A Practical Introduction to Blockchain with Python - <AUTHOR> http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2018/03/intro-blockchain-bitcoin-python/ <comment><USER2> The article adopts one of my preferred metaphors for the blockchain:

"A blockchain is a distributed database that allows direct transactions between two parties without the need of a central authority."

Which as a developer, I feel like I have a good handle on - but where I continually come up short is figuring out what I'd use such a data store for when building an application?

The article starts off calling blockchain tech "significant and disruptive technologies that came into existence since the inception of the Internet."

I'd love if someone had some examples of practical applications or uses that are being developed or could point me in the right direction.

<comment><USER3> Blockchain have a few characteristics that make them unique:

\- they are database

\- they are distributed

\- everybody has the entire db

\- it's transparent: everyone see the content

\- it's temper proof

\- it has a notion of temporality

\- it has a notion of transactions, and each transaction has a unique id and an history

\- transactions have authors, sources and destinations, with unique identifiers that can't be faked.

Hence it's a transaction based system that is a source of truth that can be audited from end to end by anybody.

So the only applications that are interesting for the blockchain are the ones mapping to this EXACT concept. Otherwise, you don't need a blockchain.

But because of the bubble, people are now using the blockchain for everything, since that gives visibility. I have friends myself that have projects making ICO just for that. And it works. Their product clearly didn't need a coin, but they raised several millions of euros to build their stuff.

Ok, so what kind of project DOES match the blockchain paradigm?

So money, obviously is a contender.

But voting systems as well.

Or a mix of both, such as betting (see the wagger project).

Compliance systems are another use case. E.G: make a public database of all plane inspections or food products origin.

Being decentralized doesn't mean blockchain systems don't have central authorities. The decentralized nature mean the data access (and potentially production) is not on a central system, which has great benefits. But as soon has you need human actions, you need something to tell them in which direction to go.

So you need a central authority for the part dealing with the humans.

E.G: for the voting system, something to register the citizen and produce the polls. For the betting system, something to introduce the bet results into the blockchain. Etc.

One alternative to that we are experimenting with currently as a community is the use masternodes (POS machines holding a lot of coins out of the market for a long period of time to show their commitment). It's basically an oligarchy.

The coin Polis is an example of that: they make proposals of things to finance, and each masternode vote yes or no for the proposal.

They are a lot of masternode coins, now, for various uses. Zencash uses them to distribute the messages of its chat system, wagger to introduce the data from bets into the chain, etc.

But most of the masternodes are just used to increase the ponzi effect (we build and host masternode for our clients as a service so we have a large sample of them on our servers).

<comment><USER4> > Compliance systems are another use case. E.G: make a public database of all > plane inspections or food products origin.

I feel like a broken record when I point out yet again that this is a technical non-solution to a human problem. The same bad actors who would falsify inspection records or food origin information will have no issue simply falsifying it into the blockchain instead of whatever current system is used.

The problem with bad actors faking records has everything to do with the bad actors and nothing whatsoever to do with the mechanism by which the records are recorded. The blockchain solves absolutely nothing in these use cases.

<comment><USER3> Of course. The problem it solves is not preventing bad human behavior, but easier detection by a broader number of actors, and an history of it.

It's basically by-passing a lot of bureaucracy, cut some of the news reporting middle ware and give a central source of truth (or lie) for a given issue. It's not a silver bullet, but it's a damn good improvement.

Technology and social progress goes hand in hand.

<comment><USER4> Right.

Can you give me an exact, explicit, description of exactly how use of blockchain would have prevented (eg) the oft-cited melamine milk poisoning scandal in China?

> It's basically by-passing a lot of bureaucracy

That bureaucracy _caught_ the problem. Physical testing of the product uncovered the bad actor. How on earth would blockchain have helped?

> cut some of the news reporting middle ware

???

> give a central source of truth (or lie) for a given issue

There already is. And obviously the problem is when it's a lie. What value does blockchain bring? What good does it bring if the lie is more visible? And if there's no bad actors then there was no problem anyway.

> It's not a silver bullet, but it's a damn good improvement.

It's not any kind of bullet. I just don't see any improvement. Exactly what has improved and how? Consumers can reassure themselves that every step in the chain says everything is OK, rather than relying on the manufacturer to do that, which they do. And? If the manufacturer did not believe everything to be OK, the product would not even be on the shelf. The consumer will never see anything other than "everything OK!".

> Technology and social progress goes hand in hand.

Hype and money also go hand in hand. I don't think you've refuted my point successfully. As always, I _want_ to be convinced otherwise, but I'm just not hearing anything compelling.

<comment><USER3> > Can you give me an exact, explicit, description of exactly how use of > blockchain would have prevented (eg) the oft-cited melamine milk poisoning > scandal in China?

I can't give you an exact, explicit description on __exactly__ how smiling more could have prevented one specific argument. But I can tell you that globally it will improve your relationships.

The point is that the track records are not only visible, in a standard format and accessible by all, but also with a permanent impossible to alter format.

So the data is more visible, more easily to a vastly greater number of people. And people can't rewrite history afterward.

You don't need to request papers to some kind of administration.

You don't need to scan thousands of papers.

You don't need to fight the PR trying to tell they never said that.

Again, it's not a silver bullet. But if you ever tried to do a citizen investigation, you knew that the process just to get the administrative data is excruciating.

The block chain helps with that, and so help citizen be part of their democratic process.

In turn, globally, this will help diminishing the number of problem than the one you describe. Not a specific instance, but the global number.

> It's basically by-passing a lot of bureaucracy

> That bureaucracy caught the problem.

Not the same bureaucracy. Besides, the chinese bureaucracy probably knew the probleme since day one and just "caught them" because they stopped paying something.

> Physical testing of the product uncovered the bad actor. How on earth would > blockchain have helped?

By giving an easier opportunity to the public to have basic data to compare to the one they get if they choose to investigate.

Democracy is about having the people execicing power, not relying on institution to do everything.

It's like saying "how a knife is going to solve my hunger problem?". Well it won't. But it will make it easier to engage in the process of solving it.

> cut some of the news reporting middle ware

Data journalism is a thing.

> give a central source of truth (or lie) for a given issue

> There already is.

You never tried to investigate obviously. It's a maze of offices that don't talk to each others using incompatible format they make very hard to obtain. And that's just the official, potentially faked record.

You can't bust institutions all the time when they make bad move. But you can make it easier. The block chain can help with that. It makes fact checking easier, because half of what you need, the official story, is in one place, one format, accessible by all.

> What good does it bring if the lie is more visible? And if there's no bad > actors then there was no problem anyway.

Visibility is everything. Try to ask your company to reveal salaries of each employees, including bosses. What do you think will happen ?

> Hype and money also go hand in hand.

That's not mutually exclusive with usefullness.

> I don't think you've refuted my point successfully. As always, I want to be > convinced otherwise, but I'm just not hearing anything compelling.

It's my last attempt. It's ok. Not everybody needs to understand everything.

<comment><USER4> > It's my last attempt. It's ok. Not everybody needs to understand everything.

I asked you direct questions and you have answered none of them. Yes I am aware of what a blockchain is, to the finest detail. There is no need to reiterate its features.

You haven't answered my questions at all. I directly challenged you on how blockchain would have helped in a famous case of "food products origin" \- an example you yourself mentioned. You have utterly failed to answer that, instead holding forth on the value of smiles, PR, silver bullets, irrelevant theories about chinese governance, democracy and its virtuousness, company salaries, how hype is actually good, and my own lacking IQ.

Can you please just answer my damn question, or do the honourable thing and admit you have _no fucking idea_ how blockchain helps foodchain security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please comply with the license of the blockchain implementation in Python. It's MIT, so all you have to do is include the copyright notice ("Copyright (c) 2017 Daniel van Flymen").

