Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser? - <AUTHOR> Being the Open Internet advocates that they are, you would imagine that most of us are generally big supporters of Firefox. So why then aren't more of us using it as our primary browser?
For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox and every time I try to switch over the absense of this feature lures me back to Chrome as I'm just more effective with it.
Ref: http://www.danielfuterman.com/google-chrome-tab-to-search
What stopping you?
[edit: grammar fixes] <comment><USER4> Frankly: speed. As a web developer it notice it all the time. Chrome (using Canary) is faster in every aspect; Firefox renders slowly, becomes unresponsive over time, hangs often when using web sockets (webpack); the developers tools seem to have problems with large files and so on.

I actually love Firefox' dev tools and I really would like to use it - <USER2> it's not a bad browser at all- but as a developer all the small things add up (same reason why I cannot use Safari as my daily browser).

<comment><USER5> I think the problem with webpack isn't the websockets, but that the devtools have a hard time dealing with large JS files, and especially large JS source maps. Changing the sourcemap option in webpack has helped avoiding hanging for me in the past. It would be nice if that wasn't the case though.

<comment><USER4> We use eval because we have around 60k LOC now and they were just too slow. The hanging occurs if you reload the page, it hangs a few seconds, then a message concerning websockets pops up in the dev tools and then the page reloads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use bookmark keywords to search various sites in Firefox.

For example, a bookmark to search Amazon:

      Name: Amazon Search
      Location: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s
      Keyword: ams

So now if I enter the following in my address bar:

      ams keyboard

I am brought to an Amazon search results page for keyboards.

I don't like the tab-to-search version in Chrome very much by comparison. There is a service called Shortmarks that aims to emulate this behavior in Chrome, but I'm not sure how I feel about using it.

\---

I switched to Chrome about 5 years ago because Firefox was getting slow for me. Recently I am strongly considering switching back. My biggest continual annoyance with Chrome is poor searching of previous visited pages when typing partial URLs into the address bar. The main thing holding me back right now is I am wondering how this will impact me when using a Chromebook.

<comment><USER7> If you use Duck Duck Go search engine you can replace your search query with

!a keyboard

If you need to search Google

!g keyboard

Cannot recall how long I've been using it, but it replaced the need for me to have bookmark searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be that.

Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use Chrome.

<comment><USER9> Time to switch to DDG! It's come a long way in just a few years. It's my daily search engine and I have never looked back in reget.

<comment><USER10> DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my life.

<comment><USER11> > DDG isn't very good at searching

You can use the !g bang to search on google.

> with no visible benefit to my life.

The main advantage I personally see in using DDG is to be able to directly search on sites. For instance:

      * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo
      * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo
      * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

<comment><USER12> All things you can do directly from your browser url bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. I switched to Chrome after I got fed up with firefox's tabs not being sandboxed. I worked at a company that ran an app using silver light. It freezing would often lock up my browser (or at least that's what I thought was happening at the time). I switched to chrome and liked the overall "tighter" experience.

2\. Now its security issues. I'm watching closely however to see how firefox evolves over the next year.

</comment><comment><USER14> This may appear flippant but its insightful in that sometimes the reason is non-technical and not anyone's fault.

In the mega-corporate IT world you have supported locked down apps and best effort apps (and banned apps but thats not relevant to this discussion)

Officially FF is locked down to hell and back and I can't customize it in any way or install ad blockers or web development tools in any way. HOWEVER being locked down the IT support personnel can officially walk users thru using the corporate intranet or the medical insurance site or whatever without any weird "peoplesoft doesn't work, I didn't think it important to mention I installed an adblocker or javascript blocker and fifteen toolbars and ...". Support isn't happening without it being locked down to the point of uselessness.

Meanwhile chrome is on the tolerated but not locked down list and I can install ad blockers and development tools all I want but if it doesn't work then IT support has a written policy to not give a F. They're not actively blocking it, deleting it, or locking it down, but they are not actively supporting it at all. If some obscure IT supported something-as-a-service doesn't work with Chrome, they autoclose the ticket officially. Unofficially they're not total jerks, of course, so they'd fix it, just officially Chrome doesn't exist.

So take a wild guess which one I use at work... I can't imagine using the internet without an adblocker, can't install one, or anything, on FF, so ...

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't like the design of the user interface - at all. If Firefox looked and worked exactly like Chrome, I'd use it in a heartbeat. There's way too much clutter everywhere. At some point I'd like to redo the entire design for them.

</comment><comment><USER16> I keep trying to go back to Fx, and get held up on a few things (partly due to my own laziness):

1) tab-to-search (you mention already) 2) Chrome is "cleaner" out of the box (I'm sure I can have an omnibox in Fx I just haven't tried very hard) 3) I prefer Chrome's developer tools by a _huge_ margin (especially the react/redux ones) 4) easy profile switching in Chrome (I have a dev profile that I use a lot) 5) Chrome better history plugin

</comment><comment><USER17> The flexbox bugs: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flexbox...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flexbox+slow) E.g., "Firefox slow to the point of hanging when rendering nested flexbox layout with overflow-y: scroll", which is trivial to reproduce, and which all other modern browsers handle fine. In fact, anybody who visits our product's site using Firefox is given a warning to use any other browser: [https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/1314](https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/1314)

</comment><comment><USER18> I use it as my main browser, mainly because of Tree Style Tabs, but with the upcoming changes to their extension framework, I understand this won't be possible anymore. (I also understand they have their own experimental version of this feature, however).

I have been drifting away, however, because it seems to get very slow. This is partly because of the number of tabs I keep open (thanks to TST, which makes it easy), but that's not the only culprit. Even after re-starting it, when most tabs are not loaded, it gets slow pretty fast. JS also runs much faster in Chrome, I've discovered.

<comment><USER19> I was a TreeStyleTabs-diehard until I discovered Tabs Outliner [1] for Chrome.

It is a separate window with a tab tree for my entire browser session (= all windows), has a much better keyboard support, supports the unloading of any subtree (makes The Great Suspender obsolete) and you can sync your (sub)tree from an other computer to the current computer's session just via drag and drop.

In the linked screenshot [2] you can see my current session with collapsed subtrees and the grey captioned subtree isn't even loaded. With (shift+)tab I can (un)intend tabs to make them into childs or siblings and with ctrl+up/down I can reorder them. This can be also done with the mouse and compared to TST it actually feels deterministic.

