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David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

Posted on • Originally published at letslearnabout.net

Should you use Medium or dev.to?

Original Post Should you use Medium or dev.to?

Should you use Medium or dev.to?

Medium or dev.to

Medium or dev.to, which one should you use as a blogging platform? What are the pros and cons of each one?

I asked myself those questions too, and now, with a few weeks of experience, I can answer them.


Introduction

A few days, @tomkastek reached me on a DM via Twitter (I'm @DavidMM1707 there, by the way). He was interested in a blogging platform and was indecisive between Medium and dev.to:

It was a good question. A question I asked myself, and the best way to answer it was to try both.

I started on Medium. A few days before I saw reasons to move to use dev.to too. And I saw benefits and drawbacks of both platforms.

And I'm going to list them here, but before that…


What is Medium?

Medium or dev.to

Medium is an online publishing platform. It is an example of social journalism, having a combination of amateur and professional writers and publications, and it is regarded a blog hosts.

And it looks like this:

It has cool things like a polished and clean style, publications and more. You can follow me there as DavidMM.

But, what about dev.to?


What is dev.to?

Dev.to is an online community for sharing and discovering great ideas, having debate and making friends.

It is a blogging platform? A chat room? A forum? For me, all 3 things combined.

Not as polished as Medium, but better for engaging other developers. And you can follow me there too.

Now we know both platforms, but…what about their pros and cons?


Medium pros and cons

Now, my Medium pros and cons:

Pros

  • Easy to write on. Writing in Medium is easy to do and clean.

  • Importing articles. You can import your articles from anywhere to Medium. I use it to link my own website articles to Medium so I can share them there too.
  • Cool stats. You know how many people watched your post, how many read them, a % of Read Ratio, etc.

  • You get a lot of views …if you write in a publication (More info on cons)

Cons

  • You get no views. Unless someone lets you write on their publication. I had 1-5 views per publication until someone got me into their publication. After that, I got around hundreds of views (100-450) each day.

Red for no publications, blue for publications and green when I was granted a spot at "Programming" Medium section. You can see the difference.

  • Your content aim is to be on the paywall. While a legit business model, I don't agree with that. I want my articles free and they will always be.
  • Not for programmers. It's extremely hard to post code there. I have to use a plugin to do it and to use it you have to create a gist then link it. It does it automatically but I don't like how it works. It should be copy-paste and that's it.
  • Stupid "like" system. You can vote as much as you want for posts. I had a post with +100 likes and only 11 people liked the post.

Summary

As a programmer, I don't like Medium too much. While it is good to write posts like this one (In fact, I only copied the URL of this post and I imported it, with minor tweaks and that's it), programming-posts with lots of code is taxing.

You almost get no views there unless you get spotted. Then you sky-rocket. My record was almost 500 readers in one day a few weeks after being there. And this:

Mixed feelings as a programmer: Hard to write code, Medium is not aimed as a programmers but for everybody and you don't know who is entering in your posts. But is has a "Read ratio" system so you know how many people actually read it.

And it looks clean.

But now, let's see Dev.to.


dev.to pros and cons

What I like and dislike about dev.to:

Pros

  • Aimed to programmers. 100% of your readers are programmers or people learning to code.
  • Voting system. You can like a video, give it a superlike and/or 'save' it to read it later. I have used a lot the save option to read later/having it as a learning resource.
  • Easy to write code. It's just a tag you throw and then you copy and paste the code. That's it. Zero complexity.
  • Easy to get comments. Even with several hundreds of real readers, I barely have any comment on my Medium posts. In dev.to it is hard to not get any comment and likes/superlikes in any post you create (Prove I'm right!)
  • Tag system. When you create a post, you select one or more tags. People following those tags have a higher chance to find your posts. And you as a reader can just filter out things you don't like only to find things you're interested in, on your feed.
  • Great for sharing code Unlike Medium, you can easily share code on dev.to. For example, using Markdown syntax highlighting:
const hello = (name) => {
    console.log(`hello, ${name}`)
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You can also embed Kotlin snippets, Glitch, Codepen, JSFiddle and more.

(Thanks to Jean-Michel Fayard, Alexis Benamar and Dominik LubaΕ„ski for poiting out my mistake.)

Cons

  • Uses a Markdown system. I don't like it as I don't use it normally (only to create http://README.md files), and while it has an edit and a preview view, you have to switch between both to see what you are doing. You can't import any blog to it unless you can transpile it into Markdown (Thankfully I found one)
  • When you create a user you automatically follow 50 people. Not that it is super bad, but I get like 150 followers daily and I don't know which one is real and which one automatically assigned.

Summary

I like dev.to a lot. There are only developers so 99% of the posts are potentially interesting for you, more 'human' feeling in the form of interactions (comments, likes, etc) and a great platform for developers.


Conclusion

So, answering the initial question: Should you use Medium or dev.to the answer is… it depends.

Wait there before hitting the 'X' or grabbing a pitchfork!

