We need an alternative to Medium, and it’s not Wordpress
Introduction
I hate medium and I think it should die a slow death. I tried to get some information on the subject to substantiate my belief.
What Medium Does Bad
Medium is slow
On Gmetrix, medium.com has a F PageSpeed Score, with a 11.8MB Total Page Size and a Fully Loaded Time of 12.4s . A random article got a little better, with a D score
Pingdom gives Medium a B score, with a page size of Page size 12.4 MB and Load time 2.15s (much better). This is from San Francisco, USA.
Probably because I’m closer, the results for São Paulo, Brazil, are marginally better. The B score remains, but Load time dropped to 1.68s.
Tildes gotta a C on GTmetrix and an A on Pingdom. On Google, Tildes got a 98 and medium.com got a 48.
What is probably more concerning is that builtwith.com’s lists 106 different technologies at use on a single Medium page, ranging from AngularJS to Subversion, Wordpress Grid (aren’t they competitors?), Microsoft Azure and AliExpress. Tildes list only 13 technologies.
Medium is annoying
I’m sick and tired of opening a random Medium article and being bombarded with an immediate call to action for me to subscribe or to sign into a useless mailing-list. No: I do not pardon the interruption.
It’s 2019: I don't wanna sign-in just to read a free fucking article.
Medium weakens your brand
On Medium, you’re not a content maker. Your a Medium contributor. There’s a great difference. There are little customization options, but you’re encouraged to strengthen the Medium brand instead of your own.
Medium does not support Markdown
In 2019, this is utterly ridiculous. I should be able to write my posts in Emacs, Vim, VS Code, whatever. Markdown is a universal format that simply works and not supporting it natively is unacceptable.
The Default Editor Sucks
It forces you to write in a certain (clunky) way and it doesn't work at all.
Too Much White Space
Medium uses space poorly.
Not FOSS
Wanna host your own? No can do amigo.
Your content is not (really) yours
Wanna export your Medium posts? Should be easy, like a single button, right? NOPE. And it can stop working at any time.
Most Content is Shit
I don’t wanna generalize, there are some good things on Medium. But most Medium articles are bellow 300-words, full of unnecessary subtitles with nothing more than obvious statements I could easily get from Google. Most Medium articles are from developers trying to leverage their status by showing knowledge of trivial technologies.
What Medium Does Right
A Social Network With Content Instead of Content With Social Networking
This is something no amount of Wordpress widgets will ever top. Medium is a social network. It gets views, it gets you “applauses”, it gets you validation. It’s the Instagram of text content. Medium makes you feel good about yourself, and give you the shot (illusion?) of exposure. Maybe you can be in a publication, which is just an assortment of posts within Medium itself! See, you’re growing! You’re reaching a larger audience! They might even read your stuff!
The Alternative
It is obvious that Medium does a lot of things right. It is an actual social network that engages people like no other current blogging tool. People that know better use Medium to their advantage. People use Medium to talk trash about Medium. So we need another Medium. One that is just as social, but that is faster, less annoying, less of walled-garden and respects your content. I’m not in a position to do such a thing yet. But I certainly wish it existed.
Medium is pretty much the epitome of the "too good to be true" dynamic that happens when sites/services are built up using a lot of venture capital without having a feasible business model. When they started out, their focus was "the best reading experience", and they built a site that legitimately was quite good, which is why they got a lot of adoption.
But then over the years it's become obvious that doing that wasn't going to make the site worth billions of dollars to get a return for the investors that have put 132 million dollars into it. So they've had to constantly make the reading experience worse by adding popups and "dickbars" and all sorts of annoying shit all over the site to try to keep pushing up their numbers for user signups and "engagement" and so on. This is a good timeline of a lot of the statements and changes of the site over the years (the format's a bit confusing, but just keep scrolling down, it's very long): The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present
In terms of other options, I know quite a few people seem to like Netlify, which basically lets you just have a repo with your HTML files and it will auto-update and host them for you (for free for small/static sites, I believe). Julia Evans also wrote this post recently with some other simple options: How to put an HTML page on the internet
As a side note, those performance/tech/etc. tools you used at the start generally aren't very useful for making any judgements (not really these specific ones, it's a general problem). They tend to measure the wrong things or are inaccurate. For example, that GTmetrix one seems to be giving Tildes a "C" entirely because I'm not combining images into CSS sprites. That's a performance trick that's been obsolete for years. I was originally doing it on Tildes and specifically stopped because it makes performance worse now that HTTP/2 is widespread.
