Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point.

The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.

Culturally I think it is pretty bad. Writers on medium are lazy and they frequently have very little to say other than to assert their membership into a tribe. That’s par for the course on many subjects but for technical subjects it’s like a joke that blasts through the set-up at 200% speed and then misses the punch line entirely.

I remember talking to somebody who was so impressed that he got 70 views on an article on Medium and having to break it to him that I thought a blog post was a big hit if it got 70,000 views back in the day.

Perhaps it is as simple as this: any author who is exposing their readers to the awful experience is contemptuous of their readers and not really serious about blogging.

FWIW i wrote occassionally and I do not care where. I just cared that it worked.

I do not write articles for a living or make money out of them. So no tribe stuff in my case.

I just did it out of enjoying it

So I assume you would’ve avoided Medium which was limiting how many articles a user could read for free, since then it literally wouldn’t work for many.

I also heard some shallow marketing people saying how great it is and how everyone should be going to medium to promote their personal brands and increase visibility.

This is an immediate red flag for me. It means that even if Medium is fine now, it's going to get populated by these types soon.

> I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point.

I wholeheartedly agree. And for this reason, and many others, I'm planning on setting up my personal website/blog using Wordpress.

But as for the default template being "less offensive" than Medium, I'd like to do a little better than this. I've looked at other WP templates and I am happy to learn PHP and become a real WP developer just to make a good site (I'm already an experienced developer in other languages). I also get the impression that WP development is a highly transferable skill.

I understand perfectly well that making a good, "minimalist" site takes a of expertise and effort. But I don't have the faintest where to being with this, as all my effort up until this point has been on the back end, data science computation, etc. Should I just start at the wordpress.{org,com} and follow my way from there? Is there some special resource that I should know about?

Medium articles now are a major source of google spam on programming topics. They're churned out by people who are just learning a new language or whatever and don't have a lot of technical depth and they're people who are pretty desperately trying to push their own personal brand.

Medium CEO here. I saw this thread too late for many people to see my response. I love that the result is basically unanimous. I agree with nearly everything here.

I am a programmer, I've written a programming book, I used to work at a tech publisher (O'Reilly). From O'Reilly, I know a lot about how to build a system around programmers that puts out important and accurate information. Medium started in the ballpark of that and then went in the wrong direction.

I think we can do a lot to change that. For me, change is less about changing our reputation and instead just getting the utility right.

We have syntax highlighting coming out in a week or so and I'll do a bigger post then about what is changing for technical readers and authors.

> For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again"

Use https://scribe.rip

Just replace medium.com or other medium domain, and you get a clean representation with all cruft removed.

if you have libredirect extension installed you can also make use of multiple instances of scribe if one's down

Sometimes people complain that my article presentations are so out of date, but I like it, and they load fast. They're just static plain old html.

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html

I am one who enjoys your articles and the simplicity of the display, but I do wish there was a little more love applied to the CSS styling for mobile. Sidebar cuts the display region of the text by a significant portion and line heights get a little messed up by some of the inline code segment things, minor nitpicks like that. Might wanna view them on a vertically oriented phone or emulate the display yourself to see what I'm talking about. Just my two cents!

Agreed on all counts. Mobile seems also not padded enough. Feels like the text is going to run off the right side, if that makes any sense.

Glad you enjoy them! Thanks for the tips.

Reader mode on iOS seems to work pretty well.

Or a WordPress site with a nice looking theme on your own domain with total control over your own publishing platform, with portability. WordPress is the Linux of publishing. Publishing on Medium or Substack is like building apps on the iPhone or applications on Windows: you’re there by the good graces of the platform owner and if you’re ever a strategic risk or opportunity to them, you’re dead.

For developers, static site generators are the better choice IMO.

Why is this? I'm drawn to WP for my own personal site, because there is a critical mass behind WP, it's a transferable skill, there's a lot of nice stuff that comes out of the box, there's a well established web design community around it, etc.

I've seen so many static site generators come and go over the past decade that the number of options now is just dizzying. From what I've seen, they all try to be "minimalist"... until the developer realizes there's a lot more work and expertise involved in "minimalist" design than they originally thought, and they grow, bit by bit by bit, etc, ... Then somebody sees these "bloated" SSG's and decides to reinvent the wheel by creating their own "minimalist" SSG with no baggage and thus the cycle starts all over again.

> Why is this?

Because why put your admin interface out to the web if you can also just send some HTML files to a static site hoster. The static hosters are nearly impossible to hack and they can be heavily optimised because they only serve files.

As another argument, software engineers are used to Git meaning that you’ll have a proper backup for your site.

I disagree. They’re fashionable but are more work and don’t provide benefits that justify the additional work. Just install WP out the box and let it run on the latest version of PHP which is blazingly fast. Get all the ease of use and flexibility that comes from default WP without the complexity.

Wordpress sites also take some work.

>The typography and layout on Medium is fine

Isn't there any Medium-like theme for WordPress? (Though maybe you frighten people thinking they ended up in a Medium blog.)

You can check some good looking free Wordpress themes from Anders Noren https://andersnoren.se/teman/

Those are nice indeed. Seems like Nordic minimalism applied to web design.

