I write on medium [1] and I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me at all.
Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.
If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.
Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.
I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest.
[1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/
For what it's worth, you're currently losing my discoverability by using a platform that I don't. Me (and many, many other people) will get redirected to your site, see a big intrusive banner on our screen, and leave. It doesn't matter if you were about to disclose the panacea or secrets to life, there's simply no writing on Medium that's worth the royal asspain of stepping through your digital metal detector.
You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
Yes, they're losing yours, but that's a small cost to pay vs NO ONE discovering their stuff.
Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.
Your observation is worth nothing because you also aren’t reading his personal blog, or wherever he would publish instead. You don’t even try to suggest other places you’d happily read.
> Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.
Apparently adding this hoop is filtering for a lot more readers who are willing to pay, though. You're probably not willing to pay. I'm not either. From a financial point of view, both of our opinions on the Medium paywall are worth absolutely nothing.
There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.
Does medium force you to be exclusive? Else why not do both, it takes a fre hours to set up and afterward 5min per post to post it nicely on both medium and your own site. In return you can have your own newsletter signups, freely link to ehatever you want, ... and have some independence if medium ever decides they don't like you (or you decide you don't like them).
I'm with aoleinik. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, I had a stand-alone blog that--to put it bluntly--no one visited.
Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.
Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.
As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.
Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.
But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.
If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.
But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.
Wow, that’s a significant return. I used to have a blog in which I wrote technical content, and the traffic was considerably more than 25,000 per month. I only spent money on that, never made a cent.
It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.
Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.
$20 CPM is indeed very high. Just a cursory look at your blog I think 25k page views/mo is actually pretty low given the number of likes/user interactions you get on your posts and how frequently you post. I don't know how Medium is counting a view but usually 3 views translate to a unique user for blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if you counted your views with something like Google Analytics and saw numbers 10x more views than what Medium is reporting. If true then even a $10 CPM would put you in $2,500/mo range.
> you only care about yourself, not about your readership if you have any
Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.
What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.
Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.
(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)
There are two sides to this, though we often only hear one.
For readers who aren't subscribed to Medium, it can be annoying. You go to read an article, and if that article is monetized, you see a banner to sign up. Plenty of people leave immediately.
Now let me tell why, as a writer, I still use Medium and will continue for the time being.
I only post 2-4 articles on there per month. But even then, I'm seeing ~50K views per month and this month I'm on track to earn $1000.
To see those same results on my own blog, I would need to learn a lot about SEO, affiliate marketing, and have a large Twitter following to direct traffic to my blog. I would also need to maintain it myself.
Sure, I might have a higher chance of going viral on HN, but how likely is that even anyway?
As a full-time developer with a newborn who's just looking to earn some fun money, Medium is perfect. I write, submit to a publication, and they take care of the rest.
People may say, "I'm not going to read your posts on Medium." My answer is: okay? Can't make everyone happy. But I'm still getting 50K views from people who do want to read them, and I'm okay with that.
The other point to make is that Medium only pays for views/reads from other Medium members, so I don't necessarily care if I go viral on HN or not. If I really cared about going viral, I would just post my article to something like dev.to and then submit it to HN.
If you're just looking to write and get views/go viral and don't care about money, then it might not make sense to post to Medium. But if you want to earn some money with relatively little effort, Medium is hard to beat.
I see why Medium is good for writers, and also somehow good for readers (it shows related articles which are sometimes valuable).
The problems with much of the audience is not that they do monetization, but how they do it.
Like many readers, I don't read enough Medium articles to pay $5/mo for it. I don't mind paying $5/mo for something useful, or sending a one-time donation. I gladly would pay, say, 25-50¢ for a good article, if I could do it without subscription. Such a commitment just feels unnecessary.
One way to do it is ads — good thing Medium is not pushing ads at me! My thanks. But there's still no easy way to pay a small amount.
I see how microtransactions are not economical. I wish Medium offered a "casual reader" plan, where I post, say, $10, and they go to pay per-article fees, not limited by time, that is, I'd not need to replenish it monthly if I haven't run into zero balance. This could be a gateway for more readers who just don't see the need to commit to a subscription. It could even lead to more conversions to subscribers.
Yeah honestly if I wasn’t writing on Medium and was only a reader, I’m not sure I would pay for it either. I totally get the gripes from a casual reader stand point.
There are some unique approaches to this idea of casual viewing. I know Coil (https://coil.com/) is doing this with the whole idea of Web 3.0.