You should also tell people under what license you're releasing your changes :)

<comment><USER6> @icebraining Author here. Thanks for the comments. I will add the copyright notice. Changes also will be MIT :)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FYI: At the Awesome Blockchains [1] page I collect articles on building your own blockchains from scratch (incl. Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.) The idea is that a great way to learn and understand blockchains is by building your own blockchains from scratch (zero). Happy blockchaining. [1]: [https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome- blockchains](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains)

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually wrote up a small POC for blockchains in Python myself a few months ago. I went a little bit further in to the idea of transaction verification, as well as reverse traversing existing transactions as a part of that.

[https://github.com/ltavag/blocks](https://github.com/ltavag/blocks)

Always love to see the interest here, I'm excited for the technology to become detached from Crypto speculation!

</comment><comment><USER9> > Any business or organization that relies on a centralized database as a core > competitive advantage can potentially be disrupted by blockchain technology.

That's a pretty big "potentially" since many of those organizations use centralization as a defense against bad actors.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for the write up! BTW, this would make a great Jupyter notebook (with the text, graphics, code).

</comment><comment><USER11> This implementation is similar to the work that has been shared [by Daniel]([https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building- one-117...](https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building- one-117428612f46))

</comment><comment><USER12> Great introduction, thanks! Are you thinking about expanding this at all? If so, how?

</comment><comment><USER13> Great explanation!

<comment><USER14> yes, as someone with minimal knowledge of bitcoin and blockchains, this helped with visualizing the roles of the miner, blockchain, and bitcoin wallet.

As a sidenote, I have been working in C++-land for a while now, and its really cool to see how the examples both contain a simple blockchain implementation along with the views for a Flask web UI in the same file. I wonder if there are web libraries available to do something similar in C++?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> next up - a practical introduction to implementing a relational database from scratch. It's great to learn about the cryptography behind the blockchain etc, but the herd mind is horrible - so many better things to spend one's time on than a 100th implementation of blockchain. Why won't the hype die already?

<comment><USER6> I would love to read a tutorial about implementing a relational database from scratch. Some people like to learn from the building blocks and others prefer to focus on high level applications.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, I think no matter how good your abstractions are, it never hurts to know how they work under the hood.</comment></comment></comment>


Kids use Fortnite as a game but also as a place to hangout - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1071921080485457920 <comment><USER2> its really just minecraft 2.0</comment>


They don't get it - <AUTHOR> http://startupjuncture.com/2013/03/05/they-dont-get-it/

<comment><USER2> Interesting investor/entrepreneur insights, cool to read about the investor's perspective for a change.</comment>


Books referenced the most on gamedev.stackexchange.com - <AUTHOR> https://unlikekinds.com/t/game-dev-book?s=most-mentioned <comment><USER2> Excellent books listed there. Curious about the method of extracting this data.</comment>


Recommended tools to Work with Big Geospatial Data - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-work-with-big-geospatial-data-4ba919a8ffc2 <comment><USER2> From Esri: [https://developers.arcgis.com/python/guide/working-with- big-...](https://developers.arcgis.com/python/guide/working-with-big-data/)</comment>


Valve: Let Fans Fund Games Development - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5318368/valve-let-fans-fund-games-development <comment> matthew-wegner Mount & Blade did this. They allowed players to buy the game while it was still in development. Early versions started off quite cheap, and they raised the price as they did releases (culminating with version 1.0 at the final retail price). Some info here:

<http://www.taleworlds.com/mb_buy_en.html>

Cortex Command is another game doing the same. The message on their website reads:

"Please note that Cortex Command is currently a work in progress and NOT a finished product! The campaign mode and missions are not yet present in the version available right now. However, you may buy a discounted license today, which will unlock the features of all future versions up to and including the final with the full campaign in it!

As we at Data Realms continue to release more complete builds of the game, we will also be reducing the discount gradually until we reach the final version and full price of the product. So the earlier you buy, the better value you get! Although we are very passionate about this project, we cannot guarantee that it will be completed - that's why we offer the discounted price instead of a pre-order deal at full price."

<http://www.datarealms.com/games.php>

Cortex Command is basically a one-man operation. Dan currently sells the game at $18, with _identical bits_ at $38 labeled as a "support data realms" version. He is very clear that the versions are the same; only the price is different. A nontrivial amount of people buy the $38 version! Full disclosure: Dan is a good local friend of mine.

<comment><USER2> I've met Dan a few days ago in Sweden, and apparently he is making a decent living off of Cortex Command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What happens if the project falls through/runs out of money? It would be cool if the developers signed some sort of contract requiring them to open source everything in such a case.

<comment><USER4> Game developers many times use third-party IP (for example game engines). In such a case, open sourcing is worthless.

<comment><USER3> That's definitely true in a lot of cases, but many of the more indie-friendly engines (like Source, I believe) are free or cheap for non-commercial use. I think that works well with the fact that this funding model is most likely to work with indie-scale projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could be like a more extreme version of pre-orders: fully-paid pre-orders paid directly to the developers before development begins, with the potential for there to eventually be no product. Who wants to bet on Duke Nukem Forever? Maybe an agreed-upon fraction instead of the full amount. I'd pay $20 now for a chance for DNF to come into existence later so I can pay the other $30 NPV of it or however much (if I thought I would be a PC gamer by then).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure on the legalities etc. but the idea of investing in a particular project with returns sounds great - it could help align the profit motive with making a great game.

An interesting extension would be a similar approach to additional features/content for existing products, although I'm not sure how you judge the returns of this stuff beyond combining it in expansion/content packs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Would be a good model for some television series, too—if budgets could be reasonably estimated and controlled.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea, but in practice this could never work at scale.

A hundred, a thousand, a million stakeholders in a project? They'd have near- zero say in the direction of the project and essentially no recourse if the developer went off the rails.

<comment><USER9> It works for companies, doesn't it? I think you're putting too much stock (no pun intended) in the "democratic" aspect of the idea. I could see it working much better as a way of expressing support and vaguely influencing direction. The stakeholders don't need to make every decision for the design team. That's why there is a design team.

<comment><USER10> I'll probably be blasted for this, but I don't believe using democratic principles in a company is a good idea. You need someone with a view of what needs to be done and then you distribute out the work.

<comment><USER11> I downvoted, but for the "I'll probably be blasted for this" - don't presuppose reaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the entire business model of indie games in many cases.

<comment><USER8> The key difference is that people support indie developers by buying a completed product; they don't have economic interest in an ongoing development.

So there aren't any thorny legal and economic questions.

<comment><USER12> True that is the case with many, but in some cases online games like <http://www.minecraft.net/> are solely supported by the fans, users of the game as it is being built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has already been done.

<http://www.kickstarter.com/>

What is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a new way to fund ideas and endeavors.

Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits ("rewards") to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5, exclusive daily video updates for anyone who pledges more than $1. It's up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers and there's lots of cool ways to do it.

I don't know if it's been used to fund a video game yet, though.</comment>


Where Does Body Fat Go When You Lose It? - <AUTHOR> https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/tip-where-does-body-fat-go-when-you-lose-it <comment><USER2> The only reason I knew the answer to this is because a few months ago, the gym I work out at posted it as one of those interesting health facts most people don't know. Looks like they were right.

I'd only ever heard the "burnt as energy" explanation before then. But once you understand protein synthesis, it doesn't add up nearly as easily as that.

</comment><comment><USER3> It gets 'deconstructed', the body keeps any bits that are useful (minerals, various wanted compounds, etc), any rubbish (excess usable/unusable compounds, excess minerals) gets disposed of, the rest gets burned for energy and finally gets to release CO2 and water vapor into the atmosphere.

Think of a building being demolished. A lot of the material can be reused, a lot of it thrown away, and some of it sold to recoup some costs.</comment>


Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx <comment><USER3> _The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas._

Of these, I'm sorry to see the demise of sparse files. This was, IMHO, the single most under-utilized feature of NTFS, and I was able to integrate support for sparse files into a number of clients' applications (I'm a low- level consultant and developer) to great effect. While the increasing size of volumes along with the sub-par utilization of this feature makes it an obvious victim when creating a new filesystem and looking for features to drop, sparse files can be amazing for other reasons.

