Ask HN: Why are people publishing FAQs/articles on Medium instead of Gist? I've noticed a trend in technical material being authored on Medium behind a registration wall. Are people really generating enough revenue to warrant publishing tech articles on Medium to offset the greater good of making the material broadly available? Gist offers public visibility and commenting without the requisite barrier to entry. Thoughts? |
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.
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.
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.
Gist is not very good for publishing articles in my eyes
WRT the first one "Yes, you own the rights to the content you create and post on dev.to and you have the full authority to post, edit, and remove your content as you see fit." which on the surface seems a lot better than many crowd contributer situations.
WRT the second one I still don't know and if there's a wikipedia page for dev.to I can't find it.
On the whole dev.to seems better than medium, for now at least, and more approachable than using gists.
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've used Jekyll before on github.io, but am looking for an even lighter-weight solution (if possible).
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.
P.S. My biggest peeve with Gist is the missing dark mode :(. Otherwise, I find that the ability to use Markdown and embedded images in my gist's actually covers most of my documenting/blogging use case. Obsidian will hopefully address the dark mode issue.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
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).
To me, this engagement model is parasitic and suggests that their valuation/monetization strategy is "eyeballs". Not sure this necessarily helps writers but it certainly helps Medium to drive sign-ups with free content.
Gists do not require an account/login for readers AFAIK.
Anyone interested in getting this built?
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.
USAGE gh gist <command> [flags]
CORE COMMANDS create: Create a new gist delete: Delete a gist edit: Edit one of your gists list: List your gists view: View a gist