Maybe I'm just living in 2008, but... what's wrong with just self-hosting a simple blog? Wordpress gets a lot of well-deserved hate (especially regarding feature bloat and security), but it's also very simple to spin up. A VPS is a couple bucks a month, and many hosts have a preconfigured ready-to-rock Wordpress image for less technical users.
It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there are other options for that, like Ghost. But I'd be curious as to the fraction of Medium writers that actually turn out more than beer money from their articles.
It strikes me that a lot of Medium content is something that would have gone on a small personal blog in the past, rather than the premium content worth paying for that Medium seems to be aiming for.
I'm someone who has written a lot on Medium in the past and has grown a following in a niche because of that, so maybe I can explain the issue.
Originally, writing on Medium had nothing to do with making money from the writing. In the early days, just the fact that you were writing on Medium instead of your own blog gave you much better SEO and made you much more discoverable. It was much easier to reach a new audience vs. your own blog on your own new domain that will take 6 months for Google to rank in any search results. It was just a much more efficient way to actually have people read what you wrote.
The point where Medium became total trash is when they created an "optional" paywall, but they also made the paywall enabled by default and they give the author a bunch of scary warnings if they attempt disable it. Basically, they blackhole your content if you don't opt in and they won't ever recommend or promote it. So most people who don't care about making money still leave it on.
I still disable the paywall, but I imagine 90% of the content people hit that is paywalled is not because the author thinks they are going to make money. It's because Medium forced them down that path with dark ui patterns. It didn't used to be like that.
> many hosts have a preconfigured ready-to-rock Wordpress image for less technical users.
I used one, and it was kept up to date by the hosting provider, and everything was great until it got hacked. And then the hosting company suspended my account, unless I bought some expensive security solution or fixed my site myself and proved it was safe. I ended up rebuilding the site as a static site and changing hosts. Anecdotal, but I won't bother with a self-hosted Wordpress again. It wasn't a noname hosting provider, either.
I even signed up for a Medium account, figuring alright, they want some personal info in exchange for content. So now I get a daily digest of Medium articles - most of which I can't read because it requires "premium", i.e. paid, membership. Talk about a bait and switch! I've gotten to the point now where if I see an article is posted on Medium then I won't read it. It's better for my blood pressure that way.
I just recently realized that I don't read Mediom articles anymore. If I see Medium, it's a no-click. Not sure how that happened, but that slowly growing paywall was probably the reason. Also, I somehow never had a good feeling about Medium, but in theri early days I actually did enjoy reading a few of their articles.
Pintrest images from search too. There's an extension for that as well, but in the interest of having fewer extensions you can just search with `-site:pinterest.*`
Must be a developer. Nothing is more annoying than searching for the answer to something and finding the answer on Medium. I had high hopes for Medium also but they have also earned my unending ire. Fuck Medium.
I agree wholeheartedly with the author. Not a lot of things irk me more than the Medium era of blogging. Aside from the shady practice of Medium itself, I feel like with it came the meme-infused blogs, which I personally dislike a lot. I don't mind diagrams, of course, but I feel like the memes are to pander to the "kids" of today (I'm not that old, but memes weren't until I was 21).
My pet peeve with Medium is how they had zero profile customization options when they started off. No custom themes or design, the focus was (allegedly) on the content, not its presentation.
Last time I checked, they now let you personalize your profile and its design and include a custom username.medium.com URL for your profile. They became the very thing they said they weren't.
What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing. I'm a developer, so I could use a static site generator, but I would like to deploy a blog for my mother, and I just couldn't find anything that fits the criteria. My personal blog at okigiveup.net is running on a nearly 8-year-old version of Ghost, which I can't update, because (1) they dropped Postgresql support and (2) their new business model is not friendly to self-hosted. It's rather frustrating that there isn't an alternative for which I can say "it's the default OSS solution, so I'll just go with it".
>What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing.
That's literally Wordpress. Installed by default on almost every shared host anywhere. There's even a free tier on wordpress.com.
I've tried static site generators - Lektor was the latest - but every one of them fell short of what I wanted in some way or another. But Wordpress always works.
Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/
But let me know if there's anything I can help with
There is the mentioned dropping of Postgres support. Postgres is much more popular than MySQL in open source circles, which makes me wonder why go with the latter. Sqlite is still supported, which makes this even more strange. Also, Ghost used to be a single-site publication platform: You would set up a blog with an admin user, and that would be it. Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either. The last time I was updating to current version of Ghost, between trying to figure out MySQL and finding out where to customize the site & user options, I gave up.
Thanks for putting the hard work into Ghost, but in the last couple of years, it went from "easy to use self-hosted blogging software" to "publishing platform with highly specific requirements", which is quite a change.
A while back I wrote to HN and asked them to add a domain-filter feature: a user-curated blacklist of domains whose articles the user doesn't wish to see. The list could be added to the HN user profile. Medium.com would be at the top of my list.
Readit News
It's obviously not the best solution if you want to monetize, but there are other options for that, like Ghost. But I'd be curious as to the fraction of Medium writers that actually turn out more than beer money from their articles.
It strikes me that a lot of Medium content is something that would have gone on a small personal blog in the past, rather than the premium content worth paying for that Medium seems to be aiming for.
Originally, writing on Medium had nothing to do with making money from the writing. In the early days, just the fact that you were writing on Medium instead of your own blog gave you much better SEO and made you much more discoverable. It was much easier to reach a new audience vs. your own blog on your own new domain that will take 6 months for Google to rank in any search results. It was just a much more efficient way to actually have people read what you wrote.
The point where Medium became total trash is when they created an "optional" paywall, but they also made the paywall enabled by default and they give the author a bunch of scary warnings if they attempt disable it. Basically, they blackhole your content if you don't opt in and they won't ever recommend or promote it. So most people who don't care about making money still leave it on.
I still disable the paywall, but I imagine 90% of the content people hit that is paywalled is not because the author thinks they are going to make money. It's because Medium forced them down that path with dark ui patterns. It didn't used to be like that.
I used one, and it was kept up to date by the hosting provider, and everything was great until it got hacked. And then the hosting company suspended my account, unless I bought some expensive security solution or fixed my site myself and proved it was safe. I ended up rebuilding the site as a static site and changing hosts. Anecdotal, but I won't bother with a self-hosted Wordpress again. It wasn't a noname hosting provider, either.
I mean I don't actually actively use it despite my great Intent a few years back, but still.
edit: s/ready/read/
Yep! There's an extension. No more towardsdatascience to trawl through, hooray!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
We can do better, and often do, around here.
Last time I checked, they now let you personalize your profile and its design and include a custom username.medium.com URL for your profile. They became the very thing they said they weren't.
That's literally Wordpress. Installed by default on almost every shared host anywhere. There's even a free tier on wordpress.com.
I've tried static site generators - Lektor was the latest - but every one of them fell short of what I wanted in some way or another. But Wordpress always works.
But let me know if there's anything I can help with
Thanks for putting the hard work into Ghost, but in the last couple of years, it went from "easy to use self-hosted blogging software" to "publishing platform with highly specific requirements", which is quite a change.