One of the advantages of sparse files is that they can be used to naively support certain seek-related behaviors. If you create the file right, you can save yourself a lot of code and complexity in any applications consuming that data.

The biggest advantage of sparse files though is speed. For instance, you can create a container file of X size filled with zero bytes, and only use as much space as the end application requests (for example, creating a virtual disk of 2TB that only takes up 100MB on disk).

I, for one, am sad to see this feature go. For anyone interested in this amazing feature, have a read here: <http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/sparse-files.phtml>

<comment><USER4> I agree that it's a strange set of choices. Eliminating quotas and compression might be OK for something positioned as a basic filesystem, but for something billed as a "next generation" filesystem it seems odd. Eliminating extended attributes is an even bigger step backward, because they're such a useful building block for other OS features (e.g. look at their use to in Linux to support ACLs and security labels).

Failing to support sparse files, though . . . man, that's just insane. That would relegate ReFS to the status of a toy in most filesystem developers' minds, even before you consider their increasing usefulness when storing virtual-machine disk images in a shared filesystem to support migration, etc. It's hard to imagine that none of the many people who must be involved in this at MS raised the red flag. What seems more likely, from what I know of MS culture, is that some people did raise it but then some idiot dictator with a reputation built on some long-irrelevant project ignored or dismissed their objections.

<comment><USER5> If ReFS is really in the Server version of 8, and if it really doesn't support sparse files, consider the implication of built-in deduplication. It does sparse files at a layer above the filesystem, along with dedupe and compression. Or, as mappu points out, ReFS could assume it's running on VHD/CSV, punting those features to a lower level.

Perhaps Microsoft is making a decision to focus the filesystem on being a simple storage engine and moving features into other modules (primarily) above or even below it?

<comment><USER4> Dedup isn't _quite_ the same as sparse files. If the filesystem is unaware of dedup, then it still has to allocate its own structures corresponding to the dedup'ed space, seeking to the next hole or next allocated block won't work (not that many applications are smart about holes or that MS didn't already suck in that area), etc. Dedup - even in its most absolutely simple form of just detecting zero blocks - does at least avoid the fatal problem of allocating actual disk space uselessly, but sparse files are still basically a filesystem problem and need to be treated as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some loose remarks:

\- named streams are out => it becomes unlikely that we will see these become popular on any OS (because being incompatible with the market leader is problematic; see Mac OS X, .DS_Store). I find that a pity.

\- I guess quotas are out because there will be something else replacing it?

\- Can anyone explain why a modern filesystem should have a limitation on path length? For APIs I can understand it because the standard C library thinks paths are fixed-length, but for file systems? I would think this complicates the implementation, as every directory would need to know the length of the deepest path below it (in case one attempts to rename it). Aggregating that info upwards whenever a file is created or renamed (let alone deleted) cannot come for free, can it?

<comment><USER7> Named streams were always problematic especially in a connected heterogeneous computing environment. I'm not sad to see them go.

<comment><USER6> But that is chicken and egg. I would rather see a world where we worked on solving those problems, instead of giving up on them. On the good side, they are dropping support for 8.3 filenames (but it will be interesting to see how they solve the 'copy from this new file system to FAT' problem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> sounds very much like the "current generation" to me, ZFS has done just about everything that article covers for a while, and it supports most of this too:

"The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas."

<comment><USER9> Too bad they can't just use ZFS, but, NIH and all.

<comment><USER10> I think Microsoft's legal department would freak out about having a (even if "slightly") copyleft licensed software in the Windows core.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He closes with: "We believe this significantly advances our state of the art for storage."

I don't think that's true at all. As others have mentioned, it appears they are matching the state of art achieved by ZFS.

<comment><USER12> He says _our_ state of the art. I guess by that he means the state of the art of storage in Windows file systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure I see the difference between a log-structured file system and what they have proposed for their robust disk update strategy, especially when you add integrity streams into the picture. Anyone with more filesystems knowledge than me want to clarify this?

<comment><USER14> Their approach looks a lot like BtrFS: everything in a BTree, append-only, with checksums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems very cool, the only problem seems to be that it isn't bootable. I hope that this might get the Linux folks a bit more serious about modern resilient filesystems.

<comment><USER16> Most or all of what was discussed is supported by ZFS (which you can use via FUSE in linux) and the vast majority is either already available or part of the planned feature set for btrfs, which will probably be the primary FS of linux moving forward.

The 'Linux folks' have been working on this for quite awhile, if it weren't for licensing incompatibilities with ZFS, they'd likely already have it.

<comment><USER3> _The 'Linux folks' have been working on this for quite awhile, if it weren't for licensing incompatibilities with ZFS, they'd likely already have it._

If you'll pardon my saying so, that's because it's _not_ 'the Linux folks' that have been working on it - it's other non-'Linux folk' companies ( _cough_ RIP, Sun _cough_ ) that took it upon themselves to make a better filesystem for their (coincidentally, and nothing to do with Linux) open source operating systems. The closest the 'Linux folks' got was ReiserFS under Hans Reieser, who's work was largely rejected by the mainstream 'Linux folks' working on the kernel... until the months just before his arrest and conviction for the murder of his wife.

ZFS has as much to do with Linux as NTFS has to do with Linux - <USER2> wholly outside of the Linux community by people not in the Linux community nor associated with the Linux community, with implementations available for Linux that are not redistributable with the kernel for patent- or licensing-related reasons.

But, yes, BtrFS (developed by Oracle) is indeed a 'Linux folk' attempt at creating a modern filesystem. And BtrFS does indeed predate ReFS.

<comment><USER17> Note that booting from BtrFS is pretty difficult, if at all possible, putting it on similar footing to ReFS/Protogon.

<comment><USER16> The GRUB update in May 2011 added support for booting both ZFS and btrfs. If your having issue all you need to do is update grub to get proper support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wasn't it supposed to arrive in Vista?

Now, seriously, if I got a dollar for every new Windows filesystem announced for every next version of Windows and canned before launch, I'd be at least five dollars richer. By the time they deliver it, IF they deliver it, BtrFS will be widely used in Windows servers. ZFS already is way more advanced than what they propose.

The only major change I saw was when Microsoft ditched HPFS to go with NTFS.

<comment><USER19> NT was designed to use NTFS from the start. Because NT was originally NT OS/2, it was also supposed to be able to use HPFS, but NTFS was always the primary filesystem.

BTRFS on Windows?

And yes, ZFS is more advanced, at least from what can be deduced from this article.

<comment><USER18> > BTRFS on Windows?

Sorry. Editing accident. Can't correct it anymore. I meant Linux servers, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now finally Windows FS gets some love.

<comment><USER21> Seems like the opposite of love -- they're removing a large swath of features in order to bring some new ones in.

<comment><USER22> Frankly, we don't see feature removal nearly enough these days. A move towards simplicity seems like a win.

<comment><USER21> Simplicity is not so useful in operating systems or filesystems though. There are enough "simple" filesystems out there -- the useful filesystems are the ones that aren't so simple. There's lots of great educational "simple" OSes, but nobody uses them for real work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft DMCA Notice 'Mistakenly' Targets BBC, Techcrunch, Wikipedia... - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/microsofts-bogus-dmca-notices-censor-bbc-cnn-wikipedia-spotify-and-more-121007/

<comment><USER2> Since we're on a "45" snipe hunt, I'll see your

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Britain%27s_Got_Talent>

and raise you

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc237250%28prot.20%2...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc237250%28prot.20%29.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> If the accusations are automated, can't the disputes also be automated?</comment>


Medium is a poor choice for blogging - rlv-dan https://medium.com/@nikitonsky/medium-is-a-poor-choice-for-blogging-bb0048d19133 <comment><AUTHOR> It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute.

It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get _yourself_ in control of your stuff. The _next_ free framework that comes, which promises a clean, non- distracting view, will also (most probably) eventually add advertisements, because, well, corporations need money.

