As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.
I've observed that behavior in others but never done it myself. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight as I read, I nevertheless agree that a toolbar that appears on highlight is obnoxious for a reading-oriented site. (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)
I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting. I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.
The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.
Odd sidenote -- when I was growing up in the world of Mac Classics and Windows 3.1, the Mac users were the highlighters of the group. I was a Windows (okay, DOS->Windows->Linux) guy, so I didn't.
I started using OS X in around 2002 and became a highlighter. I always wondered why.
So interesting. I didn't know anyone did this at all until I observed a friend of mine reading something online in the early 2000s. Really curious about what percentage of web readers do this.
After tinkering with so many blogging platforms and blog generators - from Jekyll and Pelican to Ghost and Hugo - I decided to shutdown the blog part because I realised last year I did more of the tinkering with my blog than actual blogging.
Now I just point my domain to a 4 page website which talks about me in as brief as possible and there's a contact page if someone wants to get in touch with me. It's pure HTML and very simple with extremely little bit of 'handmade' JS and CSS. Hosted on github. No markdown, no front matter. Black and dark grey text on white background.
I really like it now. And if I ever start blogging again I will look for some engine that gives me a very simple way to manage posts, generate links, tags, post archive etc and I might actually want to write posts in plain HTML.
I think Medium is good for those bloggers just starting out, but yeah host your blog and just syndicate to Medium to build traffic. Even better if you can get picked up by an existing publication -- I saw a dramatic increase in reads.
This guy had an established audience so Medium didn't help him much.
I'm currently setting up my blog and I didn't even hesitate to host it myself. Companies like Medium come and go (e.g. Geocities, Xanga, Myspace, Posterous), but your dot com is yours as long as you keep paying the domain fee. Guys like Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood are probably very happy they've kept their presence on their own dot coms over the last decade.
Wow! I never really thought of Medium in the same realm as Xanga or Livejournal but you're absolutely right. It's crazy to think that people are moving to it. LiveJournal and Xanga were always kind of a stepping stone back in the day. You had your blog on their first then it started getting a lot of traffic and you moved it to your own domain. It's crazy to see the opposite happening now adays with Medium!
I hate Medium and I wouldn't let them be my primary distribution method for content but I would dual post. Is there a reason why you wouldn't just xpost from your blog to Medium?
Medium is one example of something that went from “nice” to “annoying” very quickly. (LinkedIn and Meetup are other examples.) Then it gets “improved” and customers just want to leave.
I don’t know who these people are that just can’t help themselves, stomping all over something that was nice the way it was. And it means we need to desperately revisit open platforms, since you should always have the option of forking from the pre-shark-jumping point.
If there's any site that has absolutely no need to nag me to log in before reading, it's Medium. Yet every time I visit, they pop up and say "You've read XX articles, time to make this official". Why? Why? What benefit do I get from signing in unless I'm writing a blog?
It's annoying when Quora does it, but at least Quora is a question and answers site. It's designed for a back and forth and user interaction. Stack Exchange proves you don't need to make people log in for that, but whatever. Quora does it. But Medium is not a chat site. It's not a forum. It's not Q&A. It's a blog site. I'm not writing a blog, I'm just trying to read.
The adage “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” feels especially true in software.
It's been intriguing but disappointing watching Medium transition from a site that cared a lot about enhancing the readability of the average blog, to a site that cared a lot about forcing sticky engagement. I understand why they did it ($$$), but I long for the days when there were no popups, no fixed bottom bars saying "download the app" etc.
It's easy to take medium's appearance for granted now, but when they launched, their implementation was game changing. Much of the improvement in blog readability, especially in the SaaS space, feels like it can be attributed to learning from and emulating the (longstanding) typographical principles Medium put forward.
I sometimes wonder about this in the larger context of companies as a whole.
If a company has one product, and that product is released and "done", then from a purely logical standpoint, why do they still need to retain employees (other than Support probably)? There are plenty of reasons to keep people on of course, but at some level it's kind of a "default" thing to do.
While I agree Medium is going through some growing pains trying to figure out a business model, I'm a bit surprised _nobody_ on this forum is coming to their defense. I personally enjoy Medium. I don't misattribute content to Medium itself. In fact, one of the things I like most about it is that I can easily find new people to "follow" (in general and their writing).
I also do post on Medium. One of the things I like most there is that comments are "first-class" posts on Medium. This is truly novel. It makes a bunch of blog posts into an interwoven globalized conversation. Certainly, that can't be done with a static site generator.
I'll certainly begin publishing to my own domain and importing rel canonical-style from now on, since there are many good points made here. But I tend to think that, while Blogger and GeoCities were simply brokers of content, Medium does quite a bit more.