What about the Google score?
Seems more reasonable, but I don't really know much about what it takes into account.
I couldn't agree more with this, especially on the "I do not pardon the interruption" part.
There are already some libre and federated alternatives such as write.as and plume, both can be self-hosted. More details in this article.
I hope those projects will gain some traction. :)
The problem is that these alternatives lack the social-networking part that is essential to Medium's success and is not inherently bad.
I would like to have a social-networking blogging platform that didn't suck.
Huh? Both of these have social networking. They're built on ActivityPub, which in turn is built for social networking. It says on both of their home pages that they have social networking.
Sorry. My mistake.
It's fine. I just wanted to clarify. Sorry if it came off a bit harsh.
The real alternative is Ghost (https://ghost.org).
It's open source, well-funded by a company that knows how to monetize it ethically, beautiful by default, accessible to non-devs (you don't need to know got) etc.
I was in charge of finding a platform for my company to write blog posts. Initially considered Medium, gave up on that very quickly when it became apparent that it's no longer possible to use your own domain names exporting sucked (big lock in), and of course all the Medium bullshit that goes with it.
Landed on Ghost. It's extremely good.
And here's a pretty good page on the Ghost site that compares it to Medium: https://ghost.org/vs/medium/
Good blogging platform. Not a social network.
It doesn't need to be. I understand your position that it does, but I believe all your other requirements are figuring a losing battle if you want the app to sidetrack itself in social networking.
Because OF COURSE given the incentives you end up with medium's shitty popups, antifeatures, etc.
That doesn't mean the discoverability aspect of blogging is all fine and dandy. But if you think about it, why does the blogging platform need to have a role in it? Google News is a good example of a platform-neutral discoverability tool for written content.
I don't believe the needs in your post can or should be answered by a single platform.
Of course no website needs to be a social network. But it would need to achieve Medium’s ubiquity.
Hi. I'm a writer that uses Medium.
I do so because it's a pretty simple to use platform that lets me write my fiction and link it easily to friends. Sometimes, random strangers happen upon it, and that's cool.
If there were something better and/or easier than Medium, I'd probably use it. I use Medium because... well, it's what I've got.
Well, I'm eventually forced into reading Medium articles. It's a terrible experience from my end. Glad it's working for you. I'd suggest Wordpress, though.
I went looking for a free option, and Medium was there.
wordpress.com is free.
At its most basic, yes.
Here you say...
And then you say...
Which is it?
We're not logic gates, so both or none or any. It is okay to suggest WP for Thrabalen's case, it might do it for them, at least in @mrbig's opinion, but they may still hold that it's not a good enough replacement.
Seemed good for the commenters case, but the overall point remains.
There are Svbtle and PostHaven which tick some of the boxes.
The only advantage to Medium that I have is that it's allowed me to happen upon random articles about topics that interest me that I wouldn't normally find if everyone hosted things on their own websites/blogs.
This is kind of what I used tumblr for in the early days. The demographic was neither porn nor teenage fandom when it first launched in 2007-8. There’s no limit to length, so you can actually post an essay there if you want. Which people did. Probably some still do, it’s just less visible. The demo was very much tech people/digital artists. Also, I miss oldschool tumblelogs (collections of links and quotes with minimal commentary, which used to be my primary means of finding interesting articles).
Then they did everything in their power to become a walled garden, and the demographic changed, and all the people I used to follow moved on, and now... It’s transformed into something very different.