Medium works completely fine with Javascript disabled ;)

It varies. Some articles are fine. Some only show a couple of paragraphs.

Somebody at Medium must have been reading! Two days later and it's completely broken without js.

Doesn't that disable all images too?

When's the last time a Medium article had useful and relevant images? I usually just see some generic stock art from Unsplash.

I frequently see code embedded as images...

Good enough reason to close and go elsewhere.

they often have useful and relevant images.

To me the stigma is because of the terrible quality of the content. If I see an article on Medium I assume it's from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

It used to be that only passionate people would write content, but now there is this pervasive idea that you must produce content to demonstrate your expertise. Producing good quality content is really hard and time consuming and people who are only motivated by sending some expertise signal to recruiters and potential employers produce troves of garbage, often on Medium. A Medium article is the writing equivalent of an empty GitHub profile with a few unmodified forks in it.

This is definitely one thing that worries me. My forks are merged upstream and now it just looks like an unmodified fork. Perhaps GH needs to improve their signaling here with this kind of mentality being prevalent.

Just delete the fork. Forks that don't have any commits on top of upstream are pointless. People who are interested can already tell if you are an active contributor by looking at the other public feeds on your profile even if there aren't any forks.

If the problem is that your fork just looks like the upstream and you can't modify README in there because this would make sending patches to upstream painful, you could:

- create a new branch in your fork, aside from original master/main (possibly a bare orphaned branch (with 0 commits))

- set it as default branch in repo settings

- then in README.md of the new default branch, explain your contributions to the upstream (possibly with a link to github.com/<repo>/contributions?user=<yourname>)

True, some mechanicm to close olds forks. Now thinking should write some script for it and clean GitHub profile. It’s seriously bad as I see now

But if the modifications were yours then that much is clear, and at the very top of the commit history. Right?

The activity feed still shows you made PRs into the upstream right?

I basically made a similar comment a moment ago I just deleted because it was flagged immediately by someone who didn't like the premise. And I was actually being fair to the author of the article I used as an example.

I wouldn't recommend deleting comments if you really believe it was flagged in bad faith. If that's the case, other people are likely to vouch and upvote you.

Fair enough I suppose. That said, I personally would rather delete a comment that potentially has a brigade incoming towards it while I still can, than wait too long and suffer the consequences of malicious people.

I mean, I still have the original comment saved on a wordpad if I decide to put it up again; but at a slightly later time when those people have moved on to whatever it is that annoys them next.

I'm also new here, so I am doing my best to curtail the effects of the malicious against me as best as possible.

The quality is alarmingly bad. I get occasional notifications from the Medium app suggesting programming articles on their platform. They usually go ignored but recently I’ve checked a few out. What I saw was really bad advice, plain falsehoods, and grade-school level coding. The only positive thing I saw is that at least the comments were full of people calling out how bad the article was.

> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium

In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.

I agree. I get a positive impression from articles on self-produced websites with personal domains. They show that the author has put some thought, effort, and money into the presentation and preservation of their writing.

Creating such sites might be out of reach for a lot of nontechnical folks, but people in the dev and tech communities should be able to handle it.

That may be true. But a third-party site might also go out of business, throw up a paywall unexpectedly, or decided for some reason that what you wrote is not appropriate for the site and take it down.

Agree.

To me a personal blog shows more commitment from the author for two reasons: you have to spend some time to ser it up and search engines tend to position them high when you search for the author name.

Even Medium posts being signed I don’t know why it gives me some anonymity feeling and makes it harder to navigate through other content from that same author.

Committing to SERPs is challenging. Unless your domain itself has your full name, a Medium article with your name in there will rank higher than your personal blog...

Although I remember there being some option to verify a website for name searches on Google.

That plus having a Twatter/Fecebook/HN/etc account to confirm the official site should be enough to reasonably avoid impersonators.

Is this an issue? I’ve never run into people impersonating real people with websites. Are there situations where someone pretends to be John Doe and to rank higher? To what end?

>a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish

100% agree.

Doing that also gives you a ton of street cred as opposed to writing on medium where you're right off the bat announcing to the world that you've basically surrendered your stuff to someone else the moment you finished writing it.

Own your presence on the web, don't be a sharecropper on Medium (or Blogger.com, or Wordpress.com, or any other plantation).

I used to run my own Wordpress blog (don't recommend it any more because of the security issues), now it's a Hugo blog hosted on AWS Cloudfront. Costs me about $4 to $5 a month to run.

With a Hugo blog there’s lots of hosting options. You can host on GitHub for free (paying for your own domain). I’ve been using the same random cpanel host for $30/year that has unlimited domains and sites.

It’s not trivial but was painless to set up. I think it’s kind of fun to see the various setups that devs use to host their stuff.

Medium isn’t a long term solution, so aside from its other problems (terrible aesthetic and UX), I’d still want some sustainability for hosting.

CloudFlare Pages is also free, although I've had no luck getting the SSL certificate part of it working. Plus I am not sure I want to support CloudFlare with its expanding grip on the web, like forcing users with cookie-blockers or VPNs to go through intrusive CAPTCHAs to access sites.

