[eugenhotaj]

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them.

The equivalent here would be a "switch from YouTube to your own video hosting site in a few minutes." I mean sure, you could, and it probably wouldn't be that hard, but that's not the point.

[ajkjk]

I often feel like the tech industry has a huge blind spot around "not doing things that make people hate you", and that conversations around tech tend not to factor "hate" (or 'resentment' if you prefer) into making things appealing.

For example I mostly hate Facebook for the choices they have made for years, and if I was ever going to stop hating them it would be after many years of sacrificial demonstration that they have a new philosophy in mind. Not unlike what it would take for a scumbag person to reverse my opinion of them -- candor and sacrifice, rather than nice words and promises.

It is not entirely impossible to stop being hated. Microsoft is occasionally managing it with VSCode and TypeScript, although I'd say I still 98% hate them; they have a lot to make up for, and Windows is still miserable garbage.

It is easy to become hated. Google is pulling it off remarkably. Making money is often easier if you do things people hate, although it's a short-term view -- it definitely increases short-term profitability and guarantees that in 20 years everyone will hate you and avoid you. But it's definitely economically rational for the company's employees, with their 2-10 year tenures and the metrics they have to hit.

Medium started as a breath of fresh air, and has become hated by being annoying. The point of switching from Medium is to screw over Medium, benefits be damned. If you're not factoring resentment into your utility calculation, of course this action won't make sense.

[bllguo]

If you had framed this as being about personal ethics and morals, it would have been much easier to agree with. Maybe even admirable. Describing it as some kind of irrational hate just sounds silly.

[ajkjk]

Then you and I work differently, and I will stand by my claim that if you/OP don't factor in 'irrational' hate, you won't understand people's behavior.

Anyway, the underlying principle is one of morals and ethics, in a sense. The sensations of hate, resentment, or disgust are the outward manifestation of a calculation to determine who to trust. Naturally, someone who repeatedly screws you for personal gain should not be trusted. The result is the feeling of hating them.

But it is not only about raw 'utility'. Someone who does annoying things (Medium), or demonstrating tremendous hubris or arrogance, or just does things that are or should be inappropriate, gets resented also. If you send me lots of unsolicited emails, I can find a way to explain why I hate you in terms of a utility calculation ("you are taking up space in my attention that I don't want to give you"), but that's just hand-waving -- I just hate you (to some mild degree) and I'm working backwards from that.

[inetknght]

If you think irrational hate isn't rooted in misunderstood morals and ethics then you need to sit down and listen to your peers a little more when they discuss the reasons they hate companies associated with Silicon Valley.

[jmsmistral]

I wholeheartedly agree with this comment... and find the way it's articulated refreshing. God forbid we say we hate something without someone being outraged. +1 to 98% hating Microsoft... but also kudos for VSCode and TypeScript.

[elviejo79]

you and I hate the same companies, and as you explain making things that people hate are profitable in the short and medium term.

I still cannot forgive Micro$oft for their past behavior, even if they seem cool now.

[mathieudutour]

Totally, but that's what syndication is all about. The best is to have the original content on your own blog and then to cross post it to Medium, with the canonical link linking back to your blog. That way, if/when Medium is replaced by another platform, you don't loose your content and your have already build some SEO for your blog.

[ravenstine]

I've heard that Google deranks content it believes to have been duplicated, and I don't know if that's really true but I've been paranoid about copying my existing Medium content to my new blog; if it's true then Google will certainly give precedence to Medium.

[mathieudutour]

It is true yes, that's why the generated blog have a canonical link to medium so that the SEO isn't impacted. So you won't get any SEO for the articles that have been created on Medium but if you create one on your blog first and then import it on Medium (using the import tool, not copy pasting the content), Medium will be nice and put a canonical link pointing to your blog.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to set a canonical link on Medium a posteriori.

[ryanisnan]

I don't believe your blog would get any improved SEO benefit from having canonical links to Medium - IIRC, Medium would get the juice.

Furthermore, I don't know how Google handles cross-domain canonical reporting, but if I were writing a search engine, I would treat it as highly suspect.

[TrueDuality]

You've got it backwards. There will be a header in the Medium post saying "the original source for this content is on this other blog, I'm just a repost". Google does pay attention to that and ranks the canonical source higher.

[ryanisnan]

I believe they were discussing how Medium does not allow canonical links. I am aware of how canonical links work.

[ravenstine]

> Unfortunately, it's not possible to set a canonical link on Medium a posteriori.

Yeah, that's a problem. :/ I guess I'll continue rewriting my old content so I at least have a shot.

[johnchristopher]

Google is smart enough to handle duplicate content. It's a false problem.

From the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA

[gk1]

It’s Ok to republish content as long as you provide a link back to the original. That tells Google which version to prioritize.

[commoner]

Link to the post on your new blog from the Medium post.

Something like the following:

> Source: https://example.com

This should transfer link equity to your new blog post that helps offset any duplication penalty.

https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/#linking-original

[forrestthewoods]

Medium used to allow custom domains. They no longer do.