The idea, if I understand correctly, is you pay $5 a month for a membership, and any time you consume content from someone who has set up a coil wallet, part of your subscription goes to them. Like Medium subscriptions, but for the entire web.
The problem right now is no isn’t really an incentive to use it. It’s all volunteer based. So the payouts from it are pennies.
Websites would need to have Coil-only content that only members would get to see to incentivize adoption, similar to Patreon. But since it’s decentralized, it’s up to each site to implement it.
Every nights I read through the hackernews posts of the day which didn't reach the front page for my newsletter. Every time I click on a medium posts and that I click "previous" the page freeze during 1-2 seconds.
Therefore I have a ban on Medium posts. When medium.com is in the URL it is automatically discarded, unfortunately they offer white label domain so I happen to click on some of those links.
Also I didn't do stats about it, but if you want to blog about something and do it on Medium you have a much lower chance to be featured on HN (not talking about others forum ). Choose wisely. HN is not the center of the world but there are only a few places that can offer 50k visits
Hah, it’s you! Thanks for doing that effort, I enjoy every day when your newsletter hits my mailbox!
But I can only agree with you, the Medium experience is really one of the worst you can have when reading a blog.
This doesn't work for me because I forget that I redirected a specific host and end up troubleshooting my network. Especially if a few medium articles showed up at the same time, months after I blocked it.
Medium feels like it's the Experts-Exchange of article publishing, it's well indexed and comes up in search results, but every time I open a link and get begged to signup I immediately close it.
Hosting on Hugo/Netlify is kind of a good solution, but I feel like there needs to be a completely free, managed version. Setting up Hugo/Netlify is mostly simple, but it's one of those things when you don't want to deal with updating your local tech stack vs a managed service.
I feel like Substack is slightly better, although it still does lean towards "subscription" first services (but at least it's per user / patronage type model)
WriteFreely [0] may be an alternative. It allows you to self-host, or choose a hosting package. It also has a companion with paid subscription that is built on top of it, Write.as [1]. The nice thing is that all server instances are federated, and are gradually more deeply integrated with other Fediverse apps.
The business is going to a subscription model, because blogging for ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore, it has long stopped doing so.
All the big newspapers, Bloomberg, now even Reuters go subscription, because ads simply doesn't pay enough anymore.
And we dream about big advertising money for our fledgling blog?
Forget it.
If you want to make money, sell your body, not your brain, go Onlyfans.
1. Medium is not competing for people willing to spend 30 min playing with the command line to get a blog up. (Note)
2. Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
(Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
P.s I tried to put an asterisk instead of Note but it ended up putting everything in between in italics.
> Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
This. I feel like as a reader, medium is becoming pretty useless, with the gate screens and stuff. But back when I was using it a lot, I published my stuff on Medium because it gave me eyeballs, the same way I put videos on youtube now as opposed to hosting them myself (even if it was easy to do).
If I put a post on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get 20 people looking at it. Last time I posted something on Medium, it went viral and got several hundred thousand views, including from this very website (and I hadn't even submitted it to Hacker News).
That's hard to beat. If someone else wants to make something similar, to help blog authors get the same thing publishing to Youtube or Spotify get you, that isn't Medium, go right ahead. I'll certainly consider your product.
> (Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
This is what I'd really like. All these alternatives assume you want to use your editor in the terminal and git and CI publication process. I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
The editor/git/CI model feels too much like actual fucking $dayjob work. Writing is already a difficult enough process -- lets turn it into software development while we're at it! I need to worry more about dependency management of my plugins while I'm trying to write and publish something.
>I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
imml[1] comes close to this, it's all css tricks to display content so I imagine SEO would suffer until search engine's learn css #navigation but for everyone else it just works. If it had a push to github pages button it would be the perfect minimalist site/blog. For now the publishing step involves downloading the single resulting html file and uploading it manually with surge.sh or to the website host you bought your domain from.
https://hackmd.io/ is pretty nice for editing markdown, I haven't used the site in a long time. It looks like they are offering something commercial which is nice.
Anyway hackmd+zero click integration to posting to a serving system, anything.
Check out http://getpublii.com, it is quite similar to the app you're describing. (it's not Hugo-based, but similarly outputs a static site with easy upload options, including to GitHub Pages or Netlify, and is free and open-source)
Hugo user here. I just wanted to reinforce your message - I sometimes think about posting on Medium instead, for "hits"... When I crave attention; but as you said, those readers likely aren't my target audience anyhow. For those thinking of using Hugo (or any static site generator), do it!