Agreed with that. Somewhat related, the biggest issue that I'm currently struggling with is whether or not to move our content to Substack to take advantage of their discovery mechanisms. I don't love the idea of giving up that degree of control. Curious if anyone has thoughts or experience on that front.

What are some platforms you'd recommend for non-tech folks who'd like to have a simple personal site+blog?

WordPress.com is easy to set up, has custom domains, and you could theoretically move it to another host pretty easily later (unlike SquareSpace). Bret Devereaux's history blog (acoup.blog) is hosted there, and it does very well here on HN.

Thanks for your recommendation. I have used WordPress in the past. Although its been a few years, I found it cumbersome to set up a simple site; you often needed some custom plugins, most templates look archaic to me, and importantly, the loading speed was slower. I spent more time fixing something and troubleshooting than actually writing.

Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: https://super.so/ It serves my need as someone who wanted to have a personal website. More like a resume tbh. No bells and whistles. I am used to Notion so that’s another plus. And the page loads fairly quickly. However, I find that at $12/month, I could get better value elsehwere. Not to mention, I am unable to blog there.

One of the platforms that attract me is Ghost (https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.

Did you try https://feather.so?

That is also a Notion website builder, but more geared towards blogging.

This is an example site built with Notion + Feather

https://www.vensy.me

Disclaimer: I am the creator of feather.so

He's a historian and can hardly be expected to perform the developer yak-shaving that is running your own blog infrastructure (and I mean that in the kindest possible way, as I run my own as well, but my wife and daughter are on WordPress, albeit hosted by me, because of the UI hurdles of Hugo).

Yep, the person I was replying to was asking for recommendations for non-techies. I wasn't about to recommend a static site generator...

There are SSGs with nice WYSIWYG UIs coming, including one for Hugo.

https://open.quiqr.org

That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.

The best alternative IMO to medium.com from the reader's point of view is a personal blog. I much prefer them. However, if you want your articles to be found by people looking for them via Google. Probably best is putting them on Github or other non-scammy site with good page rank.

I noticed it is next to impossible to get personal blog articles in own domain onto Google search results unless they are specifically crafted for Google bot and not for a human reader (it seems to like a thousand words of introduction followed by a thousand words of historic context, then a lengthy personal anecdote and then at the very end - possibly on next page actual answer the reader is looking for).

This includes really niche subjects where almost no content exists. Google still favours showing you forums where people ask similar questions (unanswered). And lots of unrelated stuff rather than an actual blog post that has an exact answer+tutorial in under 300 words.

I personally dealt with indexing issues of numerous e-commerce projects I worked on and solution is almosrt always straightforward: more link mass. My humble personal blog of 5 pages and one single content-worthy article on it was always well indexed regardless of fact that I did nothing special for that.

I guess the best recipe to get your blog indexed is:

* Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml

* Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.

* Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.

* It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.

* Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

* Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.

So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.

About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant

>Make sure you have robots.txt with correct host and sitemap.xml

Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.

>Link it everywhere: on your Linkedin, Github, Reddit and every profile.

Yes, pagerank

>Make re-posts on social networks, reddit or other related resources.

Possibly. Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out

>It must be fast and never down so reliable hosting with CloudFlare.

Less important than most realize. As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine

>Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.

>Do add it to Google Webmaster so your search overloard can connect your domain to Google account.

It’s called Google Search Console now, not webmaster tools. Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.

I don't gonna argue that all of my suggestions gonna be effective. Any kind of SEO is always something between black box reverse engineering and voodoo magic: you just follow recommendations and pray it works.

> About half of your suggestions would not be effective. Source: am SEO consultant

I'll be honest here: it was mostly years ago, but I spent good chunk of my life doing some white and black hat SEO myself. I'm not very proud of some of it either. If you're actually working in this area then you well aware that figuring out what works and what doesn't take a lot of time and change constantly

What non-experts can do is to at least to follow some recommendations to get into search index. So I just shared some common tricks that I used myself and they cost nothing to implement.

> Yes, but no idea what is meant by correct host.

As correct host I meant the one target website is using. There are countless websites that have www-prefixed version in robots.txt while actually using non-prefixed domain and not having redirections. Also some of us might start blog on github pages and then forgot to specify correct host when moving it to independent domain, etc.

> Much more helpful if your content is actually shared as opposed to you spamming it out

I'm not suggesting anyone to spam something, but Google cant exactly guess who posted your blog post on reddit or why. Having some is better opposed to having zero ingoing links from social media.

> As long as it’s not dog shit slow it’s probably fine

Reliability is very important though. We're on HN and my guess that a lot of people there would love to host their blog on $10 linode / digitalocean test-server that also run VPN and torrent client and can be down for days after some experiment went wrong.

> Utter nonsense.

That just my personal experience. I dont argue that it will help you with rankings, but it's certainly make it less-likely to get under some anti-spam filter.

> Helpful for insights but zero effect on ranking.

Again it's not about rankings. But at least in past their "Indexing Tool" actually worked to make sure your new blog post actually there in search index.

Person above was complaining about his blog not being indexed at all. So if indexing tool is still there it's will help with this problem.