I left Medium, but because I own all of the URLs no links broke. Nor are there duplicate copies with canonical links. So there’s no SEO risk.

[detaro]

The main selling point for Medium for a long time was "cool, minimalist blogging site without all the crap". Now they're not.

[Kalium]

Like all blog platforms, they eventually realized that all the crap was there for a reason. And the wheel of reincarnation turns...

[detaro]

Which is why you should use your own domain. What's a good offer today might not be in a few years, make sure you can move.

[pighive]

I don’t have a blog, but considering Medium and Hugo, but would like to know what happened to them?

[rchaud]

Unfortunately that didn't translate into a "buying point" for advertisers and trackers.

[ravenstine]

It's kind of a trap, but Medium definitely provides the audience. The articles I've written there have gotten way more reads and interactions in the last 2 years than anything I've ever written on any other blog I've had, and it required no SEO or paranoia over whether there's something about my markup that Google has decided it doesn't like.

The reason that I say it's a trap is because I think search engines, especially Google, don't seem to index things as easily as they did in the past. Any time I host a new site, it can take months for it to surface in search results, and even then it might not even show up in other people's queries which seemingly depends on the age on a site and whether Google's algorithm subjectively likes the content. But Medium has been around for a while and your articles appear in search results in mere days, sometimes less than a day. It's a trap because we're made to believe that we can't or shouldn't host our own material.

I would prefer that we wouldn't have to use Medium, but Medium has a product that delivers, and it's not the scam that people are making it out to be.

[SamWhited]

It really is a trap, and it also doesn't provide the audience that it used to. It's annoying to users who aren't bought into their ecosystem (it shows popups trying to get you to log in when you just want to read blogs), it doesn't support syndication in any reasonable way (they have some broken RSS stuff that also includes comments, which is obviously wrong for blogs where the content should be prioritized) and any number of other problems. It's not syndicating to the widest number of readers, instead its locking you into their diminishing readership.

You really don't have to use Medium. It's trivial to get things indexed by Google if that's what you're worried about (generate a sitemap and submit it with their webmaster tools, everything is indexed shortly, or just write good content that gets linked from other places and those links will be followed), and you'll thank yourself later when Medium decides to arbitrarily kick you off, or goes out of business, or who knows what else that could cause you to lose access to your content because you don't own the domain.

[yogthos]

I would instead advocate open federated platforms like Plume [1] that have discoverability built into them. Medium obviously has more reach at the moment, but the only way to change that is for more people to start using open alternatives. The best part is that since ActivityPub is a standard protocol, all these platforms can talk to each other. So you don't have the fragmentation problem associated with closed solutions.

[1] https://joinplu.me/

[bananatron]

A ton of people want to get off platforms (including medium) that they see going the wrong direction, and making it easier is great.

[onion2k]

The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts...

There was a large audience. Medium have introduced a paywall that you could dismiss with a click, but now they've started enforcing that paywall and stopping you reading more than a couple of articles a month. The audience who have chosen not to pay will fall away precipitously over the next few weeks to the point where people are going so see no traffic on their posts at all.

Authors need to choose to either support Medium or leave for a different platform now. The glut of 'how-to-leave-Medium' posts are a response to that.

[AlanSE]

This comment needs more visibility. Everyone is stumbling by this stuff and missing the context. I got a spat of emails about organizations leaving Medium and was like "okay whatever", but then I discovered that basically everything is now paywalled.

I had a subscription to Medium in the past, and if I knew they were paywalling articles in general, I would have canceled right away.

The point was for me to publish writings so they would be generally available (and not get bogged down in details). It seems that's no longer offered. The idea that someone would hit a paywall trying to get to my articles is infuriating.

I hate everything about this. We're constantly bombarded with unwanted sharing. I get advertisements based on websites I visit, and there's nothing I can do about it. My activity is just free for the taking for advertisers. But heaven forbid I try to share something constructive to the rest of the world.

[oblib]

I used Medium a few times, but just never felt comfortable providing them with my content.

It's been so long now that I had no idea they'd put up a paywall. Make me feel like I had it right from the git go now.

Aside from that... this sounds like it's got to be close to the dumbest thing they could've done. It's akin to slapping your audience in the face every time they show up.

I hardly ever click on anything from WaPo or the NY Times. I have no problem with them charging for their content, they both do some great work, I just cannot pay for it and it's frustrating to run into their paywall.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'd still have been clueless about this had you not.

[pmlnr]

Welp... that is if you want to interact with the people there.

Youtube lets you make money. Medium just makes readers frustrated.

[forrestthewoods]

Medium does literally nothing to help the average blogger get views.

Their network is zero value. It might actually be negative value because Medium is now associated with shitty content.

Source: Have blog, left Medium for static hosting.

[dheera]

I only recently started using Medium. I do like the audience aspect of it, but I also want my own personal website to mirror all of my content on Medium. As they don't have an API I'm actually working on something to periodically scrape my own Medium account and copy all the posts to my personal website so they can be seen at either place.

Although technically not that different from this project my objective would be not to switch over, but rather still use Medium's editor, but just have content mirrored.

[jppope]

I honestly don't get comments like yours.

