Original Post Should you use Medium or dev.to?

Should you use 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.

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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…

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What is Medium?

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?

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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?

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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.

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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}`)
}

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

(Thanks to Jean-Michel Fayard, Alexis Benamar and Dominik Lubański 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.

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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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Comments

[Mirza]

If you find writing markup really annoying, consider using Remarkable . It's a markup editor which gives renders your marktup to actual text in a parallel window. It's really helpful when it comes to writing posts for dev.to or editing MD type documents in general.

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Thanks for the tip! I'm going to try it as soon as I can.

[JoppeDC]

You should change the title for the Dev.to pro's and cons (its currently Medium pros and cons)

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Done. Thanks!

[JoppeDC]

Sweet! Great post, just finished reading. Always loved Medium because of how clean it looks. And i've always loved dev.to because of the audience and content. This post sums it up pretty accurate!

[Patrick R]

I feel Medium is more for proper "articles" and "publications", not so much for discussions.

Dev.to kinda mixes things up a bit, which is good, but I often click on what I think is an article, only to find a one-liner asking a question to the community.

I'd love for that difference to exist in a more meaningful way.

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

That's what the #help is for (or it should be).

I always check how long is a post before clicking on it.

[Patrick R]

True, I don't have the habit of looking for those.

That either says something about the UX, or about me :)

[Matthias 🤖]

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.

Is that true?

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Unless I get 1 follower for every 3 views because I'm secretly a future media mogul...yes.

6,054
Total Post Views

FOLLOWERS (1762)

[Matthias 🤖]

@ben - can you help us here?

[Suzanne Aitchison]

When I joined (fairly recently) I definitely wasn't assigned people to follow... Or at least definitely not 50 🤷‍♀️

[Florian Rand]

For me, the best DEV.to selling points are:

• Ruled by an indi company (with pretty cool staff).
• Really good community.
• It gives everyone fair chances of visibility.

Great article!

[Max Ong Zong Bao]

I would go for Dev.to the last thing you want is be in a paid wall that is not specifically for the target audience you are writing it for

[Dor Shinar]

I have a few posts published on both platforms, and I feel like it's nearly impossible to gain traction in Medium without being behind the paywall (which I disagree with entirely), so I still post my articles there, but Dev is my first option.

[Paweł Kowalski]

Why do you post there if you dont agree with their hostility towards users?

[Dor Shinar]

Good question. I don't have a clear answer, but it doesn't cost me anything so I guess why not?

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Good Backlinks and views to my own blog are the only reason I see on posting at Medium. If I didn't had one, I wouldn't be there.

[Dor Shinar]

I didn't mention it, but I do have a blog of my own, so yeah you pretty much summed it up better than I was able to.

[Alexis Benamar]

Great article, it's nice to always have a choice.

But, I don't agree with your last statement about ugly code, as markdown offers syntax highlighting as a built-in feature. You just need to add the language you used in your code snippet next to the first triple backticks at the top. (You can find the right name for your language on numerous markdown help pages)

For example:

```javascript
const hello = (name) => {
    console.log(`hello, ${name}`)
}
```

will render as:

const sayHello = (name) => {
    console.log(`hello, ${name}`)
}

PS: there are many bullet points where the bold text isn't properly rendered because the closing ** sticks to a word, you might want to check it out 👍

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

I didn't know. I'm going to update the OP.

[Zen]

Markdown is amazing. I like this.

[Dominik Lubański]

**Ugly code. **While you can use your code in, it is an ugly black background chunk with the text in white. it works but it is hard to read it. Still better than the one in Medium.

Dev.to supports marking language type of the code snippet, so you can get very nice highlighting :)

The only what you have to do is to add language name after opening quotes like javascript. For example:

console.log("I'm highlighted");

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Thanks. I edited the OP and add the code highlighting as a (another) pro for dev.to.

[Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard]

What should note is that on dev.to you can have embedded runnable snippets.

I think they are sooo much better than just a block of code.

They are documented at dev.to/p/editor_guide

For example:

Kotlin Playground {% kotlin URL %}

To create a runnable Kotlin snippet, go to play.kotlinlang.org

And embed it like this:

{% kotlin https://pl.kotl.in/owreUFFUG?theme=darcula&from=3&to=6&readOnly=true %}

Glitch

Go to glitch.com and embed it like {% glitch vuejs %}

CodePen

Go to codepen.io/ and embed it like {% codepen https://codepen.io/twhite96/pen/XKqrJX %}

JSFiddle

Go to jsfiddle.net/ and embed it like: {% jsfiddle https://jsfiddle.net/link2twenty/v2kx9jcd %}

Others

See dev.to/p/editor_guide

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Oh, I didn't know! I'm going to update the post

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

This is gold

[Gurkirat Singh]

That's great. I didn't know that. Thinking to become more active on the dev.to now

[Ansh Saini]

Lol! I am one of your "fake" followers you can say xD
I was automatically following you when i created the account. But hey, now I'm a real follower.
cheers.

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Thanks for keeping it real :)

[Mike Lockhart]

I have noticed that I'm getting a lot of followers who signed up the same day I'm notified. And I have, like, ONE post, and a few comments. So now I understand: something's adding me automatically.

I guess it's incentive for me to get off my butt and WRITE A POST more :-)

[Loftie Ellis]

What I'm doing is publish to my own site, then distribute it to Dev.to from there, and link to dev.to for the conversation. That way I get to maintain full control but still engage with the dev.to community.
Example: loftie.com/post/programming-music/

I used to also publish to medium but I'm getting quite literally zero views from them so I stopped, its a bad user experience anyway to get hit with that massive banner.

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

Linking the comments to dev.to is super clever.

[Alara Oluwatoyin Joel]

I see what you did there, and I definitely like it. SMART
Will go for dev.to for now, then work on having mine later.
What do you think? Something from scratch in GitHub blog, or this whole Wordpress thing.
Thanks

[Adrien Poly]

Another Pros for dev.to is that its SEO is great.

My last article dev.to/adrienpoly/critical-css-wit... on critical CSS for Rails, has been in the top 5 Google results (q="Rails critical CCS") almost since day one

[David MM👨🏻‍💻]

You're right on that. Most of my posts are on the first (sometimes second) page of Google. But having my own blog I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, SEO-wise...

[Zen]

It's right. My posts too.

[Chapman]

Support the open web - host your own blog and distribute content as you wish. Don't silo your own work into something you have zero control over. Being dependent on a single vendor is just a bad idea, imho.

[Michael Z]

Writing markdown was one of the main reasons I started using dev.to.

I have yet to see a fully functional wysiwyg editor that doesn't bug out after writing 2 sentences with different styling.

If I want a live preview, I usually just write the article in vs code.

[Patrick Collins]

Agreed. I actually love writing in markdown. I don't know why it's not the default for everything.