Why are people publishing FAQs/articles on Medium instead of Gist?

I absolutely detest finding Medium articles in search results. Often they contain good knowledge which confuses me even more.

For anyone unaware - it seems a lot of people must be, otherwise I don't understand why anyone would choose to publish there - this is the flow for most users trying to read your articles:

- See a Google search result that goes to Medium

- Click the link and start reading

- Read the first two paragraphs, then see a popup saying you need to login to continue reading for free (the rest of the page isn't rendered, so you can't just block it with adblock)

- Reluctantly decide to login, waiting a few minutes for the email link to click on to do so

- Log in, then have to navigate your history back to the article, as they take you to a different page

- Start reading again, and after the first two paragraphs get a popup saying you need to pay $5/mo to see the rest of the article

- Rage quit your job and go live in the forest

I understand there are ways around the paywall, but that's not what most users are going to do.

Personally, I dislike how Gists are so isolated. I just created a public test Gist and can’t seem to find a way to navigate to it when I view my GitHub profile from a private browser session. From my Gists profile there is a “View GitHub Profile” button, but I do not see a button to do the reverse.

I think adding a “Gists” tab to GitHub profiles would be a nice way to increase accessibility and exposure.

Additionally, I think that edits to a Gist should count as contributions. The current arrangement disincentives those who are concerned with contribution counts.

Protip: Copy the link of any blog post written ontop of the medium platform and send it to yourself as a dm over twitter.

Unlimited access to articles & acts as a nice repo of the things you read.

This works because twitter owns medium and uses a special link shortener afaik. I'm guessing there is also a 3rd party website that will do this for you.

I post on https://dev.to

Gist is not very good for publishing articles in my eyes

If the goal of a blog is to get people to know you better, not just share knowledge, then gist isn’t a great platform for that. People would rather have a blog with clearer branding and personality, that promises more polish, and an offers to give you many ways to get to know the blogger.

I use gist for informal things I don’t have time to turn into a great blog article yet. Or half constructed notes that can live in a pastebin.

I guess I’m curious why medium is the only alternate you list to gist as opposed to creating your own blog outside of medium?

I was asking a similar question for numerous use cases (e.g. code snippets, book reviews, notes). Gists are so broadly useful, but relatively few developers actually use them. Personally, I found that incorporating gists into my daily workflow just wasn’t very convenient, and so I ended up creating a VS Code extension that allowed me to create, edit, and comment on gists within the editor: https://aka.ms/gistpad.

I’m not sure if ease-of-use is a reason for others to not use gists more frequently, but I’ve definitely become a bit of a gists “advocate”, after appreciating just how useful/flexible it is as a “developer cloud storage” solution.

I like gists and I have used them for years for my (non-medium) blog. I usually break down whatever I am explaining piece by piece and then include a link to a gist with the complete code for the reader.

I agree, a git repo would be a good place. Another option if you are just creating a blog is NeoCities [1]

[1] - https://neocities.org/

Medium allows you to set a canonical tag, so authors can direct SEO juice towards their own websites. Github/gist doesn't have that.

In practice 99% of what you read on Medium is syndicated, they are in the business of trading an audience for content (that in turn will grow their audience).

There is a significant amount of content on Medium that's readable without an account. I think, if the goal is to get eyes on your content, Medium's recommendation of your stuff to other people is a great way to achieve that.

If gists had a UI update to even look like a decent Jekyll like blog it would be used, the UI also could gain a lot by improving on Medium's editor

Anyone interested in getting this built?

If a technical article/blog, and thus assuming one has some technical understanding and cares sufficiently to spend 10 minutes per day maintaining it, why not setup a VPS and brand it under yourself (or company) which I'd imagine is well worth the $5 per month that Linode, DO, or others charge.

You can make a solid chunk of passive income thru medium.

You can open an article for no paywall on Medium, but they purposely make it difficult by requiring you to sign up for their partner program (and provide all your taxpayer / payment information) to do so.

So I think it's a split between people who want to try and generate some revenue, and those that don't want to sign up for that program and are too used to Medium to switch away.

I don't have a Medium account and I don't like running into paywalls but monetization could potentially have very little to do with the motivation to use a publishing platform like Medium over what is essentially an orphaned single public commit.

Gbduhs SD gsjsfduhsffsgsdcddbdffdggdgdggddhddd. CVS be good.