Similarly, it took me about 2 hours to set up a personal Jekyll website with a deployment script to a S3 static website cached by cloud front. I usually pay less than $1 per month in AWS fees.
No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.
Medium seems to be old news, Substack is apparently the new hotness. Seeing more interesting content showing up at the latter. Not sure substack doesn't have a lot of the same issues Medium has, though.
As an aside: I don't understand why Google hasn't updated Blogger to compete with Medium (and now Substack). Seems like some Google employees could get a good review/promotion by doing that. With all the stuff Google changes (often for no good reason), Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.
Substack is still in the “investors throwing money at them” phase. Medium is in the “squeezing every possible source of revenue to justify that investment” phase.
Sounds like a great time to take advantage of all that VC funding then. I'm sure there will be a new blog platform burning investor money by the time Substack starts to squeeze their users.
Being 'stuck' in 2005 is exactly why I use Blogger for my blog posts. I don't post to get eyeballs, I don't have monetization turned on. I post (about mainly tech) for my future self, so that if I run into the same weird error or need to do the same thing again, I have it documented online; a place that I can access from any device with an internet connection. If others find my posts helpful, that's fantastic, but it's secondary.
I wanted a platform that I could log into, that was fast, non-intrusive, that I could link my own domain to, and that was 'stuck' in 2005. I don't need anything shiny and honestly, for most things people blog about, a site that exists in circa 2005 is more than enough.
As someone in IT tier 1/2/3 support, I and many peers would not be able to do our jobs without blogs like yours. If only people knew how many times we just google/ddg an error and end up on a blog with a fix.
Medium was originally praised for no bullshit presentation too.
Imgur is another example, founded as the "no BS" image host as counter to what photobucket/imageshack has become, it's now pretty much at the state those two were at imgur's founding
Well, if your target audience is HN, then you really need to worry about this. But for the majority of the (non-technical) bloggers, this isn’t the case.
What's wrong with paying for text? I don't own a TV and I assume most people are splurging more on their cable in a single month than s/o paying for five or six web publications.
Readit News
Medium has “publications” where my work gets sent out to hundreds of readers that are reading about a topic, not necessarily from me - I’m not notable at all in the field so I’d have a rather hard time getting people to subscribe to __me__.
If I were to make my own website, I’d lose a ton of discoverability.
Plus, the monetization on medium is fantastic. Nowhere else would I get that return per view - I’m currently averaging around 25k views a month with a $500 return.
I do have my gripes with the platform, but in my case, Medium is the worst platform for writing besides all the rest. [1] https://anth-oleinik.medium.com/
You're increasing the amount of complexity in your reader's stack to reduce the complexity of your stack. Much like how nobody clicks the 'Reddit is better in the app!' button, you should be conscious that most people nope-out when they click a link and don't get your article.
Basically what this comes down to is that there's a market for something like Medium's earlier days, back when it was decent. Someone just needs to figure out a better way to monetize it, while still having the mind share Medium used to have.
You can’t lose something you didn’t have.
I think you should be the one conscious that you're a small minority and not representing "most people" at all.
There are other ways to make money on the internet, personally I like the "post shit everywhere for free, have a Patreon" model, which is giving me similar numbers of around $1k/mo for not much energy put into promotion, with a little bit more every month as my patrons grow. But some people like putting up paywalls, and it's their choice to do that with whatever they're creating.
Today I put the same type of content on Medium and get thousands of readers on almost each and every article. So much, in fact, that I've consistently been in the top 1,000 creators on Medium several months running.
Yes, I understand that I'm simply part of their platform. but that's the same for anyone who attempts to create monetized content on Medium, YouTube, Twitch, or any of the many other platforms that pay creators for content.
As far as I can tell, articles and sites like the one above exist because some people simply believe that they should never have to pay for content, and that everything should be free.
Fair enough. And, that being the case, those people are never going to see my work. Also fair.
But Medium drives enough people to my content to make the exchange work for me. Plus it provides enough incentive to get me off my butt and create things that I probably won't have created otherwise.
If anyone who reads this doesn't like Medium. Fine. If you want to go elsewhere... also fine.
But thus far, the value proposition works for me, and it apparently also works for all of the people who read my articles and stories and tutorials each and every day.
To them, thanks.
Deleted Comment
It did help me get jobs, but I can’t say with certainty that it got me better jobs than I would have without it. I’ve done far better since without a blog attached to my name.
Anyway, that’s a lot of money to make off of something I associated with costing money.