> >Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

> Utter nonsense. The anti trust blowback from this would be spectacular.

I've seen spend on ads heavily affect organic results. I wonder when anti trust will fix that

The ad is also an ad for the organic result below it.

>>So yeah people who hate CloudFlare and Google Analytics with passion are more likely to have issues to getting on google search result page.

This sounds like something the FTC and /or anti-trust should be looking into.

Yeah, but this is the world we live in. The more unusual your hosting setup is the more likely you'll get under some sort of filters.

> Google loves when you have Google Analytics. Surprise surprise.

And check whether that's still legal [0] in your country before you do so.

[0] https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-illegal

It seems there is space for newer search engine then.

The trick to getting your blog content to show up in Google is to have other sites link to it. If you don't have any inbound links you're much less likely to rank.

Getting quality inbound links is tricky. First you have to write great content that people might want to link to... but if nobody hears about it that won't help much.

Back at the dawn of blogging there was a really strong culture of bloggers linking to and amplifying great content from each other. That activity mostly moved to places like Twitter - I'd love to see that happen more again.

I keep having a vague idea of a system or service that would be a sort of tinder for mutual links; if you like a blog, and the author of that blog likes yours, then your links would show up in each others footers in an embeddable widget of some kind. Lots of challenges to make it worthwhile, but it just keeps kicking around in the back of my head.

I suspect that link rings like that would get noticed by Google and flagged down eventually.

Not if those links are clicked by real people.

I always assumed Google's business model requires the searcher to use Google Search some number of times per given search so they make their revenue goal from the user.

In that context what you describe is functioning exactly as intended. The searcher is certainly the product.

> The best alternative IMO to medium.com from the reader's point of view is a personal blog.

What are your favorite options for personal blogs? I'm strongly leaning towards self-hosted WP.

Static generators like HUGO hosted on Github Pages or some CDN.

Zero maintenance. Zero cost except for domain name.

Yes, for two reasons:

* The software: Medium somehow managed to make majority-plain-text articles slow to consume in modern web browsers, negating decades' worth of web browser optimizations.

* The culture: Medium is overrun with self-promoting "thought leader" types.

Agreed. The comment section on Medium is also buggy as hell. Its always jumping around up and down. How this simple functionality is not “solved” yet is beyond me.

Meta: HN polls would be better if you couldn’t see the vote totals until you voted.

Yes, I think they sometimes influence the answers people tend to make.

In this case, I mouthed "Yes" even before I clicked the link.

This. Also, why can i vote for multiple options? That shouldnt be possible.

To me, Medium is a platform for those who desperately want to monetize text even (and mainly) if they have nothing to write about.

Very much this for me. It was so bad a couple of years back that I seriously considered writing a browser extension to hide and/or highlight medium posts so I would stop accidentally clicking on them.

The site has been better more recently, but the stigma is still there, at least for me.

The medium is the message, truly. However, coincidentally, just this morning before hitting HN I was scanning through my emails from substack writers and thinking how even though I was putting together material and seriously considering writing a blog, I didn't want to become like them. It's not just Medium, and while I get the sentiment, it's perhaps a bit unfair to single them out.

When I wanted to write, I wanted to create the experience of curling up with a good book that changes how you relate to the world after. I don't want to be a part of someones community of subscribers, I want to become someone who has read this thing. That's what books were and represented. Online, there is zero investment in anything we read. It's what people do with wasted time, and in this sense a blog can only be as good as a recycled waste product. There is no value created by investing it in reading a blog, it is not enriching whereas finishing a book made you a kind of steward for that experience and interpretation. This was the difference, this idea of reading and writing as an enriching experience. The largest possible impact a blog post can have is to shift or dent a narrative - but what if you don't value the attention of people whose experience is an artifact of narrative? Only a decade ago, the idea of someone having a conversation about the characters in supermarket tabloids was kind of pitiful, but now we seem to live in a competition where everyone online tries to angle and align themselves to these dramas.

It's not Medium, it's the medium, and the whole thing is an inferior substitute to living.

Medium used to be fine, but with time their website became worse (popups, images not loading, way too much javascript, etc) and now I avoid Medium links. If I'm on a computer, I usually open a cached/archived version of the page.

Substack... it was okay, but it seems that now there's a full page popup that comes up while we're reading the post. I'll probably start to avoid their links too.

As for the alternatives, if all you need is a place to write about stuff, why not a blog? WordPress (self hosted or not) + your domain + simple theme.

Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium >

https://pages.github.com/

Example:

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/12/12/a-cor...

It's called Medium, because so much of it is neither rare nor well done.

Your comment. Umm. Well done. :-)

The problem with a site that wants me to pay for opinion pieces is that they're probably not opinions but "copy" written to make money. Which brings the opinion's value to about zero.

Marketing by threats doesn't help either. You have used 1 out of your 3 free reads! Subscribe to the newsletter! With no obvious way of closing the popup. Yes, I'm looking at substack now.

This is an attempt to continue paper magazines, but done wrong. Back then you could impulse buy a paper issue with no commitment. And perhaps another. And more randomly. If you liked it enough, you maybe subscribed.

