Link tags: medium

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell

Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re about to enter a golden age of personal blogs.

Make it easy for people to find you. Buy a domain name and use it to create your own website, even if it’s very simple at first. Your website is your resume, your business card, your store, your directory, and your personal magazine. It’s the one place online that you completely own and control – your Online Home.

Good advice. Also:

Don’t write on Medium.

Look, I get it. Writing on Medium is an easy way to pick up readers and increases your chances of going viral. But the costs exceed the benefits. Medium is terrible for SEO. You don’t own your content and the platform makes it difficult to turn one-time readers into loyal ones.

The more you can use platforms you own, the better. Rather than writing on Medium, do the work to build a personal blog. That way, you can have a central place to point people to.

Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.

When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.

The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.

Middle Management — Real Life

The introduction to this critique of Keller Easterling’s Medium Design is all about seams:

Imagine the tech utopia of mainstream science fiction. The bustle of self-driving cars, helpful robot assistants, and holograms throughout the sparkling city square immediately marks this world apart from ours, but something else is different, something that can only be described in terms of ambiance. Everything is frictionless here: The streets are filled with commuters, as is the sky, but the vehicles attune their choreography to one another so precisely that there is never any traffic, only an endless smooth procession through space. The people radiate a sense of purpose; they are all on their way somewhere, or else, they have already arrived. There’s an overwhelming amount of activity on display at every corner, but it does not feel chaotic, because there is no visible strife or deprivation. We might appreciate its otherworldly beauty, but we need not question the underlying mechanics of this utopia — everything works because it was designed to work, and in this world, design governs the space we inhabit as surely and exactly as the laws of physics.

Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas – The Hulry

Some good blogging advice.

Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [PDF]

A 2015 paper by Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay with a proposal for digital preservation.

We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades,centuries, or even millennia into the future.

The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland

If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.

The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?

And I think the answer is: We are very close.

Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.

Curating A Design System Newsletter

Some time ago I was going through the backlog of around 90 unread articles on Design Systems. About 80 of those were Medium articles and about 40 of those took me to either their user-hostile “you ready a lot and we like that” pop-up or their money-grabbing “you’ve read lots this month, pay us to read some more.”, it turns out that Medium only likes you reading things when you give money to do so.

Therefore I’ve started to add a little warning notice to each article that’s on Medium.

mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes

Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.

Medium | Stackbit

This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.

You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.

Write on your own website | Brad Frost

Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person. Having a distinct website design helps strengthen that association. Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it. People will remember the publication, but probably not your name.

Signal v Noise exits Medium – Signal v. Noise

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

How Warren Buffett Won His Multi-Million Dollar Long Bet

The story of Long Bets, specifically that one.

Given the nature of the long bet I’ve got running, I’m surprised that the Long Now Foundation are publishing on Medium. Wanna bet how long this particular URL will last?

The power of self-publishing - HankChizlJaw

This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:

What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Scripting News: The Internet is going the wrong way

The Internet is a place for the people, like parks, libraries, museums, historic places. It’s okay if corporations want to exploit the net, like DisneyLand or cruise lines, but not at the expense of the natural features of the net.

Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith - Taking Back The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the talk I gave at Webstock earlier this year all about the indie web:

In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!

How to cross post to Medium

Remy outlines the process he uses for POSSEing to Medium now that they’ve removed their IFTTT integration.

At some point during 2017, Medium decided to pull their IFTTT applets that allows content to be posted into Medium. Which I think is a pretty shitty move since there was no notification that the applet was pulled (I only noticed after Medium just didn’t contain a few of my posts), and it smacks of “Medium should be the original source”…which may be fine for some people, but I’m expecting my own content to outlast the Medium web site.

Barry P*********t on Twitter: “To better understand my web experience, and how I can control my privacy online, I’m undertaking a few little ‘experiments’.

Following in Charlie’s footsteps.

Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin

Medium, Twitter, Facebook and others are edge services for your content … Your platform is the origin.

The Medium - daverupert.com

I have to keep reminding myself that I do have some control. I can build The Medium I want. I can cling to what’s good.