I honestly prefer the older style of blogosphere, where not everything has to be part of a social network. Each site was unique. There were no unwelcome intrusions from the Network. Discoverability consisted of a number of people running link blogs, and to some extent, reddit. I prefer finding a few people whose tastes align with mine, who provide a stream of links curated by a human to trusting the Algorithm.
This is the original inspiration for tumblr. The term tumblelog was coined to describe it, and tumblelog is where the name tumblr comes from. This sort of blog barely exists anymore, or at least the ones I used to read all stopped updating regularly. Maybe the spirit of the tumblelog/microblog moved to twitter? But twitter’s another social network.
The OSR (Old School Renaissance/Revival) tabletop RPG community still uses an old school blogosphere approach in conjunction with social medias like Reddit and MeWe (formerly Google+) which I like. A lot of people use Blogger/Blogspot to interact and everybody shares each other's stuff around.
It's definitely less accessible than everything in one place though!
That is certainly the advantage of a social platform such as Medium. I just wish it didn't come with so much crap.
Can you open a bit about why it needs to be a social network? Why is not posting the link to social media enough? You can build the audience there and receive comments and likes and so on.
To be honest there is something that I don't understand about why so many technically inclined people use Medium as their blogging platform.
If you are not going to care that you cannot theme your content, why not just host your own instance of something like Hugo, Ghost, Jekyll, Nuxt, Middleman, etc. Use the default theme and change the logo and its done.
I understand if you are not tech savvy they make it very easy to just write there and use their hyped network to gain attention. But I assume that If you are dissecting a framework or a library or a programming language to explain some intricate or less known functionality you know how to host your own blog.
And SEO is not that hard if you are being honest with your work.
I'm really curious about how much money they contributors get through the partnership program. Because is the only reason I can think of for people to choose them, but since I never used it I don't know how much of a difference can be.
Personally one thing I'm starting to get tired of from sites like Medium is that they seem to develop with a "mobile-only" mentality. Is not only the overused white space, it's also the size of fonts, paragraphs, images, headers, popups, etc. All sizing on desktop seems off, not only spacing.
Discoverability. If you use Medium, or Svbtle, or similar, your content will be discovered w/o much effort. I had a dumb tumblr as a teen, it started to get followers and likes in a month or so. Now my current blog is a static site on GitLab, and if I wanted money and/or recognition, I'd have to do some PR and SEO which is hard to get right.
What's wrong with Wordpress? The new editor is using React I think, and it's free/open source, along with a lot of what Automattic puts out like WooCommerce, SimpleNotes, and so on. I mean, it's not fun to code PHP but at least it works without too much fuss?
Not a social network.
Somewhat recently I started a personal blog and searched for the perfect platform for my use case. Unfortunately, this meant not having the social aspect of Medium in exchange for total control over my content. I decided to go with a flat-file CMS, giving me quick loading times and a database-less website with relative ease.
I tried Pico, Bludit, and a few others, but eventually landed on Kirby. Kirby, so far, is perfect for me. It's easy enough to add plugins through FTP and I can customize every little thing about my blog, and there's a decent sized community already backing it with loads of nice themes and what not. It did cost a bit, with a flat fee just a bit above a hundred dollars; and it's entirely self-hosted, so there are recurring server fees if you choose to host on something like Dreamhost as I did, but it's cheap enough after that initial investment that I'm glad I chose it.
The writing experience is superb; I personally write in Ulysses and import my markdown into Kirby, but it comes with a markdown editor out of the box. The only downside, as I mentioned, is the lack of a social atmosphere to it considering it's a traditional standalone website/blogging platform. I'm tempted to just crosspost my writings to Medium, but that would essentially defeat the purpose of even having my own site for it all. I'm a bit torn. Personally, however, I don't care all that much about my traffic as I don't host ads or write for profit, so if nobody reads my work I don't mind. If they do, nice, but I'm writing for myself. That being said, I'm hoping to find a nice middle-ground solution for this, and I'm glad you brought it up here for others to discuss.