Skip the no commitment transactions and spam people and the trust goes away.

Maybe something like https://bearblog.dev/ ? But I don't write on medium so I don't know what's missing in comparison.

I like bearblog, and it seems like quite a few posts on there are getting well received on HN lately.

I've been meaning to start up a blog again, and I've been debating doing bearblog as an easy way to get started again since my Hugo blog has sat in a half-finished state forever, and it seems like they can get decent visibility.

Medium used to be a viable and easy way to get started, which is one of the reasons self-hosting is an important selection criteria (even if you never use it)

Doesn't look like you can self-host bear.

You can't self-host it as an individual blog but it should be possible to self-host the platform and then open a blog on it.

Sure, but this is a comparison to Medium, not too self-hosted blogs.

https://git.sr.ht/~edwardloveall/scribe made the occasional consumption of medium content a decent experience for me.

Pick an instance (or selfhost) and set your browser up to automatically redirect to it. https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector and https://libredirect.codeberg.page/source_code are good options.

Ugh - coulda saw this coming 5 yrs ago when Medium was “free” and well liked

Lesson learned again and again: all blogging platforms have a limited shelf life, and there really needs to be a better way to own your own content beyond self-hosting.

WordPress.com seems to be doing just fine so far (17 years in!). They don't insert themselves between author and reader the way Medium and Substack do—unless you go looking you may never know a given blog uses them. They also still provide instructions for how to export to another host if and when you want to switch [0].

[0] https://wordpress.com/support/export/

Just want to point out: creating, maintaining and hosting a blogging platform costs time and money.

The interests of anyone who wants to use a blogging platform without directly sharing those costs are very unlikely to align with those paying the costs. (I think it can be done, but will probably be very inefficient and susceptible to being out-competed for attention.)

why not just make self hosting far easier

Some VPS providers are starting to do just that [1] with the theoretical goal of making it just a couple clicks to deploy web applications and provide automated backups. I have not personally used these services because I like to tinker and add things myself but I know that isn't for everyone.

[1] - https://www.linode.com/marketplace/category/website/

Thanks. I'm particularly interested in providers that I can easily resell / affiliate refer through my own software products, to let casual users self-host their UGC. Bunny.net CDN (I have no association, yet anyway) is one great example of that - prepaid (so no runaway bill risk with metered services), generous referral program ($20 on first spend), and low barrier to entry ($1 minimum spend, one time, which is plenty for many UGC use cases). But their services are still limited, no compute besides DNS scripting. Linode has a nice referral program at $20 per paid signup (90 day+) and fixed prepaid cost (though recurring, unlike Bunny). Cost of entry could be lower but not bad at $5/mo. However the onboarding experience is likely still bad for all these for casual b2c users.

We had cPanel years ago

These are indeed similar in spirit to cPanel, only difference being a tighter integration to VM/app deployment and the whole stack being tested. It's probably a little closer to a pre-configured cloud formation and cloud-init.

Medium is great for writers because it's a content hub just like Youtube and it can actually pay out as well.

However, it's terrible for readers. The dynamic loading of images is mediocre on anything but a fiber connection, the web pages are slow and the pay wall is an instant turn-off. Even if you get into the free experience, half your screen is covered by banners and side bars.

I think Medium is great for a specific audience: Medium readers. Some people like to browse Medium and the blogs it hosts and for those people, the setup is perfect. For anyone who doesn't like to browse Medium but rather gets linked to it occasionally, it's an awful experience.

Personally, I prefer plain old websites. You don't need a domain and a server, throwing something into Github/Gitlab Pages is more than enough. You can set up a whole CI/CD system for static site generation or write a document in Word and export it to HTML if that's what you want. You'll need to rely on platforms like HN and Reddit to get new people to discover your site, though, but from what I've been recommended on Medium, the articles that get attention seem to be very SEO-optimized and not very technical. Listicles and terribly written blog spam that just repeats the same basic information in several ways get a lot of attention. There are also opinionated articles about subjective things (UX design etc.) that only exist for the author to make their preferences known to the world; there are great articles on there that reference sources and research, but it's not what I see pushed on the website because outrage clicks and reactions from people disagreeing are worth more than people consulting the website for information.

If you want something easy and hosted, WordPress still has a free tier. Your options are very limited but if you care about the content more than building a specific look and feel, they're fine.

Can't have a stigma against the article if you can't read it.

A rather large percentage of tech articles across the web are little more than marketing hooks for some product or service, especially paid training courses. Medium has this issue, but so do many other common sites that typically hit the top of the list in search engine results.

Wading through such results looking for something in-depth is too tedious for me. As others note, the articles I bookmark and come back to tend to be from personal blogs more often than not. For real depth, however, I still turn to books.

I don't know about "stigma", but I've certainly starting seeing Medium articles the same way that I see blog posts on LinkedIn. There's zero authenticity there... it's just some crap that you're mechanically writing, in order to put "thought leader" on your resume or CV.

Ghost [1] and Substack[2] seem to be popular alternatives within dev and tech communities.

[1] https://ghost.org/publishers/ [2] https://substack.com/

I'd like to recommend Hashnode[1]. I've been using it for the past few months and enjoying it so far. Highlight - it has a non paywall based monetization system.