Real
Simple
Syndication
Step 2: I don't know what Step 2 is because I'm unwilling to do Step 1.
> I don’t think switching to a stand alone website would be good for me
Well, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work innit? :) Producers care about themselves and consumers choose, competition ensues, the producers are therefore forced to conform to the consumers’ preferences.
What I mean is “you only care about yourself”, in a business setting, is not an accusation by itself, however unvirtuous it sounds. The opposite of “capitalism” in the first sentence is not “social democracy” or “welfare state”, it’s “planned economy”, and I’d say that every ethical judgment that moves us towards that has to go.
Except this works only when there’s (a lot of) competition, which is exactly what platforms attempt to exploit: you (a producer) move according to your best interest at each point, like everyone else, only to find yourself in a mono- (or oligo-) psony market where you have to sell through the platform(s) or perish, and now the platform(s) can enforce whatever they wish on you. The consumers aren’t feeling that spiffy, either. The laws of competition no longer apply.
(Huh, is moving to a platform essentially a prisoner’s dilemma with the (defect,defect) state obscured by marketing?)
This is why I still (occasionally) write on Medium.
For readers who aren't subscribed to Medium, it can be annoying. You go to read an article, and if that article is monetized, you see a banner to sign up. Plenty of people leave immediately.
Now let me tell why, as a writer, I still use Medium and will continue for the time being.
I only post 2-4 articles on there per month. But even then, I'm seeing ~50K views per month and this month I'm on track to earn $1000.
To see those same results on my own blog, I would need to learn a lot about SEO, affiliate marketing, and have a large Twitter following to direct traffic to my blog. I would also need to maintain it myself.
Sure, I might have a higher chance of going viral on HN, but how likely is that even anyway?
As a full-time developer with a newborn who's just looking to earn some fun money, Medium is perfect. I write, submit to a publication, and they take care of the rest.
People may say, "I'm not going to read your posts on Medium." My answer is: okay? Can't make everyone happy. But I'm still getting 50K views from people who do want to read them, and I'm okay with that.
The other point to make is that Medium only pays for views/reads from other Medium members, so I don't necessarily care if I go viral on HN or not. If I really cared about going viral, I would just post my article to something like dev.to and then submit it to HN.
If you're just looking to write and get views/go viral and don't care about money, then it might not make sense to post to Medium. But if you want to earn some money with relatively little effort, Medium is hard to beat.
Edit: Here's proof of my claims for people questioning them (https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...). Note: it is a Medium link to an unlisted post. Didn't know where else to put it.
The problems with much of the audience is not that they do monetization, but how they do it.
Like many readers, I don't read enough Medium articles to pay $5/mo for it. I don't mind paying $5/mo for something useful, or sending a one-time donation. I gladly would pay, say, 25-50¢ for a good article, if I could do it without subscription. Such a commitment just feels unnecessary.
One way to do it is ads — good thing Medium is not pushing ads at me! My thanks. But there's still no easy way to pay a small amount.
I see how microtransactions are not economical. I wish Medium offered a "casual reader" plan, where I post, say, $10, and they go to pay per-article fees, not limited by time, that is, I'd not need to replenish it monthly if I haven't run into zero balance. This could be a gateway for more readers who just don't see the need to commit to a subscription. It could even lead to more conversions to subscribers.
There are some unique approaches to this idea of casual viewing. I know Coil (https://coil.com/) is doing this with the whole idea of Web 3.0.
The idea, if I understand correctly, is you pay $5 a month for a membership, and any time you consume content from someone who has set up a coil wallet, part of your subscription goes to them. Like Medium subscriptions, but for the entire web.
The problem right now is no isn’t really an incentive to use it. It’s all volunteer based. So the payouts from it are pennies.
Websites would need to have Coil-only content that only members would get to see to incentivize adoption, similar to Patreon. But since it’s decentralized, it’s up to each site to implement it.
That's impressive. I'm clearly writing the wrong articles haha.
Dev.to is flagged by default on HN.
Do you use it? And if so, how do you like it?
I didn't want people to think I was just writing this to get attention which is why I didn't originally post it.
Here's proof to the claims I made: https://medium.com/@SunnyB/proof-of-medium-stats-700c2b0b638...
Therefore I have a ban on Medium posts. When medium.com is in the URL it is automatically discarded, unfortunately they offer white label domain so I happen to click on some of those links.
