[Shywim]

I don't even understand why someone who has a hosting would want to write on medium when they can host their own blog, especially when in the case of liberapay and mastodon they say they are fighting for freedom but choose to wirte their posts in a closed, centralized service which also has user-hostile behavior.

[forgotmypw]

I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains, hackernoon.com, etc.

The website sucks. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.

Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre.

It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience would find it.

It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.

And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium is worth a lot less to me.

The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.

I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.

[cyberferret]

> It's crippled without JS

Fun Fact: A single Medium blog page downloads more code and data than a multi user ERP & Accounting system I wrote for a large company back in the 80's (in terms of MB).

[type0]

> Medium is in business of driving traffic...

It always puzzled me how did they manage to get the amount of visitors they get? Is it just overabundance of marketing type people among Medium users that would spam their blogs to all corners of the Web?

[otakucode]

I wrote comments on a few Medium articles months ago. Since then the email address tied to that account has been targetted by some really aggressive disinformation "news" garbage coming from Medium. I don't know what they're doing, but it is clearly being misused.

[pmarreck]

> It's crippled without JS

It's an SPA. What did you expect? That's the new M.O., unless you're a 90's relic like myself, in which case I appreciate your point but times change.

[Zak]

There are some use cases for which SPAs are a huge leap forward, greatly improving the user experience. A lot of modern web applications don't and shouldn't behave like a collection of pages, after all.

A blog is not one of these use cases; it is exactly a collection of pages.

[et-al]

Not to mention, as a SPA, Medium is a total failure.

Trying to read a string of comments on Medium results in a bunch of unnecessary clicks and page reloads. I guess it's upping their click count..

[acqq]

I have thought it was intentional, to reduce the number of comments and motivate the writers to write their own real big posts instead.

The way I see it, medium doesn't want to be a forum, but to have people write the full articles. Even those who respond.

[et-al]

I can see that. But it's tiresome as a reader.

[Lazare]

> It's an SPA.

Yes, that's the problem.

> What did you expect?

Technology to be used in an appropriate manner to achieve business goals.

> That's the new M.O.

...for apps, yes. This isn't an app, it's a blog. Of all the things on the internet that could be handled by a static page of HTML and CSS with maybe some JS to offer extra features, this is it.

[pmarreck]

Fair enough!

[MiddleEndian]

You're not missing much. The content on medium is consistently low quality.

[exotree]

Medium offers the potential for an audience who will read your work. It’s dead simple to use. The “claps” economy at least offers a glimmer of hope you could be compensated for your work. And, for a lot of folks, it can offer a sense of community. And honestly, hosting your own blog, while cheap, is often an annoyance to maintain.

[JoshMnem]

> Medium offers the potential for an audience who will read your work.

If you write good content and are consistent, it isn't that difficult to drive traffic to your own blog.

Blogging is easy with a good static site generator and netlify (free).

[etattva]

because they can get access to audience which could take years to get on your blog

[djsumdog]

I get e-mails ever once in a while asking if I'd like to write for a medium blog. I always ask how much they're paying and never get a reply.

I'm fine for writing in a spot I can get exposure, but you better pay me. Medium does pay a subset of their writers. I know when they started The Nib, they paid political cartoonists like Matt Bors. So they paid a small group to get others to contribute. They're pretty much the new Huffington Post.

[EGreg]

How exactly does that happen btw? What are all the discovery mechanisms? Once the network is saturated like the Web, what does it do to allow new blogs to be discovered, besides just a "new on X topic" section and stuff people can do anyway to share urls?

[domevent]

Thst only explains why they would syndicate to Medium, not host there.

[markbnj]

I've got access to GCP and AWS, and a private account at a VPS provider with a server I can put anything on, and I still publish technical articles on medium for the simple reason that I get far more readers than I do when writing on my own blog.

[mulmen]

Why not publish to your own site and syndicate to Medium?