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7 Comments

Do you write on platforms like Medium or Devto often? Can I pick your brain?

I have a vague idea related to these blogging type platforms like Medium and Dev.to that I want to get clearer on and validate.

I'm also feel strongly that writers should be owning their own audiences, content and traffic, and that readers should not being subjected to extortion in order to read a simple article or tutorial.

If you use services like these, could you please tell me

  • Why you use them specifically, and not just your private blog?
  • What services you use, and why?
  • How often you use them?
  • What are makes using them a good experience?
  • What are makes using them a bad experience?
  • Which ones do you contribute to?
  1. 3

    I used to cross-post my blog posts to Medium outside of the paywall, but eventually stopped and focused on my own blog.

    Now I no longer share any Medium links, not even content gems. And I try to avoid clicking Medium links. The reason is the same @axegon mentioned. Medium has the most obnoxious nags to subscribe or register in the known universe.

    1. 1

      Ok, good to know. What blog platform do you use for your personal one, out. of interest?

  2. 3

    Used to but stopped and deleted all my content. The first problem is Medium's absurd "register now" on every single post. The moment someone asks you for your identity online, their service is no longer free by definition. Medium wasn't a good experience overall. They have tried to simplify the interface but in doing so, they've made it magnitudes less usable and flexible. Dev.to supports markdown which is a step up. Bad experiences? Medium's main problems are:

    • "Register in order to view the content"
    • Ranking system, which was okay-ish initially but then something, somewhere went wrong.

    dev.to mostly has it right for the time being. But realistically it's main audience and subsequently contributors are javascript people and I abhor javascript with a passion to put it mildly. Props for it going open source, even though I hate ruby almost as much as js.

    Private blog? Started working on one but... Time constraints at this point of my life.

    1. 1

      Cool, thanks for the thorough reply. What part of a using a private blog is the main time suck? Maintenance, traffic generation, or just the writing part?

      1. 2

        I developed a platform which requires 0 maintenance (no backed required for GitHub pages) so that's not an issue. I genuinely don't care about traffic so it's the writing that's holding me back.

  3. 1

    Used to frequent Medium, but ultimately had a lot of frustrations with it including the paywall, not being able to use custom domains, and an increasing amount of Medium intrusions/branding everywhere. It's why I spent that past few months building imprint.to, to bridge the gap between these fully centralized blogging platforms and something self hosted like Ghost.

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