Going back to Firefox with TST would be a downgrade. :(

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl)

[2] [http://imgur.com/a/1HZSi](http://imgur.com/a/1HZSi)

<comment><USER18> Thanks! I tried a Chrome tool that was in a separate window and found it to be very difficult to use (window focus was a big issue). I'll check out Tabs Outliner, for sure!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support.

Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

<comment><USER21> Firefox doesn't support U2F natively yet, but there's an addon: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-add-on/)

Not sure if that will actually help you though, lots of sites are using user agent sniffing to only allow chrome instead of detecting it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Speed.

2\. Lack of interest in macOS. I still remember when I got the first Mac with a Retina Display, shortly after release, and most third-party apps were pixelated and looked like crap. Among browsers, the timeline looked like this:

June 11, 2012: Hardware announced and released; Safari HiDPI support

July 31, 2012: Chrome HiDPI support (50 days after release)

January 8, 2013: Firefox HiDPI support (211 days after release)

Safari obviously had the advantage of prior knowledge, but that doesn't excuse Firefox taking so much longer than Chrome.

Maybe they've improved things since then, but... considering that they still don't support the pinch-to-zoom trackpad gesture, I'm not optimistic.

3\. Security. Firefox has been the only browser to not feature sandboxing for quite a few years. Now that Electrolysis has been revived, this should be fixed eventually.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just installed a fresh FF Developers edition, no addons.

Comparing to Chrome's current beta, with about 15 installed/active addons including uBlock Origin.

Firefox has Gmail + [https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/)

Chrome has Gmail + 2 windows, each with 30+ tabs + [https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/)

Pressing <Space> in Chrome to page down in [https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/) \-- completely smooth pagedown

Same in Firefox -- significant lag, jitter, tearing. Pressing <Space> the second time -- don't even see animation, just see the page offset jump.

I'm on Sierra 10.12.2 (16C67)

This is what's stopping me.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use FF as my primary. There are so many more really nice plugins for Chrome though that FF doesn't have. So, sometimes I just have to use Chrome.

I've installed "Chrome Store Foxified" and it's hit or miss on if a given Chrome Plugin will actually work in FF.

</comment><comment><USER25> 1) It is significantly slower. That's probably because multiprocess ("e10s") is not enabled (and I don't even know why). 2) Stable version still does not support touch scroll on Linux (only Developer version does). Also do not understand why.

<comment><USER26> I use FF as primary. Enabled touch and love it. Debian unstable, FF stable.

Enable e10s

MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox

dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled

<comment><USER25> I still don't know how to enable e10s. That trick works on Developer version, not stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a follow-up question for Chrome users (plus any FF devs who may be browsing HN).

Is Chrome really any safer than Firefox when Firefox is used with the "holy trinity" of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript? I realize that comparing a default Chrome install to Firefox with these three extensions might be perceived as an unfair comparison, but this configuration with FF is my daily driver for a long time now and I would like to know if there are any real benefits to returning to a browser from an ad company.

Privacy and security are both important to me, with privacy slightly more so. If I suffer a security breach, I wipe, restore from backups, and continue. Not so for a privacy breach.

</comment><comment><USER28> > For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly > has never been ported into Firefox

Firefox has a similar feature called 'Quick Searches' (look in Firefox's Bookmarks menu). For example, I have one for Flickr - keyword 'fl', url '[https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all'](https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all').

So if I type 'fl bridges' in the address bar I go to [https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all](https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all)

<comment><USER29> But it still doesn't work as great as in Chrome. Ok. Sometimes even in Chrome it doesn't work perfect, but the ease of use to just search for a youtube video ist great. Also the mobile browser worked better 2 years ago. Now i haven't tested it lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been saying this for a while, and I get downvoted for it (I don't care). Firefox has not been able to keep up with the speed of Chrome. As that joke goes, '6 minutes Abs' business is better than '7 minutes Abs'. I use a relatively old machine and I have specific needs to run multiple profiles. I don't run a whole lot of tabs on any given time, but I have consistently noticed a difference in the speed between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome just runs better and faster than Firefox. There's also a wide spread issue of fonts, look and feel of Firefox. Things just look better on Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER31> Few reasons:

1\. Firefox crashes would take down the entire browser, not just specific tab

2\. I often load a lot of tweets in Twitter.com tab (back 4 hours). This causes Firefox to freeze.

3\. If I refresh the slow tab, I watch memory not being clean and still stay there for several minutes. Chrome clears memory very quickly.

4\. Why is the space around address bar so large? They are like 15 px top and bottom. What a waste.

5\. Postman is only Chrome

6\. Chrome Dev Tools is 10x better

I have no complain about CSS rendering issues or anything like that. It's mainly just performance. Also I tend to use Firefox in the firewall because the Proxy feature works quite well to connect to my internal lab.

<comment><USER32> 1\. Electrolysis has landed, not true anymore.

2\. 3. Yes, memory leaks still exist.

4\. To prevent GUI overlap attacks and fake popups.

5\. I bet there is an equivalent.

6\. Very much no, though they are faster for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It is my primary browser but there are things I dislike about it. The addition of things like pocket and the ads on the new tab page drive me crazy but not crazy enough to switch. The constant removal of features from the preference panes cause me to have to go looking for addons or about:config options. The fact that the URL bar changes when I switch tabs but the search box doesn't makes no sense. I wish wish wish it would allow me to sync everything, including all my addons and all my addons preferences and all my about:config changes.

</comment><comment><USER34> 1\. Tab 2 search - productivity monster 2\. Auto translate - <USER3> monster 3\. FF slow rendering - proven by real tests, not useless benchmarks 4\. Signal app and other apps

but getting these negatives: 1\. super huge memory use and dozens of processes, easy to completely fill memory of a super workstation 2\. every keypress and webpage action recorded by big firm 3\. lack of plugins in mobile version 4\. hated and blocked by companies

</comment><comment><USER35> > For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search"

Firefox has 'Add a keyword for this search', which you set up by right- clicking in a search box.

My keywords are all single letters. 'a sean carroll' does an Amazon search for that author, for example.