[1] https://hashnode.com

Nope. Hashnode is about the same level as Medium in terms of community / culture.

Reading the site, what's the catch? What is the monetization system?

Maybe https://hashnode.com/sponsors?

How do they make money? It's not clear from that site.

I'm not a dev or too much of a tech person, but Substack also has a slight stigma in my eyes. I really haven't looked into either platform, but as far as I know, it's similar to Medium, no? (It has a low barrier to entry?)

I guess anything with a low barrier to entry, has to do more to prove itself.

Substack is moving towards the same paywall setup as medium AFAIK

Who didn't see that coming, though?

The web has become broadly influenced and geared towards a certain way of doing things that happens because:

1. it costs money to create and maintain a substantial web property. Medium, Substack, Patreon, gumroad, ghost, buttondown, etc all run on top of services that cost money. Maybe AWS, maybe Google App Engine, plus Cloudflare, Heroku, Netlify, Digital Ocean, etc. Oh and Stripe, PayPal or some payment processor, if the site has a subscription model, too.

2. the web of the 2020s really has only one way to make enough money to pay for these services: advertising. There's only one way to get enough money through advertising to be profitable, and that's to have some portion of attention-getting, clickbaity, top 10 list content. That content generates enough 'virality' to show up on Twitter, FB, here, or wherever.

A no-paywalled, no-ads site (like Hacker News) is a cost center maintained as a sort of vanity project for a company that makes money elsewhere.

What people are complaining about around Medium is really a complaint about how content on the web is, and must be, monetized, if it is to be a money-making business, as opposed to my blog, say, which is just money out of my pocket.

It's going to take a concerted effort to break away from the current economic model of the web. Just turning up our noses at Medium or Substack and pivoting to the NEW new thing won't change anything, as the new new thing inevitably gets dragged into the web economy or goes broke.

I’m kind of surprised we don’t have a “decentralized Medium” at this point. Yes, Mastadon and others exist and have traction, but they don’t fit the specific demographic that Medium does (an easy place to write content that gets ranked and monetized). With less costs would come more sustainable integrity, as well as a bigger share for writers.

Strong disagree, the barrier to entry should be higher. That's why GitHub Pages is a signal of quality, at least the author knows what GitHub is. As cost approaches zero (time/effort/money) spam approaches infinity. Then you need gmail-level spam filtering and you end up with centralization.

Is it? Substack was made with paywall in mind from day one. The difference is that the writer decides.

I've actually blocked medium.com in ublock because of how poor the quality is. It seems to have become a target site for low quality tech tutorials that are filled with errors and often times just plain don't work.

Also its a wasteland of copy paste from the documentation of the subject official website.

I learned a while back that if the article had code in image format there was 100% certianty it was not functional and I could close the article without reading.

Your own blog, as many have said, is probably the best.

When it comes to getting people to buy your articles: Well, I've never met a person who pays for their articles. Ever. Maybe you should sign up with a writing team that has a big website, I don't know, The Verge or something, and write there and get paid for it?

If it's for good SEO, well, as of now Google is flooded with low-quality, copied click-bait articles full of trackers, ads and spam.

Yes, unfortunately. I speak only for myself though. I found some very good articles there and even then I couldn't help getting turned off when I read them because I associate them with the mountains of subpar material that get published there and the horrible reading experience.

A curated personal lightweight website attracts me more: see https://lemire.me/blog/ (Wordpress) https://lilianweng.github.io (powered by https://gohugo.io)

Reading experience is pretty bad, and many authors on Medium use shady techniques and clickbaity titles to drive traffic to their articles.

I like polls on HN because sometimes the answer is nuanced, so on HN I can say "Yes, articles on Medium have a negative stigma" but then upvote @tyingq's and @thrtythreeforty comments that capture that nuance.

It's not like substack is much better. I can't recall a time in the last 5 years I've stumbled upon a substack or medium post that didn't feel like a waste of time. The only worthwhile sources seems to be small niche tech bloggers still keeping their head down in code the majority of the day (not selling stuff, just sharing their findings).

> Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?

I can't view text without JS and I don't want to turn it on so Medium can track the anal cream my neighbour uses on their cat.

> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium

Markdown + Pandoc + static page host. With that you get control and personality.

Make your own web site. It’s hard to take “developer” articles seriously if they’re published on a platform intended for non-developers.

Disagree. I don't expect embedded engineers or language designers to take a large technology detour just to write.

Cloning the jekyll example repo on github then writing some markdown is not a large technology detour. Although I personally prefer hugo on gitlab.

So those hypothetical embedded engineers and language designers should evaluate how many options? You just enumerated two. I doubt they're the only ones.

They're all pretty much the same. You could choose any one at all and be much better off than using medium. It's easy to switch afterward anyway.

For what it's worth asking "is there stigma" might not be as useful as "do you hold stigma" because, of course there's stigma, but what % personally feel it would be interesting to know.

Github pages is pretty good

https://pages.github.com/

Yes absolutely. I looked at using Medium a few years ago but ended up just putting together my own blog website on my own domain.

