We need an alternative to Medium, and it’s not Wordpress

mrbig
2019-09-17T15:38:28Z

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.

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