I switched to Chrome recently because some websites I use frequently were taking 5 to 10s to open in Firefox, but open in about 2s in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER36> I use FF Nightly as my primary browser at work. Sometimes a site doesn't work and I'll try it in Chrome instead. 40% of the time, the site doesn't work there, either, so I try Internet Explorer. By the time I get this far, 75% of the time, it doesn't work there either and I decide that the website is broken. Note that some sites I always open in MSIE or Chrome due to prior experience.

It is worth noting that aside from a few web-based developers' demos, my browsing on the work PC is notably undemanding: documentation, blogs, email, messaging, etc. Among the actual web applications I interact with, many require MSIE... (Intranet!)

At home, I use FF stable on Linux and nothing works, ever. I don't have enough RAM or CPU power... I also use qupzilla, which performs well enough, but some rendering fails and I don't feel comfortable using it on wild URLs because ... well that's off topic.

</comment><comment><USER37> Speed. It takes twice as long as Chrome to start, and it's noticeably slower when using it to browse web pages.

</comment><comment><USER38> This summer I had huge stability issues with FF, hard to say if it was related with my macOS configuration or if it was FF's fault, but matter of the fact is I couldn't practically use FF anymore, so reluctantly I switched to Chrome for the first time ever as my primary browser. I used ungoogled-chromium for 6 months, call me old-school but I'm pretty unfazed by the so called advantages of Chrome, nothing convinced me of its superiority. So, now with this new version of FF I decided to give it back a shot as my primary browsers to see if things have improved, so far I don't have any of the previous issues but only time will tell as I keep the browser open and I add new tabs. Fingers crossed.

</comment><comment><USER39> I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically, extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of single-process train wreck.

LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI (beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of passwords (which we do), it'll take several seconds to unlock. Basically unusable.

I know these sound like LastPass problems, but the browser needs to sandbox these sketchy things better. I believe that getting from here to there is a really tough ecosystem problem, and while I appreciate Mozilla's philosophy on the open web, Chrome is simply better.

<comment><USER40> There is a lot of work underway in this area. The Webextensions project is the big long-term effort. But regarding e10s, it is true that e10s is an all-or- nothing proposition. However, as of Firefox 51, extensions do not disable e10s unless they are explicitly marked as incompatible with e10s. The rollout was deliberately done slowly in this area to favor stability over getting e10s enabled quickly, I think that was pretty clearly the right decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> out of frustration about speed, I actually look to switch _away_ from Fx about once a year, but I always end up sticking with it because the extension and customization ecosystem just isn't there for any other option.

</comment><comment><USER42> Integration with the rest of Google's services. More specifically: when logged into my Google account Chrome will automatically sync my browser history and bookmarks between devices. Adding a device is as simple as logging into a Google Account. No extra plugins to download and install, it just works. And the browser experience is uniformly good across devices.

In Chrome developer tools I daily use the workspace tools to edit CSS and other files, and see the updates in real-time in-browser.

I honestly don't know if any of these features are available in Firefox. If they are I would try it out and consider switching.

<comment><USER43> I don't know about the developer tools, but Firefox does have a sync service integrated with Firefox, exactly like you describe.

Nothing to install, only requires a login (to a firefox account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> 0\. The Killer Feature: My bookmarks are always synced with my Google account. I've lost many-a-good set of bookmarks because I didn't think to export them. Bookmarks are typically: a few key ones, a lot of old archived links, and a few important new ones. Losing those new ones is rough. Never again.

1\. Chrome Dev Tools >> Firebug

2\. minimal interface, especially vertical pixels, which are a premium on laptop

3\. 1 crashed tab = only 1 crashed tab

4\. tab right-click actions: duplicate, close others, close to the right. I use these all very often.

I'm sure plugins can replicate each of these, but having these out of the box keep me on Chrome

</comment><comment><USER45> Last time I've tried it (like 5versions ago) it was slow on PC, extremly slow on android, chrome extensions were still not present and it wasn't using more processes. When those features and performance improvements come I will consider it but atm chrome serves me well. On android I've whitelisted a few pages so they can run JS and that's it.

Might be more things that may change my decision but these are my blocker issues with it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I use it but it's frustrating that it doesn't support multithreading which is why it's so slow. Fortunately that will be fixed soon though.

</comment><comment><USER47> 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is actually my default search in a Chrome tab. It's super fast to just type 'espn ncaab scores' in a new tab and get exactly what you want without any clicks.

For Google results, I preface with a 'g '.

If Firefox had this feature (it may and I haven't found it) I'd probably switch over. Chrome takes up so much memory on my Mac with its Google Chrome Helpers, it's a pain.

</comment><comment><USER48> 1) speed.

2) politics. I remembered them announcing that they'd block intrusive ads by default, then quietly backtracked after advertiser backlash.

I understand their balancing act but this demonstrated to me that they'll continue to be beholden to those with power and money in the internet world.

Also, there's clearly competing factions inside Mozilla the company and we have no transparency into their inner workings.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's slow, and has very non-native UI on macOS.

<comment><USER50> I agree on the UI, it's a shame really, otherwise I don't find it to be slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> As a web developer, Firefox is the new IE. Random little quirks that never get fixed.

Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164)

<comment><USER11> > Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render > incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it

How is it critical to apply a transform to a select option? I don't see how this comes even close to the absurd IE bugs.

<comment><USER51> The second part is the key. The transform can be ANYWHERE in the select's parent tree and it will still break.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I run Firefox when I can, both because of Reader View, and because I want to click an arrow to show my most frequently viewed sites. I've been using it since it was Firebird, and I think it may even have been called something else before that, so this is a matter of habit.

The reasons I don't use Firefox are because I'm using a Chromebook, an Android device, or an iPad.

</comment><comment><USER53> I prefer Chrome's speed, minimal UI, and truly automatic updates (as in they're applied without ever even prompting me).

</comment><comment><USER54> I use browser sync in a project. The site reloads in a few seconds in multi- process browsers, but takes about 40 seconds in Firefox (and shuts down the browser in the process). E10s hasn't helped much yet, so I don't think I can go back until perf improves. I did love everything else about it, and I still check it out every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER55> I use it, it's just fine. Doesn't feel like there's a lot to choose between it and chrome. I actually struggle to believe that people can easily tell small benchmark level speed differences between browsers reliably in real world use. There's just too many factors and too little repeatability.

