While I don't feel as strongly about Medium as the parent comment, I'm also less inclined to read an article when it is posted on Medium. No real reason, really, just a personal bias from myself because I'm finding a lot of "thought-leader-pieces" articles over there, and technical content over there are not as well formatted as the ones on someone's personal blog that are well designed for code snippets and such in the article.
I still read Medium articles when I came across articles written by people whose work I'm somewhat familiar with though.
> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs.
This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.
I agree. I don't think they should write a custom website to host their articles. I'm perfectly happy reading Ghost or WordPress.com articles as long as the site is well designed to fit the content.
While Medium is a very beautiful, well designed site, it doesn't work equally well for every kind of content out there. Technical content with code snippets are one of the least-suitable type of content for Medium.com design.
No matter how much thought is put into the design of the site, Medium's design is still designed to be a one-size-fit-all kind of product, and well, that means no matter how high quality their design is, it is still taking a somewhat "highest-common-denominator" approach to the design.
I'm not saying you have to build a server to host your blog. You can host it on AWS or elsewhere if you get a lot of traffic. It's not that hard to get a domain name, host it somewhere, and write some HTML code.
Yes, it could be difficult and a lot of work if you think you need embedded videos that autoplay and follow readers as they scroll down trying to escape that and the pop up pestering them to subscribe.
Hosting it somewhere on your own will not give you good analytics, a good clean theme, and a CDN. A wordpress does. You're going for a ton of extra work.
AWS is madness for personal projects. You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page. If you have a high quality picture, a gif or a video, it's game over.
"You don't seem to realize how bad you're about to be bankrupt when an article hit the front HN page."
I've had a couple of AWS-hosted pages make it to the HN front page.
I don't recall my S3 bill going up to any significant degree, much less bankrupting me.
S3 bandwidth is $0.023/GB at the most expensive tier. It's hard to imagine bankruptcy resulting from any text-oriented site, even if it does hit the HN home page. Maybe if you're hosting hours of HD video or something.
Also, I've never had any trouble using CDNs from an S3 page. Details?
Hosting a web site for a blog is expensive? A local webhost offers 75GB of transfer for $6 a month, with the highest transfer day per month dropped completely. If you want a CDN on top of that, it's a whopping $1 per month per 10GB.
you could easy have a web server with thousands of visitors running on a rasbery pi. i would say a week end project to set it up or one hour if you already are familiar with web servers.
I'm curious about this. If you have a purely static site, what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi? I'm thinking things like compression would eat up a lot of its CPU, but you seem to know more about this than me.
Yep. Although I've read a few good posts on Medium, most of the content feels like something you'd find in popular business books. The design of the site seems to discourage anything with a technical/academic/deep thinking side. I've been wanting to post there, but I don't have anything to say that would be a good fit.
Let me place my bet: Professional look (design, typography) + Medium brand + very little effort to publish + chance to get featured if it attracts clicks.
There's an entire subculture of fake "you can do anything" motivational stuff on the web. The purveyors are direct descendants of Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie and whoever was selling that stuff before him.
I don't think thats necessarily true, but I also think that Medium has that kind of connotation for me.
I think the lack of branding on Medium sites has something to do with it. People ended up lumping everything as "Medium articles", from spammy "growth-hacking" articles to well-researched, well written investigative article.
> Why posts hosted there should be any less interesting than posts hosted on any other platform?
Platforms have communities that post about certain things, and less about others, and develop a reputation for doing so (and the average quality). If you post on one, your links share the reputation readers attach to it as a baseline, since readers expect it to fit in the pattern of other content they have seen on there.
Interestingly, for me Medium offering custom domains doesn't really impact this, since "people bothering to set up their own domain name" seems to be a group that's less bad in general (and exceptions get mentally tagged as such).
I still read Medium articles when I came across articles written by people whose work I'm somewhat familiar with though.