Also I didn't do stats about it, but if you want to blog about something and do it on Medium you have a much lower chance to be featured on HN (not talking about others forum ). Choose wisely. HN is not the center of the world but there are only a few places that can offer 50k visits
I always feel a bit tricked when I encounter that, myself.
127.0.0.1 medium.com w3schools.org
Looks like they just brought this functionality back as well:
https://blog.medium.com/custom-domains-are-back-2dee29560d59
Hosting on Hugo/Netlify is kind of a good solution, but I feel like there needs to be a completely free, managed version. Setting up Hugo/Netlify is mostly simple, but it's one of those things when you don't want to deal with updating your local tech stack vs a managed service.
I feel like Substack is slightly better, although it still does lean towards "subscription" first services (but at least it's per user / patronage type model)
[0] https://write.as/writefreely
[1] https://write.as
Experts-Exchange, without the experts.
Deleted Comment
2. Discovery! Medium is about getting people to read your blog.
(Note) there is an obvious opportunity to create a medium like experience that lets people blog using Hugo and Netlify. I open an app, connect to my account (GitHub pages, or Netlify) type my article and post.
P.s I tried to put an asterisk instead of Note but it ended up putting everything in between in italics.
This. I feel like as a reader, medium is becoming pretty useless, with the gate screens and stuff. But back when I was using it a lot, I published my stuff on Medium because it gave me eyeballs, the same way I put videos on youtube now as opposed to hosting them myself (even if it was easy to do).
If I put a post on my own blog, I'll be lucky to get 20 people looking at it. Last time I posted something on Medium, it went viral and got several hundred thousand views, including from this very website (and I hadn't even submitted it to Hacker News).
That's hard to beat. If someone else wants to make something similar, to help blog authors get the same thing publishing to Youtube or Spotify get you, that isn't Medium, go right ahead. I'll certainly consider your product.
This is what I'd really like. All these alternatives assume you want to use your editor in the terminal and git and CI publication process. I want to edit markdown text in a web browser and click a button to see how its rendered and then go back to the editor without changing contexts at all.
The editor/git/CI model feels too much like actual fucking $dayjob work. Writing is already a difficult enough process -- lets turn it into software development while we're at it! I need to worry more about dependency management of my plugins while I'm trying to write and publish something.
Medium is worse though, its very annoying.
imml[1] comes close to this, it's all css tricks to display content so I imagine SEO would suffer until search engine's learn css #navigation but for everyone else it just works. If it had a push to github pages button it would be the perfect minimalist site/blog. For now the publishing step involves downloading the single resulting html file and uploading it manually with surge.sh or to the website host you bought your domain from.
[1] https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/#
A modern Wordpress. But with strict guide rails and simplicity.
Does such a thing exist?
I’ve seen ghost but it’s quite expensive for personal use.
Anyway hackmd+zero click integration to posting to a serving system, anything.
Fast software is the best software. [2] (Comments: [3])
Speed is the killer feature. [4] (Comments: [5])
Slow software is an opportunity for competitors. [6]
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/12/performance-matters-jekyll-v...
[2]: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20517144
[4]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312516
[6]: https://fabiensanglard.net/silicone/index.html
No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.
As an aside: I don't understand why Google hasn't updated Blogger to compete with Medium (and now Substack). Seems like some Google employees could get a good review/promotion by doing that. With all the stuff Google changes (often for no good reason), Blogger seems to just remain stuck in the amber of ~2005.
I wanted a platform that I could log into, that was fast, non-intrusive, that I could link my own domain to, and that was 'stuck' in 2005. I don't need anything shiny and honestly, for most things people blog about, a site that exists in circa 2005 is more than enough.
Your service is appreciated o7
I dont blog myself, but what would be needed to be added to Blogger? A blog is just header image + text anyway right?
Meduim blogs are mostly just text right? Is it just the nice theme? Ads? Payment?
https://twitter.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1408473091727052804...
Substack has its share of warts, but is much more acceptable than Medium.
Medium was originally praised for no bullshit presentation too.
Imgur is another example, founded as the "no BS" image host as counter to what photobucket/imageshack has become, it's now pretty much at the state those two were at imgur's founding
People posting on Medium (or any other "platform") are seeking distribution, not a 200ms rendering performance or owning their namespace.
Also, nothing wrong with paying for content — I'm a Medium subscriber, among many other publications.
Let's discuss again when a major NYT columnist leaves for the sake of publishing with Hugo.
There is when your publishing medium gatekeeps you for no other reason than to drive its own metrics. (Also nice humblebrag?)
Medium is scum, I hope it burns