HACKER Q&A
📣 deadvoid

Why isn't there a Medium killer yet?


Why isn't there a Medium killer yet?


  👤 keb_ Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure what Medium is anymore, to be honest. I want to say it's a blogging platform, but it feels more like a doom-scroll inducing social media platform to me these days.

There are a few alternatives if you just want to blog:

https://write.as https://bearblog.dev

And more dev-focused, but I think it's quite noisy: https://dev.to

Maybe substack is more of a "killer".


👤 LinuxBender
Do you mean an alternate place to put your blogs/stories? There are plenty. There is Github and Gitlab or if you want something not owned by Microsoft or Gitlab, an alternate could be NeoCities [1]. Neocities is open source so you can even run it yourself if you don't want to use their domains. Venturing into the more manual setup are cheap VPS providers and frameworks for managing blogs. If you are specifically looking for a community, consider setting up a Discord server based on your topics of interest and invite people to it from your blog.

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


👤 andrefuchs
It depends on how you define it. Services like Substack could take a hit on them.

👤 claudiulodro
Medium was originally supposed to be some sort of WordPress killer, wasn't it?

👤 forgotpwd16
Medium is a blog-focused social network, basically a "Twitter with no limit posts", with its real advantage being that it has become trendy, probably due to its initial closed phase, to post there.

👤 Finnucane
Does there need to be? Or do we just need more alternatives?

👤 sethammons
An idea I had was to encourage discoverabily of self hosted posts/articles by integrating a label or tag system in an easy API that would present articles from others, and this could be dynamically added to the footer of your post/article, and likewise, your post will start to show up on other’s footer. Centralized webring kinda.

👤 dmode
Isn’t Substack the Medium killer ?

👤 cm2012
Medium was only special because silicon Valley elite used it at the start, giving it an aura (like clubhouse).

👤 passthejoe
Substack and free-to-paid newsletter services in general, dev.to for tech.

👤 godot
To me, I think it's some combination of substack and dev.to.

A couple of months ago I've started to notice how infrequently I ever read an article hosted on Medium anymore. This is a stark contrast to several years ago when it seemed like every article being shared on social was on Medium. Nowadays, that seems to be dev.to for code-related posts, and substack for others; and just personal blogs for the rest.

(Posts about code moving off of Medium is a welcome change. Medium's paywall and style/format itself don't lend itself well to articles containing code, etc.)


👤 cpach
Netlify? Hugo? AWS Amplify? Wordpress?

👤 is_true
CollectedNotes and similar services.

👤 lacker
There is, it's called Substack.

👤 shivenigma
Hashnode is very close.

👤 prtkgpt
There are plenty of them.

👤 kofejnik
substack ?

👤 cmoscoso
Fecesbook?