In my humble opinion, just write your Markdown files, and use one of the bajillion Static Sites Generators to create/host them, or fork a framework that already does this such as [1], copy-paste them in, and you're set.

[1] [https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll- now](https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now)

<comment><USER2> > _It 's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of > your stuff._

But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium.

The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...

<comment><USER3> > I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly > on Medium.

I totally get where you're coming from, but I'm not convinced that Medium helps at all. I mean, this article was posted to Medium. Medium didn't put it in front of you. So how is Medium helping?

I used to cross-post everything I wrote to Medium, because I thought it was a good reader acquisition strategy. But posting on Medium doesn't automatically get you readership -- you still have to go find readers and rely on them sharing stuff on traditional sites like HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook. And none of that sharing process requires your content to be on Medium.

For all of the effort I put into formatting articles well, and making sure that I matched popular writing styles, and adapting things, a post I put on Medium will get <20 readers over the course of a week.

In contrast, I had _one_ good post get traction on HN, and on average my self- hosted blog now gets more visitors than that per day. So now I don't even bother cross-posting, because I don't see how Medium helps me get content picked up on other social sites.

<comment><USER4> > and making sure that I matched popular writing styles

Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of _Finnegan 's Wake_), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either.

It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -- together with countless other people, so you get really small crumbs. Go for a smaller cake and you may get actual slices with frosting and all.

<comment><USER5> +1 for the apt cake analogy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm amazed at how many people here say that people should simply use a static site generator instead of wordpress or medium.

Does anyone else understand that probably 99% of Medium traffic (both reader and writer) don't even understand those words and would have no idea even where to begin? Most of them probably had trouble just signing up on Medium and already forgot their passwords.

This is where Medium wins. It looks ok, makes posts look professional, and doesn't give any choices. You don't have to choose a theme, or setup anything. Signup (or even, login with twitter/facebook) and just write. Done.

You can't possibly hope that any writer on Medium is ready or interested in a static site generator.

<comment><USER7> Medium also liberates writers from social stuff. It has claps, comments, etc, but also when you share a Medium article on Twitter or Facebook you have all the meta-tags to make it look good.

Also, no infrastructure headaches either.

<comment><USER8> Medium comments are up there with the worst comment implementation I've ever seen

<comment><USER7> UX wise I agree. But, I think those are better than having comments on your own blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before.

A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages.

You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>

If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups.

Here is a link to my own personal blog: [https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt](https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt)

You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this _absolutely right_. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there".

[1] [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/)

<comment><USER10> He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it.

I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It's responsive and simple. [https://alanhogan.com](https://alanhogan.com)

 _Edit:_ Here's a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms [https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog- platforms](https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms)

<comment> Digit-Al I mostly like your design, a nice clean look, but I have a couple of comments and a suggestion that you are free to ignore completely.

Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without affecting readability.

Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about...

My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not too much.

<comment><USER11> > Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen.

FWIW most professional typographers recommend a column width of 30-40em. Much more than that seriously increases the distance the eye has to travel from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and makes it harder to keep track of where you are.

The max-width of this blog's main column is... 40em.

And now you know why so many sites do this thing you hate.

(An em, if you are not familiar with it, is a typographical measurement equal to "the width of an M in this font".)

<comment> Digit-Al I am familiar with em thanks. I am a software developer and have done some web development in the past.

Far be it from me to argue with professional typographers, but do you hear anyone saying "oh, the line lengths on paperbacks are far too long, I can't scan them"?

Maybe it's just me but I'm a little tired of always having to cater the the very lowest common denominator. That narrow width seems almost ludicrously too narrow to me, it's like a childrens book.

There has been research that suggests that most people don't finish articles, so it seems to me that maybe making columns so narrow is catering to the audience most likely to have such a short attention span that they probably won't finish your article anyway.

Or maybe I'm just a moany old git :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This topic comes up fairly often. I think about it a lot - as a Medium user and as a person who has managed multiple wordpress blogs.

##Here's my thoughts on why Medium is so popular:

1\. It's easy. We are all techies here. We often underestimate the weight of this.

2\. It looks better than your average blog theme. (With 0 effort)

3\. It promises the opportunity to access a larger audience. (Even if it does not deliver on that promise)

4\. It provides an endorphin rush though likes/claps and the analytics/view counts.

##What the average blogger doesn't care about:

1\. Effort Overhead. Managing a web server, buying a domain, configuring a wordpress blog, updating wordpress, choosing a theme, deleting spam comments etc.

2\. Content ownership. Most people don't think about it that much.

3\. RSS feeds. I'm willing to bet >80% of bloggers have no idea that people still use RSS (or even what it is at this stage)

\</comment><comment>

I don't think Medium is perfect, but I also don't think any of the alternatives are good enough either.

<comment><USER13> A small note on that very last one: RSS falls in the "you probably don't know about this, so let us tell you that you can reach more people with it" category. Any platform that doesn't offer it, or offers it "tucked away" is doing so intentionally, to keep traffic siloed, and keeping the posts from reaching external audiences. Not knowing what RSS is as a user is completely fine, and really:to be expected. But that's true for all technology: pick any tech you value and the majority of the world won't be familiar with it (case in point: I didn't know hackernews existed until my stuff got posted to it and people started yelling at me about it) so it's not a matter of "do people know about it" but "should there be a reasonable expectation that people are told about it when they start doing a thing that would greatly benefit from it".

Not offering RSS, when you're an online syndication platform, is a pretty clear sign that Medium made Medium to serve Medium first. Not to be the best experiences for readers and writers of blog posts and long reads. Which includes not informing people about things they could have had if Medium was a little less self-serving and actually cared about getting people's voices heard out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then?

I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify)

<comment><USER15> Because it's not just a platform, it's an audience. If you want to reach the audience, you have to use the platform. And the audience most in need of this message are definitely the people publishing on Medium.

<comment><USER12> Are you referring to platform generated content? The thing is, Medium doesn't do very well at that either.

I have a medium blog. I've had a few posts got >10k reads within a month. Almost none of those reads came from Medium itself, but rather from the various outlets that have linked to my post, and Google.

The only reason I currently use Medium is that people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than www.mypersonalblog.me - and it'll never get blacklisted / shadowbanned on reddit.

Oh, and claps. I like the claps.

<comment><USER16> > people are more likely to open a Medium url when it shows up in link > aggregators. People trust the familiar url far more than > www.mypersonalblog.me

I know this is just anecdotal, but I assume anything coming from Medium is usually less worthwhile. First, the author isn't important on a Medium article. Medium is the brand, the other is someone that doesn't matter. Secondly, it's not easy to follow the author, so even if I did read the author bio at the bottom, following the author is a pain. Finally, everything the above article mentioned. Medium articles are all about playing SEO games and "Growth hacking" before good content (literally). I'll ready Medium articles, but personal blogs are far more credible every day of the week in my book.

That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that people are more trusting of medium articles?

<comment><USER12> >That being said, I would be interested in how you reached the conclusion that people are more trusting of medium articles?

Really just from my own experience. I've been writing and posting content for a few years and usually I get more clicks and comments when using the medium domain. (not always but noticeably more often)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad the author mentioned the thing that I dislike most about Medium: the "share" tooltip that appears any time you highlight anything in the article. I realize that they consider this a value prop (and it certainly hasn't hurt their ability to grow) but for those of us who highlight text as we read, it's incredibly annoying.

<comment><USER18> It's very annoying, but thankfully reader mode in every browser gets rid of it and every other annoyance medium has, including popups.

<comment><USER19> Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience. A rather sad truth.

I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic- rea...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/)

<comment><USER20> _a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com_

Safari has this built-in.

Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode.

Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in other browsers, as well.

<comment><USER21> Damn' thanks ! Awesome ! I just discovered it's also working on iOS with a long press on the reader button

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pretty convincing. I didn't notice how bad medium was since I'm always logged in and have an ad-blocker. I also don't think they do much in terms of discovery. My blog [0] has about 370 followers and my posts only get about 10 - 20 views unless I put them on social media. Then they'll get between 100 and 10k+.