I remember once someone who posted their blog and it was just a listing of markdown files in a github repository. Not even a jekyllyzed version... just a folder with date prefixed markdown and rst files.
I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files.
Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.
I've come to the conclusion that all the design stuff is a waste of time. In most cases, it doesn't impress me on other sites, and if someone cares, they can use Reader View or Pocket or something like that. Unless you are good enough to create a design that makes folks say wow, there is no benefit at all from doing so.
This is only slightly similar, but Ive played around with hexo to acheive a HTML only driven blog based on github hosted markdown files. Once setup and secured it is pretty much just me writing and publishing text files.
https://hexo.io/
It seems to be very popular in Japan as most guides I read were google-translated Japanese blogs.
Now I'm intrigued as to what that looked like. Was he using github.io or did you have to just click through the Github source code browser? Also was he really writing some of the posts in ReStructuredText, or was that a converted output?
His stats for Medium views vs own-host views are the exact opposite of my experience. Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere, and we find the same happening for clients who make the switch too. We tend to recommend publishing on Medium to clients these days, both for the traffic and the inbound link SEO bonus.
There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.
> Everything I've ever written on Medium has way more views than anything I've ever published elsewhere
I guess if you're an author, it makes sense to use Medium to find an audience.
But if you're a company, how relevant are those views? Are the people reading your articles a quality audience? Or just random Medium visitors? Does 1000 views equal to even 500 visits to your website? Or to 10 sales?
I think the reading experience is pretty good on Medium: you can easily browse content via topic. But I think the content is more memorable than the author. I never know who wrote a piece on Medium because 1) most blogs look the same 2) the author's name is not really prominent.
So I wonder what's the cost of that increase in views? Would you rather have a tiny blog with 100 visitors a month who follow you closely? Or 5,000 views from random readers who might not remember you the next day?
> On top of that, the amount of views a given article would get ultimately weren’t that impressive. At least not much/any more than our own blog (given we’d already built up a nice readership).
That's a crucial point made as a side remark. They had already done the hard work of building audience for their own hosted blog, to the level of getting around 10k views on posts already. So, this was about the author hoping for even bigger numbers and perhaps visibility to new audience. Which apparently didn't happen to any significant level.
The best practice (and what Baremetrics is doing) is to do both. Post your content first to your own domain and then later import it with the Medium article import tool.
"more views" is relative, too -- the Baremetrics blog had been around quite a while and already was pulling in good traffic, so I could see why their new Medium blog wasn't quickly matching their old traffic.
FWIW I've seen similar with my own blog. Posts that get 500 views/day on my site have a total Medium view count of under 2k, ever. I also sorta suspect that Medium doesn't promote the "Imported" articles as much as Medium-native ones (Imported articles set Canonical URL to your original blog post so you get the SEO juice).
> ultimately your takeaway is “I read this article on Medium”, and that’s not what I wanted. I wanted to get back to people saying “I read this article on Baremetrics”.
Is that what you'd be getting back to though, or would it be "I read this article on some blog I found on Google" (or didn't find, since—as he says—Medium is excellent at surfacing content).
He says his traffic has slumped since the Medium switch; it may be causal, or not.
I run a small blogging platform (https://blot.im) and get a steady stream of Medium-apostates who've made this realization. Medium is a deeply flawed product and is not designed in the best interests of its writers or its readers. I recommend The Billionaire's Typewriter by Matthew Butterick if you're interested in why this is so:
> They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business.
This is the risk of becoming dependent on any outside service or company for your critical business activities.
SaaS services make your life easier... until they stop working the way you want, go out of business, get acquired and shuttered, etc. etc.
Pick and choose wisely. And always have a backup plan!
I've been meaning to blog more, and currently I have 2 posts on Medium. Part of the problem is the work it takes to make a solid post. But mostly, as Fred Wilson points out, it is the lack of control. Want to add a small image customly placed? Can't do it. Want to provide your non-logged in readers an experience where an annoying interstitial doesn't appear every time they visit? Can't do it.
I have thought about syndication, and I'm glad to learn here about the import tool.
Edit: Incidentally, where is Dustin Curtis? There is opportunity here. Own your blog and make it social. Must be a way.
>I realized Medium is really great about surfacing content, but it removes the face of it. It neutralizes all content to basically be author-agnostic. It’s like Walmart or Amazon in that you can buy from thousands of different brands, but you rarely actually know what brand you’re buying…you just know “I got it from Amazon.”
Medium has pretty much always pushed the stance that they're the "face" of the blogs on the site. You're not hosting your blog on Medium, you're writing for Medium. Heck, their "our story" section says right at the top:
>Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.