</comment><comment><USER56> There is only 1 reason I stopped using Firefox completely. I cannot search with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint). I use search a lot and basically all the search engines on offer are sub-par. I use Chromium and Opera also, and have them all running, but I wont touch Firefox.

<comment><USER57> >I cannot search with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint)

It's certainly possible, it's one of the first tweaks I make on a fresh install. You may have to add a search provider, or change the default, but it's quite easy.

The only thing I can think of is that the bundled FF is old or is a fork that for some reason is not including that ability to do so in your case... I tend to use nightly whenever possible, so I don't remember what the default is or how old it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I use Firefox for everything except DevTools. Mostly because they are slow.

Also I'm not a fan of how objects/arrays are handled in the console. It feels unnatural to click on an object and move my eyes to the right side of the console to drill down into properties.

I love the being able to find any website

</comment><comment><USER59> I find that the syncing of settings within addons is lacking. The sync of firefox's own settings also seems to miss some things (menu layout for example).

I'd also like some kind of profile implementation like Chrome has.

I use firefox as my main browser on my personal laptop, just not on my phone or at work.

</comment><comment><USER60> 1\. UI (More UI overhead than Chrome) 2\. Speed (Noticeably slow than Chrome) 3\. UX (Moving tabs out of the window looks and is bad) 4\. Extensions (Missing some essential stuff I use) 5\. Breaks some Website (One of my regular websites doesn't work correctly in Firefox)

</comment><comment><USER61> I never stopped using Firefox since I started using it the first time (around 2004). It's quite fast and pleasant with NoScript.

Chrome is my primary browser "at work", and I use it at home for video (Youtube, Twitch, etc.), and for any guests I have over.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nothing, in waterfox flavor, it is my default browser since a lot. Sync, extensions, bookmarks and Saved for later, amazing restore session feature. Usually I keep open about 600+ tabs in two Firefox Windows (core I3, win7, 8 GB RAM) and no problem.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can't login to comment here. It may be one the following extensions 'pocket', 'ublock origin' or 'pushbullet'. That said, I do switch back and forth between firefox and edge as default browser, depending on activity.

<comment><USER63> It was a bad cookie I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> While watching a Youtube video on OSX, when I hit the fullscreen button in Firefox the video takes about ten seconds to go fullscreen. It only takes three seconds in Chrome. (And <1s in Safari, but Safari is missing some of the extensions I use.)

</comment><comment><USER65> I like the chrome debugging tools a lot. I do try to use firefox+DDG but everytime I am doing some dev work, I switch to chrome.

Maybe someday I will try and understand the firefox development+debugging system and then, FF will become my primary browser.

</comment><comment><USER66> I use it as a primary browser, but there are a few web apps on which it's so uselessly slow or chews so much CPU (consistently 90-100%) that the only viable option is to run them on another browser. Shame.

</comment><comment><USER67> Auto translate. I live in Japan, but my reading ability isn't that good. So I have to rely a lot on translating by the browser.

I use FF primarily on my smart phone, just chrome when I need to translate.

</comment><comment><USER68> How fast Chromium renders... I click a link and Chromium starts displaying parts of the page and rendering, while FF shows me a blank page until everything is rendered.

</comment><comment><USER69> I do use it as primary browser, for ideological & moral reasons :)

</comment><comment><USER70> Occasionally Firefox has had terrible performance problems on macOS.

<comment><USER71> This, the debugger is so extremely slow compared to chrome that it's unusable for me. It chews through ram, even with all plugins disabled on a clean build.

I've tried multiple times to switch, but the performance problems were just so bad I had to stop.

This was on a 2015 mbp, 10.11.6, 16gb ram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Old slow down with addons.

Current progressive process struct renewal.

# after renewal : retry primary browser planned :)

</comment><comment><USER73> Before I can choose to use it I have to install it and that's significantly less convenient than it is with Chrome.

If I go to Chrome's download page it offers up a 64 bit .deb file. Perfect and I happen to know it keeps it's self up to date.

If I go to Firefox's download page it offers up *.tar.bz2 file. I have no idea if that file is a source package that needs to be built or a binary blob for what architecture?

So, since I'm too lazy to dig deeper Firefox lost out before I even tried it.

</comment><comment><USER74> Security. Or the perception of it being less secure than Chrome. Not sure how correct the perception is.

</comment><comment><USER75> I like the flatter look and feel of Chrome, and appreciate its speed too.

</comment><comment><USER76> Personally, I find it a bit ugly - shallow I know, but the honest truth.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pale Moon is a superior product.

They've frozen the UI before Australis and had a 64 bit build on Windows long before Firefox.

They will continue to keep XUL in the future once Firefox abandons it for WebExtensions.

Tree Style tabs is the ONLY way to browse ;)

</comment><comment><USER77> I use a Chromebook, can't run Firefox easily.

</comment><comment><USER78> Nothing, I use Firefox as my main browser.

</comment><comment><USER79> speed</comment>


Ask HN: Best product landing pages - <AUTHOR>

I'm at the stage of knocking out a landing page for a new product, and I'm looking for inspiration.<p>What are some of the best landing pages out there?  I guess ideally you'll put one suggestion per root comment to group commentary but we all know that'll never work! <comment><USER2> [http://www.quora.com/What-startup-homepages-are-most- simple-...](http://www.quora.com/What-startup-homepages-are-most-simple-clear- and-effective-and-what-makes-them-so)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

Not beautiful in the traditional sense (sorry Patrick), but he's A/B tested it to death and I'm certain that this is a highly effective landing page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like Coursekit's -- <http://www.coursekit.com>

I used it as inspiration for this design at <http://www.greekdex.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> I really like <http://path.com>. It's very simple, but the videos tell you the whole story. The same landing page looks great on the iPad and iPhone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://basecamp.com/>

New landing page for the new Basecamp.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <https://trello.com/></comment>


NowJS Real-time Trials: Build a 2-week hack, win sweet prizes - <AUTHOR> http://nowjs.com/rtt?y=true

<comment><USER2> Why the hell is it so hard for me to determine wtf NowJS does?! All I can tell is it's a framework on top of Node and I can build a chat server in a few lines of code...

EDIT: Ok sheesh, I had to go to nowjs.com's frontpage to see it. The Docs page was less clear, which was the most obvious button to hit from the real time page.

<comment><USER3> Ah thanks for the feedback! We'll work on a better designed website to be more clear.

