Why does anyone still use Medium?

For the future you should say "piqued my interest".

As for Medium, it has a lot of people using it because it was popular, fashionable, and free for a long time. These days as a reader it is terrible - I don't bother clicking medium links, and as an author I'd want to host my own content, not get it mixed in with the other noise hosted nearby.

What I find quite annoying is that Medium has clearly spent a lot of effort on SEO. Whenever I Google a technical topic, the top results always include poorly written Medium articles.

As a writer on Medium I didn’t know it requires sign in for free content. I plan to move my content to a personally hosted blog but haven’t got to it yet. I also get a lot of views (10k+ mon) with no real effort on my part.

https://nomedium.dev/ is a new site, where the author describes what he doesn’t like about Medium including “ When sharing a Medium article, there is a high degree of uncertainty that the person opening the link will be asked to pay money to read the content.”

I learned about it at https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/121849195514918...

I have used Medium and would consider using them in the future.

Basically, Medium is at a sweet spot of pleasant presentation and zero maintenance. I don't write things to make money and don't particularly care that Medium can make money off my "work." I am also not at a place where I want to actively maintain a self-hosted solution (which is totally possible, I just don't want to keep it up).

All the downsides of the service are real, but they're in line with other services that people use (facebook, etc) and I've generally been skeptical that they're worse. That said, they recently started having much more aggressive "log in" popups and I'm once again interested in alternatives.

I found some good articles by real people about real life things that I don’t think I would ever have read in another publication. I paid and bought a subscription to Medium after that. I like the idea of paying writers for their work and if I ever get around to writing myself I would use Medium for the same reason.

For authors the access barrier is pretty high, IMHO. It seems like there are millions of authors and posts fighting for the top home page position. I once wrote a post because I thought Medium is a great platform to reach a lot of readers. It isn't. It took around two weeeks until I got the notice that my post is eventually being ignored because there are to many posts to be reviewed. What I understand. But this also means, Medium is not the platform that gives you millions of impressions in the blink of an eye.

Publishing on Medium on one side takes away the pain of hosting your stuff on your own premises. That's all. But - as far as I understand it - you need to put a lot of effort into writing dozens of posts before you are actually being considered from the "post-review-team". I would rather spend time and effort into SEO to push my self hosted content. Seems easier and more sustainable.

What was the attraction to Medium in the first place? As someone who doesn't write article I wouldn't have noticed if all the Medium articles I'd read had been on Wordpress.

Exposure is one reason. Two of my articles have over 3k views. On medium you can make good content and get a decent amount of views much easier than hosting own blog and growth hacking.

I'm guessing Medium is burning money fast and hasn't found a way to generate revenue which is why they have become so aggressive now. I'm guessing they still have a couple of years before they run out of cash but I doubt they will be able to raise another series of funding.

The subscription thing will not work because 1) there is no guarantee you will get good content from Medium and 2) people want to support content creators not faceless platforms (with questionable practices).

Of course content creators should be able to monetize their content but Medium is certainly not the way to achieve that.

If you have a user, after reading a few posts you are denied from reading if you don't get a subscription.

The Practical Dev (dev.to) has been consistently growing, while adding incredible features and offering everything for free (and open source).

My guess is that dev.to should create a similar amount of traffic as Medium and maybe outgrow it, since many writers/readers have migrated over there.

My advice is to move to dev.to, it doesn't make sense to write on Medium anymore.

Medium does NOT require you to sign in. It asks you to, but you don't have to be signed in to read the posts. You can just close the prompt or click outside of it.

Source: I have never signed up for Medium and. I have been able to read in full any article I click on up until today.

As much as you may dislike it, I don't think you should spread misinformation when you could simply have investigated this first.

Somehow, I do not have that problem. I do not have an account with Google, Facebook, or Medium, but the article is readable for me anyways, if cookies are disabled.

However, they use too big font and too narrow width; this can be avoided by disabling CSS as well.

Because the vast majority of internet readers have no such ludicrous lines they won't cross for arbitrary reasons.

I have always been able to just close the (anoying) Sign In popup and read the article without loging in.

Probably one of the main reasons people use it is because it's convenient and easy to use. Not everyone wants, or has the required skils, to configure/manage/monitor a custom blog.

Medium doesn't actually require you to sign in (for free content, at least). It just asks you to, but you can dismiss the dialog.

That said, I think you're right that people get confused about this more than authors think and close the site without reading the page.

I mostly get there by search results. I don’t specifically go to medium and search it.

I think people don't realize that Medium doesn't require articles to be behind the paywall. There are two ways an article gets paywalled:

1. You opt-in to getting paid for views.

2. If you put your article up for curation AND it gets picked. If it gets picked to be shown in curated feeds, it goes behind the paywall, but if it doesn't get picked by a curator, it's openly accessible.

If you don't select getting paid for views or put it up for curation, it's always openly accessible.

I use Medium because hosting my own blog would be too much of a hassle. I never put my articles behind the paywall; my aim in writing is not to get paid, and I don't put them up for curation because I don't have an explicit goal of increasing my readership.

I'm also a Medium member, because I do think we need ways of paying for content, and paying for good content (the curation part). Maybe Medium's model is not the best way to do that, but I'd rather support a company that's trying to find the right balance than declare that all content should be free.

Almost all Medium articles can still be viewed in incognito Firefox (you get "1 free article" in each new incognito session).

The gradual paywalling of the web continues apace, however. Medium is just the latest in a long trend of content moving onto walled platforms (first social media, then news sites, now blogging)...

Medium provides a lot of value to both readers and writers.

I think people don't like signing up or paying because they're not used to having to do that, so it feels unfair.

But if you look at the trade-off objectively, it's very worth it.

Medium adds much more than $10/month of value to my life, just in terms of the articles I read there. That's perhaps two coffees.

Just another perspective.

I think we often have unreasonably high standards for what we're owed by software companies, that we don't have when those companies make hardware and physical goods.

Press 'esc' and the popup disappears

Why did medium become popular in the first place? What sets it aside from any other blogging platform?

They don't require it. At least I have an "X" Button.

bane voice: "No one cared who I was until I put [it] on the Medium."

It looks nice enough, people read the things I write. When the editors like the things I write they send it to lots of people. For people who don't already have any kind of following, these are big plusses.

Ask HN: why does HN allow moans disguised as questions?

Nothing productive will come of this topic.