Does anyone have experience with an alternative platform? Preferably free and hosted.

[0] [https://medium.com/ml-everything](https://medium.com/ml-everything)

<comment><USER23> There is a freemium service called Write.as [0]. It might not be the exactly same kind of thing as Medium, but, personally, I appreciate its ultra- simplicity. Since I have never went as far as starting my own blog, I occasionally host text content there that I want to share.

[0] www.write.as

<comment><USER24> According to the creator's blog, he intends to complete a whole suite of products that all work together.

As of now, normal people will have difficulty understanding how Read.as, Write.as, Snap.as all work together.

Looking forward to when I can get a full Facebook replacement for like $3/month subscription.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> More and more, I find myself relying on "follow the damn money" to understand how increasingly weird the Internet is and how to unweird it.

If you're a writer and you want your words to get in front of people, those words need to be on a server somewhere. Someone's gotta pay for the electricity and maintainance on that server. If you don't know who pays for that and what their motivation for doing so is, you don't have a clear understanding of how your words get to your audience.

So many web horror stories these days — privacy violations, shady business practices, broken user trust, companies "losing their morals", etc. — stem from the fact that the users deriving value from some product weren't paying for it and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that the people who _are_ paying for it expect something in return, whether freely given or not. Even many startups that begin with their hearts in the right place eventually go wrong once those early "angel" (an ironic term if there ever was one) investors want to recoup their investments, somehow, anyhow.

Fortunately, there is a solution. It's not in wide use yet on the Internet (it is a long-established mechanism in other industries like food and consumer goods), but I have some hope that adoption will grow. I call it, "pay for shit". ("Macropatronage", "c-to-b", or "crypto-free currency network" might be better terms for the HN zeitgeist.) The way it works is like this: If you want some product or service, you give a company some of your own money and then they give you the thing in return.

This system is not without its flaws. Every time you use it, your total wealth goes down by a measurable amount. Companies often end up incentivized to give you the minimum value in return for maximum money. But it least somewhat aligns the interests of the companies you do business with because you are, well, actually doing business with them.

When you buy sausage from the sausage factory, you may not be exactly sure of what you get. But it's still probably better than _being_ the sausage.

<comment><USER26> I agree with you in general.

However, it feels there should be a "fair" amount to pay.

What is the fair amount to pay for blog hosting? Free is too cheap and surely subsidized by something else. $20/month seems like too much for a blog.

The odd thing is that the marginal cost goes down with the popularity of the site.

Something like $5 feels right (svbtle is at $6). I think if you hit scale you might be profitable at $3 or $4.

I am not talking about the value I get, but about the cost + profit threshold for the provider.

<comment><USER27> I think $5/year feels about right for a low-traffic personal blog.

I also think free makes sense, if the business model is to get people using the tool for personal projects, hoping they will recommend it at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think medium has some cool features like the "claps", comment boxes and story analytics. There's a lot of stuff that that just works out of the box

However I really dislike syndicating my blog to it because the formatting is so limited. You cannot do bullet point lists for example, which makes it a huge pain having to tinker with your existing post to reformat it for medium.

Nowadays I just syndicate an introduction to the post and a "click here to continue reading" hyperlink to my actual blog. Which is a rubbish experience for Medium users.

I'm wondering if there's a decentralised version of a blogging network, where users host their blog themselves, with the social features like claps/comments wrapped around it, plus a bit of a 'recommendation' system for other posts in the network to get that network of writers feel.

I know disqus exists but it's not quite the same

<comment><USER29> You actually can do bullet points if you type '*' or '-' and then a space. For some reason, they have a few markdown-like formatting features that aren't shown in the popup editing bar.

Also, about the recommendation system for self-hosted content, I've seen a few sites that link to HN or Reddit for comments. Upvotes can stand in for "claps", and posting on HN or Reddit makes your article discoverable.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, you are right, I misremembered, I think I meant further indentation of bullet point lists is not supported, so only 1 level of indentation is supported.

I think linking to HN/reddit is fine but that means leaving the original site where you were consuming the content. I was more thinking along the lines of the social features would be embedded in your blog, and would act as part of a bigger network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> No site has perfect UX, but some of these complaints don't seem true, e.g.:

> _No, those do not go away as you scroll. They literally (yes, literally) > take up 25% of your vertical space_

On my computer the bars _do_ go away the instant I scroll down (Chrome on a Mac, and logged-in, not sure if those matter), and 25% is a made-up exaggerated number for a window the author has made much shorter than any reasonable person would be browsing with, even on a small laptop.

Yes, Medium strongly nudges you to have an account and be logged-in, and if you do a lot of the other complaints go away. Because it's inherently a _social_ blogging platform, not a _static_ blogging platform. And the social aspect helps spread your audience and build engagement... that doesn't make it a "poor choice". To the contrary, it's a great choice to have.

<comment><USER31> Here's what I get opening the post with a landscape iphone: [https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn](https://imgur.com/a/ywJtaCn) (that's after I dismissed the cookie warning popover)

Neither bar disappears when I scroll down. You can test this with Chrome dev tools and see the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> In any case, it is stupid to give one platform all the power (see YouTube). Internet should be decentralized.

<comment><USER33> There are some benefits to centralization. For example, if I want to watch a movie or TV show, I have to look for it on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, HBO, and my cable box. I wish I could subscribe to a single mega-service that just covered everything.

<comment><USER34> I wonder if it would be possible to create a service (or if one already exist) where you could select which streaming sites you are subscribed to, and the service could search all those sites for the movie you want to watch, then redirect you to that site. Because it's hard to remember or to know which site has which movies/TV shows.

<comment><USER35> Android TV has a unified search if you have multiple apps installed. It works very well - and on my SHIELD, highlights shows from multiple apps on the home screen with proper thumbnails etc.

<comment><USER33> I bought a Sony TV at the start of this year and it has Android TV. The Android TV stuff is slow and will throw out error messages that don't mean anything to me. Stuff lik "Huey module has stopped". Or it complains about a Samba issue. We ended up buying a Roku box and use that instead of the Android stuff.

The only thing we use Android TV for is the MLB app. I'd like to figure out some way to delete everything but that one app because I always have to search for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Disabling JavaScript and cookies for medium.com domain, and a bunch of uBlock rules [1] should do the job

[1] Here's mine:

medium.com##.metabar

medium.com##.js-stickyFooter

medium.com##.js-postAttributionFooterContainer

medium.com##.js-postActionsFooter .buttonSet

medium.com##.button--follow

<comment><USER37> There are also dedicated extensions for this [0]

[0]: [https://makemediumreadable.com](https://makemediumreadable.com)

<comment><USER38> Thank you for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is an on-point rant, but what alternatives are there that combine clean, useful publishing tools with the ability to reach a wide audience? Sure I can host my own blog, but what good is it if I have no reader engagement. If there is a decent replacement, I'm all ears.

<comment><USER40> 1- Host your blog.

2- Write post.

3- Post to multiple aggregators (HN, reddit, etc)

It can even be made (semi)automatic.

<comment><USER41> I have found Reddit to be a very hostile place to post content. You post your blog post. Regardless of how much hard work you put into your content, the first few comments on Reddit are going to be a snarky one that attacks some trivial point and adds nothing to the discussion. I don't know why people do that.

HN, on the other hand, feels like a more matured community. Any other such matured communities where one can feel comfortable about posting their blog posts?

<comment><USER42> Worse, for Reddit: _there is no sustained discussion_. I've been thinking and working a lot on discussion (first law: conversation scales poorly), and what sites do and don't work.

G+, for its many, many, many flaws, _could keep a discussion going_ on those rare instances where it started in the first place. In ways few other sites do.

The fact that all members of a conversation (up to a point) are informed of new posts, helps. That's a two-edged sword: low-value comments, if left standing, merely annoy others, and tend to cause them to mute out of the discussion.

But it's a dynamic few other sites match.