That's pretty clearly "Medium has great content", not "look at these excellent bloggers". They're a curator / reading platform, intentionally emphasizing the value you get from Medium itself.
Given that stance, loss of brand identity seems like a pretty natural outcome.
I recently decided to move from Svtble elsewhere. I looked at medium briefly but wasn't super thrilled. I ended up with using Hugo and hosting it with Netlify.
Pushing to GitHub publishes my blog , it looks pretty nice and I have total control over it.
And most importantly, as the author notes, it's "my blog", hosted on my site with links to hire me.
Definitely way more enjoyable, and as a result I blog a lot more.
> We’ll publish new content two weeks later to Medium (so the initial publishing of the content is able to get solidified as the primary source from an SEO standpoint).
Hrm interesting, but if it's the same content, won't Google rank the copy Medium very poorly?
I don't understand why anyone posts on Medium. If you are an individual, a github blog is easy to set up and completely free. If you are a business, I don't understand relinquishing control and diminishing your brand. Whenever I visit Medium it asks me to create an account, which is mildly annoying. Id' be worried Medium will increase the annoyances to a point you'd have no choice but to move elsewhere, which is a hassle.
Medium works great as an amplifier and as an aggregator. It can get you additional traffic for your blog, product or site. But yeah, own your own content.
[+] [-] dlandis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|8 years ago|reply
I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting. I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.
[+] [-] nerdywordy|8 years ago|reply
Medium & kin infuriate me with the popup toolbar.
[+] [-] Nicksil|8 years ago|reply
The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.
[+] [-] rconti|8 years ago|reply
I started using OS X in around 2002 and became a highlighter. I always wondered why.
[+] [-] djtriptych|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|8 years ago|reply
Own your own blog!
[+] [-] drcongo|8 years ago|reply
http://sayspy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/moving-this-blog-to-med... https://medium.com/coder-who-says-py/i-have-moved-over-to-sv... https://nothingbutsnark.svbtle.com/moving-the-blog-to-silvrb... And eventually to https://snarky.ca
[+] [-] balladeer|8 years ago|reply
Now I just point my domain to a 4 page website which talks about me in as brief as possible and there's a contact page if someone wants to get in touch with me. It's pure HTML and very simple with extremely little bit of 'handmade' JS and CSS. Hosted on github. No markdown, no front matter. Black and dark grey text on white background.
I really like it now. And if I ever start blogging again I will look for some engine that gives me a very simple way to manage posts, generate links, tags, post archive etc and I might actually want to write posts in plain HTML.
[+] [-] virmundi|8 years ago|reply
Six-ish hours.Doing something totally new.
[+] [-] joeax|8 years ago|reply
This guy had an established audience so Medium didn't help him much.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] acconrad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zodPod|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wand3r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
I don’t know who these people are that just can’t help themselves, stomping all over something that was nice the way it was. And it means we need to desperately revisit open platforms, since you should always have the option of forking from the pre-shark-jumping point.
[+] [-] freehunter|8 years ago|reply
It's annoying when Quora does it, but at least Quora is a question and answers site. It's designed for a back and forth and user interaction. Stack Exchange proves you don't need to make people log in for that, but whatever. Quora does it. But Medium is not a chat site. It's not a forum. It's not Q&A. It's a blog site. I'm not writing a blog, I'm just trying to read.
Stop asking me to make an account.
[+] [-] RickS|8 years ago|reply
It's been intriguing but disappointing watching Medium transition from a site that cared a lot about enhancing the readability of the average blog, to a site that cared a lot about forcing sticky engagement. I understand why they did it ($$$), but I long for the days when there were no popups, no fixed bottom bars saying "download the app" etc.
It's easy to take medium's appearance for granted now, but when they launched, their implementation was game changing. Much of the improvement in blog readability, especially in the SaaS space, feels like it can be attributed to learning from and emulating the (longstanding) typographical principles Medium put forward.
[+] [-] dceddia|8 years ago|reply
If a company has one product, and that product is released and "done", then from a purely logical standpoint, why do they still need to retain employees (other than Support probably)? There are plenty of reasons to keep people on of course, but at some level it's kind of a "default" thing to do.
[+] [-] jvictor118|8 years ago|reply
I also do post on Medium. One of the things I like most there is that comments are "first-class" posts on Medium. This is truly novel. It makes a bunch of blog posts into an interwoven globalized conversation. Certainly, that can't be done with a static site generator.
I'll certainly begin publishing to my own domain and importing rel canonical-style from now on, since there are many good points made here. But I tend to think that, while Blogger and GeoCities were simply brokers of content, Medium does quite a bit more.
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agentgt|8 years ago|reply
I have to say it hit me and I was like... damn I should just do that. Forget all this blogging platforms and getting caught up in look and feel. Just write text files.
