Medium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fullscreen), a fixed social networking sidebar on the left and a lovely dialog box attached to the bottom of the screen letting me know I can subscribe to Medium for $5/month. Best part about that bottom bar is that just in case I haven't subscribed when I closed it out, it is more than happy to show up after a few minutes when I've switched back to the tab, as it did while I was composing this commentary.
Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!
Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.
This.. “Don’t know anything about web development at all? Don’t worry you can just take a week long bootcamp!
Already a web developer? Buy the C programming language book here and get out while you still can.”
With high quality open source publishing tools like Hugo[1] and Ghost[2], and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish.
Even using a paid service like Squarespace would be a step up in my opinion.
Gathering an audience is way harder without Medium. It might be atrocious in other ways, but it vastly increases the chances of your content getting read.
Does it really tho? This one seemingly got featured by someone at Medium and it pulled in around 10 000 hits from newsletters. While it's more than nothing its no where near the majority source of my traffic.
On principle I'll avoid viewing an article if it's being hosted on medium and skim the comments to decide whether it's worth viewing directly. Probably go on to view the original about 1% of the time. Sorry author, but using medium already counts against you.
And what's with all these sites that now force you to accept their cookie policy? Totally pointless when you configure the browser to delete cookies when the browser exits...
I'm amused to see GitHub thought of as self-publishing. It is nothing of the kind. It's someone else's platform granting you an instantly revocable right to use their facilities, no - or just a few thousand - strings attached.
In principle no different from Facebook and Twitter and all the other shoddy complimentary crap.
This seems to be a silly distinction because I doubt you will find many sites which pass your bar for being self-published. Unless you bought your own hardware, host it on land you own, connect to the internet via your ISP, and call it something under your TLD there are still a lot of people who can revoke your access to the internet arbitrarily and have terms of service. Nobody is an island.
With GitHub you can use your own domain and have full access to the code. GitHub revokes or kicks you off? Just upload the code somewhere else and point your domain there. That's not the same situation as publishing on Medium.
It's different in that I am the customer, I literally give them money to host my stuff. They can of course stop hosting my stuff at any time, but then I will also stop giving them money.
I'm not 100% sure since I'm a developer and not an entrepreneur, but I think they prefer to receive money rather than not receive money.
Medium is not doing any type of good job. Going on the website, i'm immediately flooded with a layout of pictures and headlines designed to gain my attention. Clicking on an article, I get two notifications that pop-up regarding their privacy policy and then their premium service. Their entire schtick is designed to distract you and keep you on their site for as long as possible, as part of a scheme to monetize as much out of every visitor. For a much better design, check out something like instapaper or it's competitors.
Firefox has a reader mode. I use that for websites with terrible designs that are ostensibly made with the idea I would read them, but seem to have a completely different goal the poor writers on the other end are not clued in on.
Add-ons designed to "fix" a specific website are to be considered harmful. If a website can't respect its readership, an add-on isn't going to fix their attitude. To be clear this isn't a choice of otherwise equal trade-offs and which you make are a matter of taste. The types of sites described within the original article, the type of page I described upon loading Medium for the first time in probably a couple of months, and the behaviors described in the comments from the people that replied to my post are blatantly disrespectful to their readers.
Almost half the view space is Medium surrounding the article with whatever intentions they want to push on readers.
I publish all of my posts directly on my site (static site with Jekyll) but I used to republish most of them on Medium, but as of a few months ago I pulled all of them off Medium. Medium really doesn't do anything for you unless you use them as their primary platform and YOU drive traffic to the articles, in which case, you might as well just use your own platform.
Stylus[1] (permanently removing all the fixed elements) and Firefox reader mode are the only things that make Medium bearable. Static site generators are the way to go.
Reader mode is about:reader, which is protected from modifications by extensions. (This annoys me, because I’d like an actual black on white theme in reader mode, and I can’t do that without, if I recall correctly, userContent.css modifications, which you can’t do on mobile.)
Yep. I used to have a Samsung SG2 with AMOLED and I hated grayish backgrounds in dark rooms at night: they emit light and hurt eyes when a pure black one doesn't emit any. Luckily my ebook reader of choice (Cool Reader) let me set the colors for day and night modes.
I think their fixed header is way too big, even on my monitor.
> Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.
Medium has not made that obsolete at all, and you sound like a shill. Encouraging people to host their own websites leads to a more free future. Search, networking and analytics can be done on top of that layer. Strong network coherence is why social networks currently exist as centralized services, but it's a bandaid that patches an unsolved problem.
Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!
Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.