I've also been using Reddit as a blogging platform (not simply syndicating content) for several years. I'd already been in the process of moving that elsewhere when the G+ shutdown announcement hit -- I've been somewhat engaged in that over the past month or so. I do plan to continue syndication, though I moderate _strongly_ for quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Outline.com strips away all the distraction.

Although in this case it duplicates all the images somehow: [https://outline.com/uZc4XF](https://outline.com/uZc4XF)

<comment><USER43> Thanks for posting, I'm going to give outline a test drive. It seems to be doing what I want. The redundant images are less intrusive than the bells and whistles on medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Counterpoint: Medium brings you readers and that's the most valuable feature

I've been running my own company since 2001 and been on Twitter since 2006 and I still don't have a readership that is anywhere near what I can get through the Medium algorithm.

I write to think. But I publish to get that thinking read. There really is no other feature that comes close to mattering more to me than Medium's network effects. I published something the other day that has 269K views with an additional 1k coming every day through the Medium network.

Medium's stats say they were directly responsible for 170k of those views.

Then when I look at the external views, I mostly see that those were driven by Medium as well. For example, 10k views came from Twitter, but those were Medium readers retweeting. I looked at my own promotion: Reddit, HN, newsletter, Twitter and can only count up about 10k views that I was directly responsible for.

</comment><comment><USER45> I stopped using Medium when they removed the ability to see a list of just your articles, mixing your comments into the list (as though every comment you write at the bottom of an article is just as significant as an article you wrote, what a stupid idea though it looks like they've realized that and reverted back). Also I never liked how they don't let you nest bullet points.

Moved to markdown and and self-hosting and haven't looked back since. Much prefer the freedom of owning my own files and not being married to any platform.

However I do miss the convenience of just being able to post online without needing to compile everything on my laptop with a static file generator and pushing to GitHub, so maybe I'll switch to Wordpress or something later if I take writing more seriously.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not sure the issue is Medium being a poor tool compared to other ways of blogging...

The issue I see is one of ownership:

You think you "use" Medium to publish your content, you call that blogging. But Medium own the domain and the tools: you'll never exploit the owner using the tools they offered you. In the end, it's medium that really exploits you (ie. the content you freely gave). And they'll use your content in the way they want.

Your content is just a hook they'll use to attract readers and push them to those obnoxious pop-ups, banners, buttons, etc. Well you read the article.

Personally I own my domain. I use open source tools (ghost & custom made web apps). It serves me well. I own my place and have the freedom to grow it as I'd like.

Thanks for reading, take care :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Bashing medium is cool and all but why not present some alternatives.

I clicked on it actually expecting some random article about "hey check out this cool open-source _built_in_some_hipster_language_ blogging _buzzword_ _buzzword_ platform I've built"..

Joke aside..gimme alternatives fam.

<comment><USER48> open port 443

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Number one web experience trick: If its a article style website (news, blogging, etc), disable javascript.

Since chrome removed javascript from the site model I've been using ublock's javascript button. it looks like this `</>`

Outside of images that don't render the full resolution version on sites like the Times, its a truly objectively better experience.

In fact, I want to see that as an addon, a plugin that disables on javascript on sites based on a list, like adblocks now and days, with the following criteria: does disabling javascript lead to a net increase in UX?. For sites like Medium, almost every news site, etc, the answer is yes.

</comment><comment><USER50> "Hosting" your own blog takes around an hour of setup for wordpress or github pages. Personally, I use vultr + wordpress for my blog[1], but I have technical expertise - it took only 30 minutes to setup and transfer from my previous provider.

Reason I like to host my own, is I control the content, the popups, the UI, etc. If you care about that, host it yourself. Medium is there to make money, we can't fault them for attempting to collect for their service.

[1] [https://austingwalters.com/](https://austingwalters.com/)

<comment><USER51> I hosted my own wordpress blog for several years on various virtual private servers, and was hacked multiple times. Just got to be way too much work to admin the site. I use wordpress.com currently. It's less than ideal, but I think you're underestimating the amount of work required to secure a site long term, rather than simply install one. For most lay users, insuring that their host is keeping python up to date, that the security permissions are correct on each file, and that every plugin installed is 'safe' is more time consuming than it's worth. I'm not up to speed on the state of static site generators, but that's got to be a better way to go for most users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I hate modern web. Every site nowdays filled with bright/flashing/wobbling/jumping buttons, modal windows, pinned bars covering 1/3 of the content (or 2/3 on my phone in landscape mode) and asking me to install Yet Another Special App to view site. But I already have app for viewing sites - damn web browser. Browser can even open different pages in different tabs. Or even different sites in different tabs, unbelievable!

(Will it ever end?)

<comment><USER35> I hate the modern web too. I also hated the web's pseudo-skeumorphic rounded corners and drop shadows phase. Why can't we go back to good old framesets and (mostly) plain text. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I stopped writing on Medium because I don't want claps and statistics and incentives to add stock photos and so on. I don't want my writing gameified. Other than that, it's pretty nice. More here:

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well- Appointed...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/01/04/The-Well-Appointed- Skinner-Box.html)

</comment><comment><USER54> What would it take for another platform to take over? What features would it need, in your opinion? How would it be promoted and monetized?

<comment><USER35> It would be like Medium was when it first started. Such a platform will come along soon if it hasn't already, everyone will jump to it, and then they'll monetize it, and then another will come along...

<comment><USER47> the never-ending cycle

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Nice, everyone is posting their favourite CMS, again.

I use [https://getgrav.org](https://getgrav.org) because I like flat-file CMS.

Maybe there are some photographers here: [http://koken.me](http://koken.me) (CMS for photographers).

Another idea: Use a static page generator and Amazon's S3 with this neat blackhat trick - [https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website- exploited-...](https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-one-website-exploited- amazon-s3-to-outrank-everyone-on-google.1059156/) (mildly joking).

OT: I pay 0.19$/month for my blog hosting including domain with around 500 views/month (just a personal blog). Many services cost 5$/month, I don't think that's cheap.

edit: Medium is for visibility. I know many SEO experts who use it extensively to increase their rankings. Its UX might be annoying for some, but its true value lies in its popularity and outreach.

<comment><USER56> What does flat-like means here? Are they talking about the design (flat) ?

<comment><USER57> It's referring to how posts are stored serverside. CMS software such as Drupal, Wordpress, etc. store posts in a database. A flat-file CMS stores posts in a file, making editing and creating posts easier. Also saves on the hassle of securing an admin dashboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I just use Hugo for my personal blog.

I use medium to post snippets to help attract traffic.

<comment><USER41> I have taken it a step further.

I started with Blogger (blogspot), then Medium, then Jekyll, then Hugo. Even with self hosted Jekyll/Hugo, I never felt comfortable about the tooling dictating how my directory structure should be.

Now I have my own static site generator written in Python. It is based on [https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite](https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite) that was posted to HN sometime back.

What I like about generating my blog with pure Python is that I can control every aspect of my blog just the way I want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Switching to LinkedIn these days is a better value proposition considering that your professional network is right there.

</comment><comment><USER60> Have we forgotten how awesome [https://svbtle.com](https://svbtle.com) is?

<comment><USER61> I said the same thing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I am not into blogging. If I were, I would just you a very lightweight html and css on a tiny VM, precompress it and serve it from the ram disk. No CDN. No CMS. Just good ol' vim. Maybe I would get fancy by having a header and footer that shows up on each page. There would be no limit to how many times people could view it for free.

If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use sftp, so it can't be that difficult.

In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be free to view for everyone.

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

</comment><comment><USER63> Maybe a different paradigm to blogging would be bring your own cloud, put in your cloud creds, then it does the beauty work for you in publishing static stuff to those cloud providers like AWS S3. You just pay a minimal fee to use it ad hoc or something as you would need a way to keep it running. Wouldn't need to store creds, just client-side signing to upload. It then updates its "home page" to list your articles recently for SEO. Have community plugins etc you can use etc. Kind of like a modern wordpress but without the terrible code. I don't have time to do this but thought it might be a good idea to flip it based on what we have now. I guess an issue could be broken links if people flop on their cloud payments but seems pretty light weight to build.