The author of this repo built something to help people move off of medium (where their content is currently stored) to their own blog. This has become progressively more common and people might be putting it off because it takes too long.

E.G. the basecamp blog moved in January (https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/).

Furthermore, it is super easy to be critical of something that someone built but significantly harder to create something. Perhaps instead of taking the negative road you could offer suggestions, or build your own move your blog to medium repo... or literally anything that isn't trashing someone's hard work.

[eugenhotaj]

> or great tools like OP's for setting up your own

I don't see how I was trashing OPs hard work. I'm simply pointing out that there's more that Medium provides than just a way to host a blog. No need to read so much negativity into it.

[commentzorro]

>> I honestly don't get posts like these.

That's the phrase that caused people to read negativity into your post. You didn't mean it when you were typing but to those reading the phrase has come to mean, "there's something wrong with the {thing}" or even "that {thing} shouldn't be." Could your paragraph have omitted that sentence and conveyed your meaning or is people knowing you don't understand integral to what you were trying to say?

I also appreciate the humor of @jppope using that same sentence as the lead for his/her comment.

[cjslep]

Why does it have to be a trade-off? Something like WriteFreely gives you both your own blog and (via the Fediverse) an audience.

Don't want to run your own? Then pay for a Write.as account to have Matt run it for you.

[ideophobia]

I 100% agree. I don't need a Medium alternative that let's me write blog posts from a cloud hosted Python IDE using a color-coded braille keyboard. I just want an efficient editor, clean interface for readers, and as much help as possible getting my posts in front of people. Medium can check all three in my mind. I'd infinitely prefer to see (and pay for) new and different ways to build ecosystems with which my blog could grow readership and exposure, rather than just more tools for blogging itself.

[techsupporter]

> clean interface for readers

The point of the post being that many authors don’t believe Medium provides this any longer and may be looking for tools to switch to a service that does.

[metalock]

by putting up a paywall, medium does the opposite: they are actively stopping your readership from seeing your articles.

[topynate]

"Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them"

I let Medium email me suggestions. Almost without fail, both the "Today's highlights" and "Based on your reading history" sections of the email are hard left or "woke", while I am neither. I think that if Medium were actually doing as you were saying, it would be taking the same sort of heavy criticism that Facebook and Youtube have for "suggesting" various right-wing figures. Medium has clearly taken deliberate measures to avoid this.

Maybe Medium works well for other people. I don't know. I do think that Medium is promoting the idea that it distributes your posts to the people interested in them, but I'm not really sure if it actually does so.

(Edited to add: Medium was not so obnoxious in the past: maybe it's trading on a reputation for content promotion that it no longer deserves.)

[notatoad]

>The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them.

I know this is medium's pitch to bloggers, but is it actually true? It is for youtube, but i'm pretty sure i've seen some blog posts about people having migrated away from medium with minimal change in readership.

[spookybones]

Couldn’t the blogs be decentralized, and the links and previews be offered by any platform? This is what Hacker News does, Reddit, RSS, etc. What else is Medium offering? I don’t use it, so it’s a genuine question. Do Medium writers get paid on a Spotify-like model?

[wishinghand]

This is why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20062690

[kasbah]

Audience or not, if I had started writing on Medium when it first came out then I'd be pretty pissed off with the way the site looks and behaves now with its sticky headers, popups and paywalls. I'd welcome a program like this to help me migrate my posts.

[hackerpacker]

some of don't really care who reads it, just that it is available. This gaming of everything is not necessarily a good thing. Is your article about programming or something, or is it about attention whoring?

[TrueDuality]

Personally I'm not gaming my sites for personal attention so much as I'd like people that do stumble on my content to have a positive experience. A lot of SEO metrics do reflect a user's experience.

Is it fast? Am I writing well enough that people can follow my instructions, debates, etc? Did I have a hard time finding information or additional sources on a problem?

Things like canonical links are personally important to me for other reasons. I do use the analytics of my blog for personal improvement. If people are bouncing off a page after getting there with relevant search terms maybe that post needs to be re-written or my assumptions were wrong.

Ultimately though, if you're writing a blog and posting it on the internet rather than just keeping a personal journal at some point you've got to be expecting to get something out of that. I don't think you have to jump to "attention whoring" as a motive though.

[tyingq]

Cloudflare recently posted about competing with GitHub. Maybe this is a better place to compete if they are hell bent on going wide vs deep?

Medium, for me, is a weird shit show. There are people there I want to read, but I dislike the "medium". For a variety of valid reasons, ranging from page weight bloat, to killing the custom domain feature, and finally...to paywall experiments. I do recognize their strength in visibility.

Edit: happy to hear critical feedback.

[rat9988]

Cloudflare isn't trying to compete with github, You have misread the news.

[tyingq]

Not making that up, or paraphrasing from 3rd parties, from the Cloudflare CTO:

"If we do, what features would you like?" - Cloudflare CTO

https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1134092076382064640

[nacs]

The key word being "if".

It sounds like he's just curious what people want Cloudflare to do for the GitHub audience instead of making a full Github replacement.