<comment><USER4> I had the same issue, you might want to consider adding another top level menu item 'about' with a summary of what nowjs is and a quick overview of the how and why.

<comment><USER5> I agree. The website needs an "about" link in the top menu because the home/index page may not always provide that explanation, so I'm not necessarily going to click on the "nowjs" logo to go home. Fortunately, the nowjs home page does explain what it is and "about" can simply point to the index.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> NowJS vs SocketStream? (<https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream>)

This is the closest I found to a comparison: [http://groups.google.com/group/socketstream/browse_thread/th...](http://groups.google.com/group/socketstream/browse_thread/thread/4533180d89e21b40)

Is it current and correct?

</comment><comment><USER7> Counter-offer: I work for you for 2 weeks, you pay me for those 2 weeks, at full market rate. If you're lucky I may award you a prize at the end of it. :P

<comment><USER8> Oh yeah? I have an offer and a prize on the table, when do you want to start?

<comment><USER9> Details or it never happened. :]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks interesting. We just made the decision to start developing our games exclusively with Node, just in the past few days actually. Are there any cool apps out that that you know of using NowJS?

<comment><USER11> Also see:

[http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous- Remote-M...](http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous-Remote- Method-Invocation-for-Node-js-and-the-Browser)

Here's a comparison (tldr: they both have interesting aspects):

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5317282/what-is-the- diffe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5317282/what-is-the-difference- between-dnode-and-nowjs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've always wished that there were more examples on the site on how to use NowJS other than Chat (seriously, 80% of websocket examples are of chat). Do you guys have any plans of adding more examples?

<comment><USER3> Ideally, winners of this contest should be posted as examples. But yeah, there will be more examples in the future. We've got a bunch created already, but the website as a whole needs to be redesigned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading through the examples and docs and I think this looks very interesting.

Anyone here have any experience with it?

<comment><USER13> I'm working on a pet project with nowjs and find it quite useful. What sucks is I started this a few weeks ago so I wouldn't be admissible for the contest. Nowjs basically kinds of adds an abstraction layer on top of socket.io and makes it easier to develop real-time apps.

It's especially useful if you need the concept of room. They have a multi-room chat sample which gives a good start. For example, this would be quite useful if you wanted to build a MMORPG game with different maps/rooms where each user is in a single room at a time.

I'm using it with the concept of rooms and instead of sending chat messages to users connected to a room, and send JSON messages of different types and based on the type of message received by the client, I use backbone.js to update the UI based on what's received. When a user's action affect other users' views, message a dispatched back to the room.

The only problem I see with nowjs is that if you need horizontal scaling, you would need a license for a more scalable version of nowjs that doesn't seem to be ready yet from their website. Since I'm thinking forward for my pet project, I wouldn't want to pay for this. I'm thinking to add a Redis pub sub layer to take care of horizontal scaling but would love to have access to their solution for this!

<comment><USER3> A single server running Now can easily handle 10-15k connections. The scalable solution you mentioned is called NowCluster. It is already in production-use by several companies, but has not been made publicly available.

<comment><USER13> That's good to know. If my app ever needs it, it will be a nice problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm gonna win dat, everybody just should just quit.

Making a MMO with nowjs, cya.

<comment><USER3> Good luck! Tweet or email the NowJS mailing list with your progress over the next two weeks</comment></comment>


Economics is a failing discipline doing great harm – so let's rethink it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/03/economics-global-economy-climate-crisis <comment><USER2> TL;DR - Too sciency, let's include Feminism and inclusion.

<comment><USER3> This is completely untrue and you are being facetious. Virtually nothing in the article includes anything related to what you even posted here. In fact it focuses more on the climate crisis and how mainstream economics might still fail at integrating it (which afaik is mostly true. Climate change is what you might call an "externality" in econspeak)

The article is very general but in fact there's a generalised movement within economics to reform it. There are a huge amount of arguments against macroeconomics but if I were to say one is that it's plainly unscientific. Macroeconomics has essentially no predictive power which means it can barely be considered a science at all, if it should even be considered. The Economist and other big pubs run articles about the same ideas from time to time.

There's even another publication - evonomics - that directly advocated for a different perspective on economics that includes multiple economists as its writers.

<comment><USER4> 'That's why new groups are emerging to promote heterodox economics, which draws on the insights of the study of complexity, neuro and behavioural science, ecology, feminism and the core economy of family, mutualism and community.'

I guess he's saying this is a form of intersectionalism, using it as a pejorative.

<comment><USER3> It's really not. Economics as it is in macro is really flawed. I know so many people who studied it and are now data scientists here in London it's not even funny.

All of them said a version of the same thing - "we studied a bunch of models that had lots of hand wavy assumptions" and they essentially took the maths of the course and made a career out of that instead because they felt like econ was fundamentally broken.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can we all stop using Medium now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/ <comment><USER2> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google. I wrote nearly a dozen really great articles on primarily health and dietary supplement topics. After 2 months they started to rank well and were getting daily readers, as the content was really great. Then I wrote an article on a 'research chemical' and they banned my account overnight. I lost the final edited versions of all content. They did not send me a zip with the content. They could have simply deleted the offending article(s) but instead they deleted all of them.

The thing is, the thing I wrote about isn't illegal. When you write articles on Medium keep in mind you're writing on someone else's website and they don't give a damn about you. You are subject to their opinions about what is appropriate and what isn't. I have no doubt if an alt-right voice wrote on Medium and were controversial enough in their views they'd be deplatformed.

But also the way they handle it is just rude. Fuck them.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if anything has changed since GDPR passed as I am pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content but I'm not sure how that works when accounts are deleted and/or banned.

Regarding your situation and concerns of other comments...

Many people in this thread point out that marketing and creating an audience is difficult work. But I think obvious-in-hindsight solution is to always keep a backup of your own content no matter what platform you publish it on. I'm not sure how Medium interprets their rules exactly but I would be suprised if you couldn't at least link every post back to a mirror on your own blog which would let you both generate an audience and prevents you from loosing everything is medium goes nuclear on you.

As always, back up any content that you care about. Don't just backup your own content but also that of others - ever relize a youtube video you like has been taken down by a bogus DMCA claim?. Online services may have their own redundency but that doesn't matter if they decide to delete (your) content.