</comment><comment><USER64> On a related note, while scrolling towards the second half of the article, the site started breaking apart in front of me. By the time I reached the comments the whole article had become invisible, seemingly blocked by a pop-up background that wasn't removed by the adblocker.

And this is a trend I'm seeing more often recently. I've encountered multiple sites that start to fail on all sides once you use adblock, and I'm not talking about noscript or others where the site not working is already the default behaviour more often than not.

In fact some websites actually worked better in a purely terminal-based browser than on my current Firefox setup when I tried it a few weeks ago. Something is really going in the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't think anyone should be locked into a specific blogging platform and should own their content 100%.

WordPress has been my blogging platform of choice for years but, I've tried many different platforms and ultimately ended up returning back to a platform (ORG) in which I could have total control over.

I've also built a tool ([https://scribewp.com/](https://scribewp.com/)) which allows me to now write my blog posts in any text editor I prefer and later I can sync a markdown file to a posts or page in WordPress. This has improved my productivity and I own my content 100%. While medium is a great platform, there is too much noise going on when reading a blog post.

<comment><USER32> The problem is not only how much how a blogging platform owns your blog, but also that it owns the viewer's eyeballs. From the moment the viewer reads your blog, the platform has power over the viewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The criticisms here are regarding the end user's reading experience, which are all fair.

However, Medium's unique value propositions typically outweigh these concerns:

1\. For creators wanting to monetize, Medium automagically promotes content that is getting engagement on their platform. Everything from emails to their huge user base and social media promotions can drastically amplify engagement.

2\. For non-technical writers, it offers a great UI for writing and publishing, and tools for engagement and feedback (claps, comments, ....)

Highly technical people, like the founders of basecamp/inventors of ruby on rails, use Medium for these reasons

Until a viable alternative for these 2 emerge, it's just as valid to recommend rsync over dropbox

</comment><comment><USER67> There's a Chrome and Firefox extension called Make Medium Readable Again: [https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA](https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA)

It works great and disables many of these annoying things.

</comment><comment><USER68> _> Sure, Medium editor is nice. Typography is good (for English, other languages are not supported). Publishing is free._

That's it? I'm not sure the author accurately summarized the upside of Medium. I thought the main benefit is distribution.

</comment><comment><USER69> I wrote about why you should not move to medium sometime back citing the example of Basecamp. [https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their- blog-...](https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-to- medium-but-you-probably-shouldn-t-ab36aa88158a)

And basecamp is moving away from Medium.

The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones.

This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach.

Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.

</comment><comment><USER70> Funnily enough, I was able to read this story only by switching FF into reader view. For some reason I was unable to scroll page in normal view. Probably scrolling needs some javascript which was blocked by uMatrix, or something like.

</comment><comment><USER48> Medium only carries mediocre stuff. My heart sinks a little when an enticing title carries that domain. No I don't want another es6/react top 10 stuff. This is the best article medium has posted. Speaks volumes.

</comment><comment><USER71> It's so laggy on Safari OSX Sierra and often hangs. I'm not subscribing to read articles by amateurs. What it has going is nice content, white space, a feed feature – that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER72> I just read every single comment, and not one person mentioned Typepad. Perhaps I'm the only one still using it. I started my blog there in 2004 and have been posting many times/day 7 days/week since: over 30,000 posts, all instantly accessible by anyone in my Archives sidebar. I haven't changed a single thing about the look or format since it began. I know nothing about coding, RSS, etc.; reading the comments, all the techie stuff washed over me like an invisible medium (no pun intended).

</comment><comment><USER73> If the platform itself weren't so awful in many other ways, the blogging tools on LinkedIn are pretty good, and I've always had very good engagement with very little effort.

</comment><comment><USER74> Most of the time when I see a Medium link I refuse to read it. The website is awful. The comment system/discussions are awful. The content is mostly awful. Why should I listen/read from some random on Medium? What is your background? How are you an expert that I should read and take advice from? It seems like a bunch of random people trying to make it blogging again, like in the first Dotcom bubble. Medium feels like Twitter long reads. Maybe it's just me though.

</comment><comment><USER75> I just use Github Gists. I've posted over 500 articles onto Github Gists. It's the best blogging system in the world imo. It is git backed, renders ipynb and other fancy formats, has comments and stars and allows forking. Also I use giscus to notify me of comments. The search system can use some UI help though. But hashtags help.

[https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai](https://gist.github.com/CMCDragonkai)

</comment><comment><USER76> Could be a good time to mention Plume [1], a Medium clone written in Rust that uses the fediverse for displaying blog posts across different instances.

Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles, comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because ActivityPub rocks).

Not ready ret, but quite promising.

[1] [https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume](https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume)

</comment><comment> andrew-dc I have a growing collection of resources under the title: "My Own Platform," and this is exactly why.

As many have mentioned, there are some awesome utilities out there for simple Markdown publishing -> Push to Github pages. Sure, you won't get all the interwoven clicks and promotion, but in my book, I think shooting for a smaller quality group of readers, then a huge mass of people is more where I am at. Milage may vary, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER77> The first thing I see is this: [https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png](https://i.imgur.com/jFJRaoB.png)

Very cringe worthy indeed.

</comment><comment><USER78> Yep -- I was a paid Medium subscriber / user for most of this year. Discontinued last month for many of the reasons already cited. In particular for me, the content creation interface is absolutely horrible [even worse in the iOS version] and it's a chore to get anything done using it. Clearly the guiding UX principles were aesthetic rather than usability-oriented.

</comment><comment><USER79> Just to throw my dead-simple blogging software into the mix: [https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog](https://github.com/blhack/blogeyBlog)

It's written in go. You write text files and put them in a directory. It applies a template and serves them. That's it. Personally I love it, you might too!

</comment><comment><USER80> I tried to port an article from my personal blog to medium once. The experience was abysmal. They don't render Markdown, there is no easy way of adding code sections, etc.

I had never used Medium until then and will probably never use it again but I still gotta ask. Why are we stuck with this awful platform, and why do they still not have markdown/code support?

</comment><comment><USER81> It's accessiblity is pretty bad and it's not tweakable. Why support sites which treat the UI as if everyone can see perfectly?

</comment><comment><USER82> A bookmarklet I adapted from an example I read about NodeIterator in js.

Removes sticky and fixed blocks from the dom. I use it all the time, even on mobile safari.

[https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691...](https://gist.github.com/colincbc/f8d1b8768e1e566d86b6ef4e691ecc5b)

</comment><comment><USER83> I started modestly blogging on Medium in 2016. The same year I moved away from the platform to a Github Pages + Jekyll combo ([https://msadowski.github.io/](https://msadowski.github.io/)). I'd never go back to hosting my content on external platform.

<comment><USER35> You and me both. Now they support custom domains and HTTPS it's an even easier decision. Authoring posts in plain text and then a commit and a push to put it live (just a click of a button in a half decent editor).

According to most of the posts in this thread this is "too complicated" for your average blogger, apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Medium makes reading comments extremely difficult. It must be intentional, i.e. it is a feature not a bug?

</comment><comment><USER85> Honestly I don't bother with Wordpress and the like anymore.

I simply write what I want to publish in org-mode then export it to HTML or PDF and that's it...

My data is no longer tied to anything like a database or some specific framework so its easier for backups and moving it to new servers when needed.

</comment><comment><USER86> > _Another interesting point is that they are really eager to block embeds > that do not respect Do Not Track header but do not respect DNT themselves. > Yes, Medium will collect your profile even if you are not a registered user > and explicitly ask them not to do it._

</comment><comment><USER87> Someone in the comments linked to this Chrome extension: [https://makemediumreadable.com/](https://makemediumreadable.com/)

I tried it, and after turning on all the extension's features, it pretty much solves the problem.