When you read Medium content, much of it is junk optimized to hoover up as many views as possible. Articles often have an optimized-for-Medium tone that is just off putting. Plus there is the the constant sword of Damocles hanging over your head any time you read because they might cut you off for having read too many Medium articles without paying (or at least there was, I don't know if they have updated the model).

> Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?

Not broadly, but definitely within the HN community, and probably a few others. But with that being said, I also don't think it will affect your ranking on HN negatively, at least not by much.

Medium articles regularly hits the frontpage (and as of writing this, there's a medium blogpost just below this poll on HN)

Substack meanwhile I tend to value, as they’re usually much higher quality. Medium is for Twitter style clickbait that didn’t fit in 150 characters.

Medium-hosted content is blanket blocked at my place of work (a US federal government facility, though I don't know if this is a local firewall setting or something national). So yes I am disappointed when content is only on medium.

Thankfully using Google Cache or Pocket can usually still get to the content, but requires a tiny bit of extra effort.

I check the url, see "medium" in it, and then skip reading it, no matter how catchy the title might have been.

Medium is full of people who are intentionally trying to "game" it to make more money. They produce garbage content en masse, and then they try to get as many people to read / like / whatever it as possible.

This is just what medium has brought onto itself with this sort of incentive model.

Negative stigma? Generally, yes. The "You've used your 3 free reads..." thing is annoying, especially when one or two wasn't worth it.

But lets bqck up a second...it would help to know your objectives, as well as your target. For example, might video be a better medium? No pun intended.

Possible stigma aside, Medium is a tool. It does have a "community", but so does LinkedIn and YouTube. Maybe it's some combination? You goals, target and budget* all matter.

* e.g., Do you have time to build a Twitter following, and use that community to drive traffic to anything you publish? If not, then maybe - at least for starts - start where there is a community you can "borrow" traffic from.

For tech or dev articles, https://hashnode.com/ is the best platform. It supports adding custom domains and it also has a very active community.

If you use Notion to write your articles, you can check out https://feather.so. It converts your Notion pages and builds a blog out of it. You can then assign your own domain to it.

https://ghost.org/ is also another excellent option that you can check out.

I use uBlacklist to prevent medium.com articles from showing up in my Google results:

https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

I don't care. Sometimes there's good content and there are lot's of other pages with bad quality. But I won't click on something from dev.to, that's 99% beginners writing garbage.

I think problem about Medium is that too much of its content is written by desperate people who are actually trying to live off cents Medium is paying them. It creates a negative expectation of quality.

Don’t know about stigma. I’m sure Medium is a business like many others. They are selling things. And I don’t particularly want to “buy” their products. Consequently, I don’t go to that shop.

I associate Medium with people who crank out one article a day to grow their audience. No one on Earth is interesting or knowledgeable enough to write one self contained thing of value per day. Therefore anything you read on there is someone's daily dump of content rather than something useful. Like trying to read LOTR by stopping by Tolkien's desk each day and reading one post-it note you found there.

These people ruined Quora years before they did the same to Medium.

Absolutely yes. I will often downvote posts I am otherwise neutral about for daring to inflict Medium onto me. More often I will see medium in the URL and simply not click.

There's technically 2 questions here, the title and the question in the text body. I voted according to the title (so yes)

> Will I/my articles get negativity within dev and tech communities because they are written in Medium?

I don't think the author or their writing will get any ire for being hosted on Medium. The negativity is purely towards Medium itself. However I probably won't read your article if it's on Medium unless it's in the #1 spot on HN.

I've written several articles on Medium (such as [1]), unaware of this negative stigma. Now I'd like to move them to my github pages.

Is there some tool to export a medium article to readable html or markdown? Or will I have to copy-and-paste the raw text and add back all the formatting myself?

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/sk-numerals-9ad1b5634b28

It just occurred that I was chatting to a friend on Facebook Messenger and wanted to share some old Medium posts of mine, and it turns out just copy and pasting the URL didn’t work… needed to share, copy, bla bla… quite irksome. Not a walled garden (exactly), but perversely clunkier than a free alternative that doesn’t try to integrate largely unwanted social features and content control. Very dissatisfying.

I evaluate each one I read individually, but I go into it with low expectations.

The platform is cluttered with low value, biased, or uninteresting content.

I will admit to a personal bias against them. I wish medium writers would edit their posts more carefully and would entertain the idea that writing is a craft. Arguments, even ones that I agree with, tend to be poorly shaped. Paragraphs are filled with too much fluff. Arguments are poorly structured. Theses buried underneath digressions and rambling. I just skim them.

Before I read it, I assume any article on any site is some biased crap that's trying to sell me something or has other underhanded motives. That way I can be on my guard, but also be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be genuinely decent and useful.

There's nothing special about Medium in that regard, I've seen decent articles and rubbish and everything in between.

With addendums: I have compassion for those writers who wrote on Medium at the beginning, when there was integrity and a dream, as well as those who for one reason or another believe that that dream is still viable.

But even then I am more likely to see a good title, see medium, have a moment of silence for the author, and not click through.

Medium can die. They force me to open an incognito window to read an article that I need to get something working.