<comment><USER4> _> pretty sure you are suppose to be able to download your content_

I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include things you have written about other things.

Even if the GDPRs "right to know what is stored about you" provisions does cover this sort of content, if they have truly deleted the it then they don't have to provide it as they don't have it to provide, and they are not compelled to keep it so that they can provide it on request. I have no idea whether they do truly delete the content in these cases or not, but they might if they've taken it offline due to a generic "inappropriate content" rule: if I deemed something posted to my site inappropriate I would want it properly gone so it couldn't be accidentally made available on my platform again due to some future cock-up on my part. Their ToS and other documentation my offer some clarity on what their policy is here.

As a side note (with somewhat insincere apologies for how snarky I am about to sound): regulations & laws aside, I tend to have little sympathy for people who keep data in an external system with no local (or otherwise independent) backup!

<comment><USER5> > I'm not sure that such content would count, though I'd have to review the > wording of the GDPR to be sure. Its intent is to cover information about you > that companies/people have collected or derived - which may not include > things you have written about other things.

All the actual legal guidance I have seen says it does count, because the content can be cross-references with third parties to identify the author and the fact that they once posted this text on this service. This, if they close their account or delete the specific article the content must be purged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?_

At the moment authors wanted to get paid. When did somebody else's writing became a free for all?

If, as you say, that [Medium] is where "all your favourite content lives" (which means you appreciate the content), then it's troubling that you don't want to pay for it.

> _Just so we are clear. Medium takes your content, rolls it up into a pretty > SEO friendly package for themselves and sells it. Oh, and turns us all into > seals waiting for someone to throw us a fish in the process. If you are > lucky, you might even get a cut. You know. Like the sort of cut artists get > on Spotify. Profit share I think the cool kids call it. So why is everyone > still publishing on it? For what? More eyeballs? More attention? More > reach?_

All of the above. More eyeballs. More reach. More attention. A primed audience looking to read something. And also some authors make decent-ish money (far more than Spotify) on Medium. So there's that.

> _Please. It's 2019. Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being > lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you. OWN YOUR PLATFORM._

Yeah, and how does that work for you? We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN).

<comment><USER7> > We've only read your blog because it was picked by an aggregator (HN)

But then I only read articles on Medium because they're picked up by an aggregator (HN). After I've read the article I rarely find any of the suggested/related articles of any interest. I never head over to Medium to find stuff to read because I find quite a lot of the content is just puff, fluff and bad writing. It's kinda like Quora, mostly uninteresting, annoying to use but has a rare gem now and again that got linked to in a news aggregator.

<comment><USER6> > _But then I only read articles on Medium because they 're picked up by an > aggregator (HN) (...) I never head over to Medium to find stuff to > read(...)_

You don't, but millions do -- and that's people post their stuff there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If you enjoy reading on the web chances are you've been forced to login to > Medium at some point in the last week.

I've never once logged into Medium. I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something, but I just hit Escape and move on with my day. If I had to pick a side, I'd probably say avoid Medium. But I don't know under what circumstances it forces you to log in just to read something.

<comment><USER9> > I see a "Pardon the Interruption" notice every time I want to read something

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

I stopped minding medium (as a reader) since installing that.

<comment> john-radio I'm glad this exists, and very impressed with how front-and-center their source code is, but I decided a while ago that I'm not installing random add- ons unless I have a very high level of trust in their integrity.

<comment><USER10> This looks mostly like CSS hack (even the little bit of JS there seems to mainly query the DOM and apply styles). Such things should IMO be packaged as userstyle files. I think people need to be reminded of the concept of userstyles, and how useful they are to remove the garbage web designers produce.

Stylus is a godsend: [https://github.com/openstyles/stylus](https://github.com/openstyles/stylus). Sad thing is, this used to be a built-in browser feature.

<comment> apk-d As a counterpoint, I find userstyles far less convenient than extensions. In my experience, they are more difficult to install, they work less often and break more easily (because of the "put this thing I hacked together on the internet and forget about it" mindset), don't auto update, are more difficult to find or discover, and the UI for managing/customizing them is horrible.

Sure, there's advantages too, and I like the _idea_ of user styles/scripts, but after wasting some time on trying (and failing) to use them to customize my browsing experience on a few sites, I settled on a Dark Reader + Auto Reader Mode + uBlock combo that makes _all of the internet_ nice and readable with almost no extra hassle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm writing on Medium because its rank well on Google. I have several articles about the product I'm selling that rank 1-5 on Google and it gives me a lot of customers.

It'll take me a lot of time to build my own website and content that gives me the same result. So, there's that.

Sorry, not a native speaker.

<comment><USER12> Your English is great, and it's great that you prioritize shipping over worrying about which blogging platform to use. Shipping is very important.

That being said, I do think a small investment into moving onto your own platform may be worth it, and that might kick in much earlier than you'd think. I use Hugo and a fork of hugo-minimo-theme for my technical and personal writing, and it took maybe three days to set up (granted I have some technical experience). If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO without having to worry about content licensing or platform updates. I think statically generated content is generally friendly to search engines. I don't update my blog infra at all really, and there's very few steps involved if I needed to relearn how to do it. It is possible to use free open source software and have it get out of your way in terms of making money.

<comment><USER13> > If you paid a contractor to spend a week setting up a statically compiled > site with a CMS, you may get competitive SEO

Sorry, but that's just not how it works. The technical part is easy and certainly once piece of the puzzle, but without a certain website age and tons of good backlinks you will never be able to compete with medium.

<comment><USER14> Domain authority has some importance, but my understanding is that backlinks work per page, not per domain. Your newly published Medium article has the same back link profile as a newly published page on an owned blog.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't Medium suggest articles, thus passing links to new pages? You wouldn't get this benefit on your own blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium.

We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.

<comment><USER17> The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.

<comment><USER18> Medium has a built-in audience so the number of people who will see a particular post and share it on Reddit, HackerNews, etc., is higher than if you just host it on Wordpress and do all the marketing yourself.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Have you ever met someone who navigaed to medium.com to fin articles, or is this a matter of faith?

<comment><USER19> If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite aggressive with the spam flags.

<comment><USER20> It's quite easy to disable the daily or weekly digests if you don't want them. Not saying I think medium is perfect, but there are better ways to approach the problem then training a spam filter.