I feel like if you want to write a polished article about something related to the programming world (the hardships of being a junior developer, the problems in the industry, etc) Medium is easier to write and get views.

But if you want to go more technical, be in a community, have and give feedback, etc Dev.to is the answer.

All in all, the choice is yours. I'll suggest you try both of them and stick to the one you want. Or use both, as I do.


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Latest comments (75)

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celebi90 profile image
celebi ati

it is so annoying for using some portfolio websites (like adobe) does not support social media icon and link of dev.to , but supports medium.

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» • Edited

Especially when considering Medium practises of forcing you to register and/or pay....

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celebi90 profile image
celebi ati

both (adobe and medium) business model is subscription base, make sense

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molinux profile image
Molinero

Markdown is not a cons for me... it's a pro !
All of my documentation and tutorials are written in Markdown

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khusyasy profile image
Luthfi Khusyasy

Thank you so much for your insight, I recently thought of starting a blog but kinda got confused because too many platforms to choose from, but now I kinda know where should I start.

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curtlycritchlow profile image
Curtly Critchlow

I recently joined dev and I was pondering on this question. I agree with your conclusion and would like to thank you for highlighting the pros and cons of each platform.

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cedricmurairi profile image
CΓ©dric Murairi

Can one use medium or dev.to api to post and display content to and from his website other than going to both platform every time?

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chinmayghule profile image
Chinmay Ghule

It's usually useless to expect a conclusion for anything 'this vs that' nowadays since you never get a result. In the end they always give a vague answer to avoid offending the either party.

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jwp profile image
John Peters

I cannot stand Medium personally. It's a platform for disgruntled woe is me posts.

Dev.to is a programming haven.

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yellow1912 profile image
yellow1912

Medium asks you to pay if you go above the number of posts you can read (3 per week or something like that?). While I think that's fair when the money goes directly to the writer to support the time and effort, if you plan to share your knowledge for free the. . medium is NOT a good place. I think that there are just so many free options out there such as dev.to for you to choose from. That said, you can always sync to multiple news portals.

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jcastaneyra profile image
Jose Castaneyra

Wow, thanks, long time ago I had a blog but wasn't updated for about eight years, now I want to start again to write and your great post helped me to make a decision.

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

Happy to see that my post helped someone :)

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elseraa profile image
Sera

I've been thinking about start writing a long time ago. But just yesterday I do it. And I was making me this question all day. Where to start? I think I'll follow your advice and make it in both places and see how is it goes. Thanks!

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mzaini30 profile image
Zen

I have shared this post with my friend who will join in Dev. He was amazed at the speed of this website; switch pages almost without loading.

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tomavelev profile image
Toma

My answer is on all of them, not just medium and dev.to - also LinkedIn, Steemit.com, Facebook (probably better in some dev group/page), audio version in sound cloud, anchor.co, video version - on youtube, dailymotion, vimeo, wherever is free. The core process of programming is code and run - to develop something. For the content is the same idea - test, change, test, test, test. The top spot should be the one you control (self-host), not some platform that you have account on (in User Mode). This is the Internet Game of - who would acquire the most attention (and content generation). That is what makes all big companies valuable (content, user base, attention).

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

I didn't know about Steemit.com. I might give it a try.

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tomavelev profile image
Toma

I barely have any reach there, because, it is flooded with content, like most others, but, I'm republishing my stuff there also. It doesn't take too much time. Who knows, from which hat the rabbit will appear.

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

I also had this comparison back in June. DEV definitely has more audience than medium. I even gained 6k followers in 2 months because of that one post. Check it here on my blog icenreyes.xyz/posts/a-post-statist...

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

Hm, the audience is tricky.

With Medium, like you, I had between 1-4, until (I don't know why) I was spotted by somebody on a Vue publication. The articles on the publication hit +1000 views easy, as they publish every week a curated list of articles.

But yeah, by myself my posts have like 6-7 views now. On dev.to you get more reads and, more important, feedback in comments.

The followers' thing, as I said, is not real. When I started here I was automatically following 50 people (because the tags I selected).

For example, on my first day, with less than 100 views, I had 152 followers by the end of the day, almost everyone registered the same day.

Today it is my 17th day here and I have 3165 followers, that roughly makes 1 follower by every 2 views...

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

You gain more followers with more posts. I checked your profile and see that you are a consistent writer. Congratulations on that!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Great post!

As the creator of DEV I definitely have some bias, but I'll add a few posts that sort of define the values we have on this issue, and why we make some of our choices...

We really work hard to be a value-add part of the ecosystem, rather than being an all-consuming monopoly on any of this stuff. I hope our work in supporting data portability and the open web are appreciated. 😊

And, of course, we're open source. Together with the community we'll just keep getting better and adding more value to the ecosystem that we don't entirely capture for ourselves.

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mzaini30 profile image
Zen

You're MVP πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘

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davidmm1707 profile image
David MMπŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» • Edited

Self-hostable static blogs is a great new feature.

And yes, you can tell by the number of comments and its type, that this is geared more towards developers.

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