Even with Jekyll (and its variants) I got caught up on making it potentially look nice but this person just said ... f-it... let google and github figure out how to organize the content.
[+] [-] rocky1138|8 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html
[+] [-] bachmeier|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaybe|8 years ago|reply
https://blog.fefe.de/
[+] [-] fizzychicken|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|8 years ago|reply
There's tons wrong with Medium, but it still feels like a better option than a self-hosted system that nobody ever discovers.
[+] [-] bbx|8 years ago|reply
I guess if you're an author, it makes sense to use Medium to find an audience.
But if you're a company, how relevant are those views? Are the people reading your articles a quality audience? Or just random Medium visitors? Does 1000 views equal to even 500 visits to your website? Or to 10 sales?
I think the reading experience is pretty good on Medium: you can easily browse content via topic. But I think the content is more memorable than the author. I never know who wrote a piece on Medium because 1) most blogs look the same 2) the author's name is not really prominent.
So I wonder what's the cost of that increase in views? Would you rather have a tiny blog with 100 visitors a month who follow you closely? Or 5,000 views from random readers who might not remember you the next day?
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|8 years ago|reply
> On top of that, the amount of views a given article would get ultimately weren’t that impressive. At least not much/any more than our own blog (given we’d already built up a nice readership).
That's a crucial point made as a side remark. They had already done the hard work of building audience for their own hosted blog, to the level of getting around 10k views on posts already. So, this was about the author hoping for even bigger numbers and perhaps visibility to new audience. Which apparently didn't happen to any significant level.
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegladiator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dceddia|8 years ago|reply
FWIW I've seen similar with my own blog. Posts that get 500 views/day on my site have a total Medium view count of under 2k, ever. I also sorta suspect that Medium doesn't promote the "Imported" articles as much as Medium-native ones (Imported articles set Canonical URL to your original blog post so you get the SEO juice).
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bogomipz|8 years ago|reply
Closing paragraph:
>"Going forward, we are still going to publish to Medium, ...
A better title might have been "Why we are now using both our own blog AND Medium. I'm guessing that's a less click-baity title though.
[+] [-] sheraz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] styfle|8 years ago|reply
Medium is still very useful to get content to readers that would otherwise not visit your website.
Articles I wrote that were picked up by a "publisher" on Medium get way more views than anything on my own domain.
To put some real numbers on it, one article I wrote this month got 92 hits on my personal website[1] but 429 hits on hackernoon[2].
That makes me motivated to write because people will actually read it :)
[0]: https://medium.com/p/import
[1]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2018-01-01-es6-pr...
[2]: https://hackernoon.com/es6-proxy-and-localization-c1269bbc0a...
[+] [-] lucideer|8 years ago|reply
Is that what you'd be getting back to though, or would it be "I read this article on some blog I found on Google" (or didn't find, since—as he says—Medium is excellent at surfacing content).
He says his traffic has slumped since the Medium switch; it may be causal, or not.
[+] [-] dmerfield|8 years ago|reply
https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html
Medium's trendy design can be enticing but I'd try to steer people towards a platform over which they have control.
[+] [-] willow9886|8 years ago|reply
This is the risk of becoming dependent on any outside service or company for your critical business activities.
SaaS services make your life easier... until they stop working the way you want, go out of business, get acquired and shuttered, etc. etc.
Pick and choose wisely. And always have a backup plan!
[+] [-] TailorJones|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilingual|8 years ago|reply
I have thought about syndication, and I'm glad to learn here about the import tool.
Edit: Incidentally, where is Dustin Curtis? There is opportunity here. Own your blog and make it social. Must be a way.
[+] [-] Groxx|8 years ago|reply
Medium has pretty much always pushed the stance that they're the "face" of the blogs on the site. You're not hosting your blog on Medium, you're writing for Medium. Heck, their "our story" section says right at the top:
>Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.
That's pretty clearly "Medium has great content", not "look at these excellent bloggers". They're a curator / reading platform, intentionally emphasizing the value you get from Medium itself.
Given that stance, loss of brand identity seems like a pretty natural outcome.
[+] [-] rusbus|8 years ago|reply
Pushing to GitHub publishes my blog , it looks pretty nice and I have total control over it.
And most importantly, as the author notes, it's "my blog", hosted on my site with links to hire me.
Definitely way more enjoyable, and as a result I blog a lot more.
[+] [-] nailer|8 years ago|reply
Hrm interesting, but if it's the same content, won't Google rank the copy Medium very poorly?
[+] [-] tomc1985|8 years ago|reply
Medium took something wonderful -- elegant, self-service blog hosting -- and ruined it.
[+] [-] city41|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hoasi|8 years ago|reply