<comment><USER19> If I've tried to turn if off once, and either it hasn't worked or it later reverted, I'm not wasting any more time on it. I can press the spam button without even leaving my mail client. I don't work for these spammers, and I don't owe them anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's quite a lot of mileage in what this guy says, and the "content behind walled garden" thing pisses us all off (I'm a non-Facebooker for All The Usual Reasons and have the same response whenever I see stuff "published" there).

But: noone seems to have mentioned the fact that you can publish on WordPress and use the Medium plugin to copublish to Medium. It deals with the whole canonical content / SEO thing, you get to keep your original content, and you get the potential benefits of a Medium audience / stats / etc.

Best of all worlds.

<comment><USER22> If someone can find your work on medium, why would the bother to find your site and read it there instead?

<comment><USER23> Your content is backed up. In addition to Medium, your own blog can also attract users. Your website is much more customizable. With some luck and work, your website may perform better in google search.

<comment><USER24> That's what archive.is is for(as a reader). if i share an article i usually back it up on archive.is first just in case. your hosted website can go down at any time as well sadly(i see this a lot for ms hosted content)

<comment><USER25> What makes impossible for archive.is to go down? Last time i checked it was developed and funded by a single guy (who even seems to have some sort of agenda against cloudflare for some reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems like not many commenters are giving a perspective on why people might like Medium more than going to a personal blog. Here's mine.

As a reader, I usually don't care who wrote the post I'm reading. I also don't care about seeing more content from the same person, which is all I would get on a personal blog; in fact, I would prefer to see related content but different viewpoints from other people, which is what Medium shows me. I want to read them all in the same format, not hop between different blog layouts. I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, sorry, I just don't care about your personal brand or platform. I want to easily read a lot of stuff by different people on a topic.

Never used it as a writer, but why should individuals have to set up their own SEO, comment system, blog system, etc just to post an article? Because they think that they're so important or controversial that they need a personal space/brand? For most writers I think you get a lot for free with Medium.

<comment><USER27> > I want them all to have consistent like/comment mechanics. As a reader, > sorry, I just don't care about your personal brand or platform.

This is an important point. There is a small mental burden users face every time they see a new website and have to understand how it has been laid out and where things are and what they mean. Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to streamline the process.

Not to mention the sites that have silly disorienting scrolling effects, with things moving around while they slowly load, or are barely even functional on mobile. Although these tend not to be problems for the average blog.

<comment><USER28> > Medium gives users "just the content" in the same familiar layout to > streamline the process.

minus the login prompts, the persistent top and bottom dickbars and the full- screen interstitial blocking the page if you've dared to open more than 5 links in a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know this doesn't justify all the issues but I'm at least a little excited that someone is trying to create a media/news service that isn't ad based. Seems like we have a way to go but at least this is a start.

I'm a little surprised that there are so many complaints here - I bet a lot of the same people complaining also complain about ad based services and now they create news / journalism / articles designed for clicks and not quality content.

<comment><USER30> Ever since we switched our app from ads to ad-free soft paywall with daily limited content, we get a lot of hate and negative reviews on the App Store from our users. Some even said quite directly "bring back the ads".

This is so strange. What this kind of people don't understand is, we all buy products whose prices include advertisement costs. Eventually we pay for everything anyway, there is no charity (unless something is explicitly charity). Let alone cases where ads make us buy things we don't need. And not to mention the rabbit hole behind the seemingly free services like Google Search/Maps.

I don't get all the hate here. Paywalls are at least honest, clear and upfront about how the business makes money. We should support this type of businesses. It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should probably be cautious about it.

<comment><USER31> > It's usually the switch that triggers a lot of hate: businesses should > probably be cautious about it.

I agree. The switch is the noisy period. When you are free, you attract people who are looking for free and would probably never pay for it directly. When you are paid and ad-free from the start, you attract a customer base who understands the value intrinsically and will probably run away if you switch to an ad-based model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Please re-enable the `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;` CSS style for your content. The article is a pain to read on Mobile Safari because bouncy/rubber- band scrolling is disabled.

<comment><USER33> That feature has serious bugs on iOS, and that's probably why it's not the default as Apple can't get it to be stable.

Don't ask him to add it, ask Apple, it's their fault. It's not a production feature.

And since it's Apple, you can't just use another browser as it's all the same crap on iOS.

You're stuck with something worse than the 2019 equivalent of IE6. iOS is a joke when it comes to web browsing.

<comment><USER34> It's probably not the the default because it disables the scrolling behavior used everywhere else on iOS. The "Safari is IE6" meme was briefly valid a couple years ago, but they've done a much better job more recently. (Check out the release notes for the technical previews.)

<comment><USER33> The default isn't touch(which is momentum scrolling), so it's by default NOT like it's most places in iOS.

Technical previews is for Safari on Mac OS, and that browser works quite well. It's safari on iOS that is a huge shitshow.

Its more unstable than ever before and far behind everyone else on features, and it's freakishly unconsistent. Heck, Apple can't make up their mind if they are having a click delay or not, so now they have it only for standalone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Large.com is available for $850k if there's a VC thinking they can disrupt.

<comment><USER36> Would you like fries.com with that? It's for sale too.

<comment><USER37> I'd like a literacola.com please.

<comment><USER38> I don't want alargefarvaIwantagoddamnliteracola.com, but perhaps you might be interested?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There's a deeper thing going on here that should be mentioned because it applies in so many places: the platform is the enemy.

That is, once you create a platform to do X, the purpose of the platform becomes "get people to use the platform to do X", _not_ X. They sound like the same thing but they are not.

An example: Facebook, I guess, is all about sharing things with your friends. But over time it quickly morphed into an engine that was only concerned about how many people would spend their time on their site sharing and consuming things, not about sharing. So people "shared" by posting memes from other places. They shared by copying crap and fake articles. They "shared" by playing dumb and addictive games for hours at a time, asking anybody they could find to help them milk a fake cow or something.

If you cared about sharing, you might think about a wise investment in time, both for the sharer and the folks consuming what was being shared. But if you think about whatever you could pass off as sharing, then you might think about virality, demographics, psychology, and so forth. Worse yet, you'd probably do whatever you could to prevent people from talking about real sharing. After all, that would be a huge hit to your site's metrics. It might even involve an existential crisis.