</comment><comment><USER88> Having just posted a programming related article there last night I think it's a poor choice for technical subjects too. We need a Medium for technical people. Maybe not quite Observable (Mike Bostock's thing) but with more tools than Medium.

</comment><comment><USER61> I like(d) Svbtle for both reading and writing. I'm sad it didn't catch on more.

<comment><USER26> It took me so long to find the pricing. I actually cannot find it anywhere on the site and had to give up and do a google search.

There is no reason for that. Why would anyone sign up without knowing the pricing?

<comment><USER61> This is a good point. But that aside, I like that it's a simple platform for reading/writing. Its drawback, I suppose, is content/topic discovery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> This is as good a place as any to ask- what's the easiest way to get a POSSE setup?

</comment><comment><USER90> [http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for- medium-c7c...](http://medium.com/joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for- medium-c7cc156bc5d9)

</comment><comment><USER91> The proper way to think of Medium is as "Long Form Twitter" \- that it's not where you should primarily post your long treatise about XYZ, but that it's a secondary platform for promoting it, interacting with the audience there, etc.

OPs article describes the first landing UX - which is definitely bad, but not what a habitual Medium reader sees.

I wrote this much bigger posts about it here [1], but the TL;DR is that you should post on your own site and use Medium's hidden "Import" tool to bring your content into their platform:

[https://medium.com/p/import](https://medium.com/p/import)

This preserves the SEO of your original article because it adds a rel canonical tag.

1 - [https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your- content...](https://sendcheckit.com/blog/why-you-should-put-your-content-on- medium-and-your-own-domain)

</comment><comment><USER92> What's great about Medium is the exposure it can quickly get you if you get to write something worth it for people to read. It's still powerful for that.

</comment><comment><USER93> I wrote my backend blog code mainly so I could have a step above a static site gen, but allow for future expansion in weird ways if i want to do that.

</comment><comment><USER42> DeFuckifyingMedium.css: [https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi](https://pastebin.com/YdmTFcBi)

</comment><comment><USER94> Do any of you guys know how I can downvote posts or let Medium know that I'm not interested in having articles like x on my feed?

</comment><comment><USER95> Anyone want to start a web ring?

I'd love to self-host, but without some audience from Medium I'd probably just be blogging to myself.

</comment><comment><USER96> Honestly, it used to be pretty good, they did some UI changes and added a paid platform and I haven't used it since.

</comment><comment><USER97> Medium may not be providing Rss, but I'm a big fan of their curated content. Plus it gives your posts more publicity.

</comment><comment><USER98> One of the worst things about Medium is the commenting section. I still have no idea how it works, the UX is terrible.

<comment><USER99> Ditto. Absolutely dreadful. It's like they sort of tacked it on without much thought of how to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Funny, medium suggested this message to me.

</comment><comment><USER101> This cycle has been repeated and will continue to be repeated until the underlying economic models change.

</comment><comment><USER102> I suspect posts on medium get up voted more in hacker news but I don't have data to back this claim.

<comment><USER103> Nope; if anything, the signal-to-noise is much lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> I would like to put forward an alternative called Ghost, I self host my version but its nice and simple.

</comment><comment><USER105> Why is he writing the post on medium instead of a platform that doesn't have the issues mentioned?

<comment><USER106> Because the target audience for the message he is presenting (Medium is bad, use it less) is Medium users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> If we didn't have medium where would all the documentation for js frameworks be published?

</comment><comment><USER108> Pissing off the user creates an opportunity for competitors to kick in.

</comment><comment><USER109> Ha. I was about to write an identical blog post. Must be zeitgeist.

</comment><comment><USER110> try [https://getbuzz.io](https://getbuzz.io), we're in private beta, it is white label and you can put it on your domain.

</comment><comment><USER111> I moved on to [https://dev.to/sergio](https://dev.to/sergio)

1000 times better writing experience, and non of the political fluff that pesters you on Medium.

If you write technical articles, go to Dev.to

</comment><comment><USER112> You realize you are using medium to blog right?

</comment><comment><USER113> PostHaven is $5/month, but it is much better than medium. They add a tiny little chip with the logo and get out of the way.

</comment><comment><USER114> What would be a good alternative ?

<comment><USER115> I don't know if it's a _good_ alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It's a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own domain (critical!)

If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.

Every single one of Medium's discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.

The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn't some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator.

Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I'm never doing that again.

<comment><USER116> I'm curious as to why you say it's 'critical' to have your own domain on Github pages? Is it to do with search engine listings?

<comment><USER115> Joel Spolsky (if you don't know him, he was one of the first "Celebrity Bloggers" in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago: Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your content and the links to your content.

If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I'd be screwed.

But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need:

1\. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and;

2\. Control your domain name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day over traditional advertisers.

Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better.

> it's bad. Bad. Really bad. It's not good, for any meaning of good you can > imagine. There's no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even > partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and > profiling.

Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.

<comment><USER118> For me, "the point of medium" is entirely different. I don't blog regularly... I hardly ever write anything. When I do, medium offers me a large audience. I don't feel pressured to write periodic posts in order to maintain my audience. I just write something when I feel like it. No self-hosting solution can give you that.

<comment><USER117> That's a good point, I think it ties back in as well. Medium does a solid percentage of the work of building an audience for you. They need a way to be compensated for the costs of that as well, hence get more paid users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> over a year ago, the rapid fire, almost daily updates to their android app had given me the suspicions that their operating expenses would be too much to remain humble for long, then came the notifications and social media posts inviting me to come read the paywall articles. I'm not against paying for access with subscription, as I have a few, as well as a healthy list of creators on Patreon but I feel it's kinda like YouTube profiting massively from user generated content. I know they aren't in it for fun, just saying it's been obvious for a while now

</comment><comment><USER120> Story about Medium sucking published on Medium... the irony

</comment><comment><USER121> Why did you post your rant on medium?

</comment><comment><USER41> Most of the popular online services have screwed up their interface.

I think it started with Digg. It was once a loved website. The screwed up the interface and everyone ran to Reddit.

Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.

We all used to love Google for its simple and elegant web interfaces. Look at what a mess GMail is now.

If there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is that once we host our content on another company's service, we are at the mercy of that company. They can take our content and serve it over absolute crap interface providing an absolute crap experience to our readers whenever they want to. They are never going to care about the presentation of the content the way the original author might. So I think it is time to take back control and host your own blogs. I know not everyone wants to buy a domain name, buy a VPS, set things up, and keep a blog running. And no, GitHub Pages, is not a solution. GitHub Pages is great today but if there is anything that more than 10 years of Web 2.0 teaches us, it is ... Do you see my point?

So as technologists, we need to think how we can make it easier so that anyone (from young kids to the suits type) can setup their blogs and publish content with ease. Any interesting solutions? Any takers?

<comment><USER122> > Now Reddit has screwed up their interface too.

At least Reddit has alternatives (for now), e.g. dm.reddit.com ; old.reddit.com

<comment><USER123> For now, indeed. Not sure what I'm going to do when they go away, I dislike the new interface so much that I don't think I'll use the site anymore

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> Why is this post written on medium??? Just to be ironic?

</comment><comment><USER125> Why on earth did he post it on Medium, then?!</comment>


Homemade computer sets pi record - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2011/10/23/141629745/homemade-computer-sets-records-in-the-trillions

<comment><USER2> This <http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-5t/details.html> has got the specs of the computer he used to calculate 5 trillion places.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen The Chudnovsky brothers also used a homemade computer to compute pi, and they held the record for a long time.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_brothers></comment>


Equifax's dox of America: Sign up for "free" monitoring, get billed forever - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2017/09/09/to-unsubscribe-just-die.html <comment><USER2> I don't know of a B2C contract in the world that lives in perpetuity without a termination option. Boo for a clickbaity title.

That being said, shame on Equifax for gathering credit cards and holding them for a year. The atrophy on them during that period will be incredible anyways(change of address, stolen card,expiry etc). Nor should they be trusted with keeping said information safe.</comment>