If you have something interesting to say why would you want the first thing someone sees when they reach your article be a cookie banners, sign up boxes covering half the screen.

Try viewing your articles in a private browser to see just how bad the experience is for most of your readers.

Alternative:

    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>
        Things I want to tell the rest of the world go here
    </BODY>

</HTML>

Never really understood what the supposed added-value of medium above the above actually is.

Absolutely, e.g. 'towards data science' always comes on top when searching anything ml related and is always a disappointment -- code without syntax highlighting, meme pictures over half the screen, etc. I extrapolate this to Medium as a whole.

I don't do anything with ML and yet I routinely see this site sitting in the top results. They appear to have a large amount of "generic" content that is probably purpose-built to show up in common queries.

If I see a Medium article on HN, I immediately hide it. As others said, its a garbage site that is ONLY interested in making money for itself, at the cost of everything else, including user experience.

If you want me to read your article, DO NOT put it on Medium.

No matter how much I dislike Medium for its increasing annoyances, I think most dev and tech communities simply don't care. In fact, to my knowledge, HN is the only community where a negativity towards Medium is significant enough.

Yes, Medium is neither fish nor fowl. It's neither a site for blogs nor a Magazine. To be honest I don't know what it really is. WordPress for personal blogs and Substack for (paid) newsletter articles seem to be much better.

I block medium.com urls via pi-hole. It has been a quality of life improvement. Every now and then there appears to be a medium.com article that might be worth unblocking the domain but more often then not I regret it when I do.

Yes, ever since they decided to censor and rate limit content that contradicts the current narratives. Almost everything on Medium is freemium content based marketing and milquetoast garbage. Substack is the new medium.

The far better alternative: your own website, using your own domain.

Or, you can go professional: https://lee-phillips.org/whypay/.

I have nothing against the articles itself, but medium is way too heavy and regularly doesn't work in some browser / plugin combinations which is inexcusable for static articles of text and images

Publishing a tech article on Medium is the equivalent of suggesting a Google search, or having an @aol.com e-mail address.

People will assume you lack basic technical skills, and that will tint what you wrote.

One way would be to publish on Medium but link to https://scribe.rip/

medium has been on my uBlacklist for a while now, since when im searching for ML references to read theres often some halfassed medium article above the actual paper.

I voted yes. Hashnode is much better. I still use Medium for syndication with canonical links back. The value there is the publications in medium which are pretty nice.

What I hate about Medium, is that have created multiple other websites using the pay model all hiding ready remind you how many free articles you have left.

Choosing "unsure" because we shouldn't be shown the ongoing results of the poll. Otherwise I believe I would also have chosen "yes".

I mostly remember medium articles starting to show up at the same time as svtle ones, and the svtle ones were always more interesting

> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium

https://read.cash

Aside from any stigma, I believe medium will PayPal your articles, so lots of people won’t be able to read them even if they wanted to.

I find these articles very pedestrian, nothing I couldn't infer from a quick Google search or my own intuition.

I don't think so, the site is a bit heavy but I enjoy all the Medium articles that make their way onto HN.

Sooner or later, every online forum reaches the point where its primary objective is to driver users away.

For me, the stigma is more about the paywall thing that usually fires up and hides all but the first paragraph of the article. Otherwise, I don't care about the domain in the url.

Anything is better at this stage. The constant reminder to becoming a paying subscriber is annoying.

Yes. I and logged in just so I could vote yes. That's how much yes this is for me.

Yes, if only because Medium articles render incredibly slowly on my phone.

I see a lot of folks touch on the UX of the Medium website. For me it's the content -- the paywall and overall layout would be digestible if not for the awful lot of generic Medium posts that regurgitate for the nth time the same basic tutorial of X, or repeat ad nauseam the particular set of ideas found on some independent blog sites.

I don't deny there's some quality content out there, but I feel it's not well curated and every other search phrase, I'm getting bombarded with tons of bland tutorial-blogposts (in ML domain especially) which really makes me disdain the website itself.

Effortless alternatives to medium:

Hashnode(tech focused) Substack

Github pages, or GutHub repo served by CloudFlare

Medium was a textbook "free to gain traction, then paywall" bait and switch.

Yes, because of the paywall for obvious reasons.

I run https://bearblog.dev which I would consider a pretty good alternative to Medium. Super simple, privacy centric, without all the paywalls.

Thank you for your great work!

Yes, ever since Medium turned into tumblr...

The question is poorly worded as it's not clear whether you just mean "Does Medium itself have an association with poor content that creates a stigma" or whether it would also include reasons such as "I don't click Medium links because of the paywall or bad UX"

Strictly speaking it sounds like you're asking the former but the latter is the reason I don't tend to read Medium content.

I would argue that this kind of ambiguity means your results are probably worthless. (On the whole I find most surveys suffer from an issue like this)

Yes.

Medium has a paywall & annoying pop-ups. I'd prefer the author maintain their own websites. With services like Netlify & Vercel, it's incredibly easy & cheap to do so. (Free if you don't care about the domain.)

Medium or any kind of paywall sites need to be stopped.

it became a shit product with the naggin and paywalled weirdness.