In the last couple weeks, there's been a lot of backlash against Medium in response to the infamous "Paywall". I started seeing a lot of tweets sim...
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Nice post. I'm conflicted about the title you chose as the best way to get the point across but you shouldn't change it now. π
Of course, I wrote something recently addressing Medium's place in the world:
Medium Was Never Meant to Be a Part of the Developer Ecosystem
Ben Halpern γ» Jun 3 '19 γ» 5 min read
I'm not crazy about "piling on", but in the case of Medium, a massive VC-funded company founded by an already rich, accomplished tech guy it's definitely a case of "punching up".
I recently also posted my problems with how FreeCodeCamp handled the situation, but that didn't put Medium in the right. They were sort of both in the wrong and the relationship was bound to end poorly based on how each party chose to seek the right outcome.
I'm concerned with the move that FreeCodeCamp just pulled by leaving Medium
Ben Halpern γ» May 28 '19 γ» 3 min read
Anyway, I think the real trouble of all this is that we shouldn't have to work so hard ourselves to be treated properly on these platforms. We're really trying to make our tooling such that data import, export, canonical URLs, etc. is streamlined so it's not a burden to make sure you're covering your bases and getting a fair deal.
I generally just think Medium has gotten arrogant about their position and no longer feels the need to serve the community. To me that is the biggest mistake they have made. Every criticism I put in my post is fixable, but I think their problem lies in culture and mentality and not just in process.
Thanks for taking the time to read it, I really appreciate it.
You don't need even Wordpress or Drupal for simply hosting blog posts. By using a static site generator like pelican or jekyll, you can freely host your content on github-pages. Its free to use and they also allow you to link your own domain!
If you aren't technically inclined, there are also other options like Blogspot and Tumblr. DEV.to is great for networking but you should also have your own blog or site as your online identity or whatever.
Its absolutely free for hosting blogs and they even allow you link your domain!
Also I seem to get way more engagement from Dev.to over anything I have ever posted on Medium
Completely agree, the engagement has actually been the most impressive part of Dev.to so far.
I totally agree with you, it's very frustrating to click on a Medium link (from twitter or reddit for example) and never know if it is behind a paywall or not. I'd rather be Rickrolled instead.
So you're telling me I should strategically submit Medium articles that only contain a Rickroll? π
especially since the bug is still not resolved: I have never paid anything on medium. I always clear the browser cache. and when an article is still inaccessible (like Forbes Inc.), I copy / paste the title in Google and I read for free ...
I just made a medium article post a few days ago in a long time and it automatically got paywalled, which is kinda a jerky move.
I never liked Medium too much as a user: all these modal dialogs, images are blurred in an ugly way while being loaded, sticky footer and header are waaay too big, comments section is hard to follow β so many little annoying things that I sometimes resort to reading Medium articles in Lynx. Then again, without alt text for images that's not too good either.
I really hope they'll eventually fix at least the UX part if not policy because there's a lot of content worth reading already posted there.
Everyone can edit the canonical link for a Medium article.
Not sure if it was possible at the time you wrote this article but it this feature available now.
Edit Story -> More Settings -> Advance Settings
In Advance Settings
I've stopped using Medium after that
Arguing that Medium makes it difficult to get noticed without the paywall is definitely a valid argument.
Good article on whatβs currently going on with medium. Specially agree with your comments in regards to their UX design.