Likewise Medium cared about blogging and publishing, but only in terms they had predefined and could control. As they started looking at their numbers, they started refining their definitions.

The same thing is happening everywhere, for instance YouTube. YT couldn't care less about average folks making creative content to share, even though that's the schtick. What they really care about is reliable non-offensive video content being regularly produced and consumed by the most numbers of people that they can sell ads to.

I'm not saying that any of these platforms are evil or ran by bad people. My point is that by defining a platform and business model that's widely-adopted, you end up preventing any sort of change, quality improvement, or re-imagining what the important drivers are for that platform. I can change what I consider to be high-quality video to create, share and consume ten times a day. YouTube cannot. Same goes for Medium and text content. The platform, the idea of fixing quality attributes for complex things into code, is the natural enemy of serious consideration and evaluation of the thing the platform supposedly supports.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's halfway through the month and I'm blocked by Medium. It is a bit frustrating.

I'm not sure about this comment though:

"Learn to market yourself and your content. Quit being lazy waiting for Medium to do it for you."

Maybe I am lazy but there really isn't an easy and inexpensive way to market your blogs or apps.

<comment><USER41> > Maybe I am lazy but there really isn't an easy and inexpensive way to market > your blogs or apps.

HN, Reddit, and other social networks?

<comment><USER42> I've had blog posts do well on Medium but sink like a stone on those platforms. It's a very different proposition submitting to medium and having it shown to people who are likely to be interested over a day, vs self- submitting to a site like HN or Reddit and watching it sink like a stone because the few people who are likely to be interested aren't looking at that particular moment.

Not to mention the fact that if you self-submit anything to those sites people tend to take it as an invitation to eviscerate you.

<comment><USER28> Well, for Reddit, I know that tech subreddits really don't like it if you drop a link and don't provide any additional commentary in the post. This is doubly true if the link happens to be "medium.com" because Reddit is already full of downvoted posts submitted by content marketers.

If you aren't a regular poster on the sub that you're placing the link on, why would posters bother opening said link? You have to participate in the community as well, and that includes providing content in the form of Reddit posts as well, because Reddit users don't like clicking outbound links with no context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wrote one article on Medium. I ended up writing my own little version using open source markdown rendering to see how hard it would be to roll my own, [https://jott.live](https://jott.live)

From what I found, there is a lot of stuff Medium does well that is hard to recreate by one's self. Super simple features, like

\- rich text editing that isn't ugly

\- caching what you're currently working on

\- tracking views and who has viewed your article

aren't easy to build and generally aren't worth it unless you write many many articles.

Although I don't like the aggressive account on-boarding and payment models for reading articles, Medium certainly makes life easy for writing articles.

<comment><USER44> They use Quill.js - rich editing (you can use this in your project easily)

Caching/saving work just simple AJAX calls to a localized database or filesystem which can store the JSON data that Quill.JS creates.

Google Analytics is free and offers more customer insight and analysis opportunities and it's as simple as a script tag inclusion in the html.

I plan to show how to replicate this website in a matter of minutes on my YouTube channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> g-d forbid writers find a way to be compensated, eh? I despise medium, it sucks as a platform, it sucks to read, and 99 times out of a hundred if I'm on an aggregator or twitter and I see a medium link to a piece that sounds interesting I skip it, because medium _sucks_. But christ does that post reek of entitlement. On top of that, maybe learn to put words together a bit better if you want people to read your blog over another platform

</comment><comment><USER46> The main argument in this article doesn't apply unless the Medium writer enabled the partner program on the post. That's what enables the pay wall.

<comment><USER47> A huge percentage of the authors behind the paywall don't realize that they are. It seems like Medium might have made this option less clear than it needs to be be (like by describing the benefits but not the drawbacks) or made it on by default.

<comment><USER48> Nah man, I considered turning it on for no reason in particular.

Asked me for bank account routing info.

Wasn't interested about it that much.

Definitely not on by default.

<comment><USER49> The partner program isn't on by default, the paywall is. You do not need to be part of the partner program for the paywall.

Source: [https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360018834314-Stori...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360018834314-Stories-that-are-part-of-the-metered-paywall)

<comment><USER46> What on earth are you talking about? From the link you posted:

> Stories become eligible to be part of the metered paywall if the writer > selects that option in each story's distribution setting. Medium will never > meter a story without the writer's permission.

> During the publish flow, you have the opportunity to check the box to be > eligible for curation review and distribution across Medium. Checking this > box means that your story is also eligible to be part of Medium's metered > paywall, and can earn money if you are in the Medium Partner Program.

<comment><USER50> Your second quote implies that the paywall and the partner program are separate.

<comment><USER46> Partner Program is a prerequisite for having paywalled articles.

[https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360018677974-About...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360018677974-About-Medium-s-distribution-and-earnings-system)

<comment><USER50> I don't see why, that link still implies that you can have paywalled articles without being part of the partner program.

Follow the chart from the top:

> Are you enrolled in the partner program? NO

> Would you like to be eligible for curator review? YES

> Was the story curated? YES

> Story is distributed by Medium, _is part of the paywall_ , and _does not > earn money_.

<comment><USER46> You're right actually: curation is paywalled even without payment. Still, it's not enabled by default: [https://imgur.com/lFY0hzp](https://imgur.com/lFY0hzp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't publish anything ever really so I don't understand the appeal of using Medium. Can anyone explain it to me? Is it just the ease of use? Write some text, click button, it's available online?

<comment><USER46> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done.

Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways.

I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though I've never enabled the pay wall myself.

I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's dependencies.

<comment><USER51> > I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as > good.

What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser?

This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.

<comment><USER46> It's good, still not as good as medium. Especially being able to copy and paste YouTube/gist/etc links in and have them auto-embed.

I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my writing flow.

<comment><USER51> I can't speak for Hugo but with Jekyll, I solved this by writing a few line plugin. It still involves putting in a short custom tag (which I have as an editor snippet) and paste in the video ID.

It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO.

If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed snippets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wish I could upvote this 10 times.

Medium is the pinterest of thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER53> Funny how from "All to Medium, ditch WordPress and personal blogs" now people want to go the way around because of metered views and other limitations imposed by Medium popularity.

I say it since ever: own your own content.

<comment><USER54> But you don't really own your WordPress. No way to get around using their services if you want to have proper spam filtering.

<comment><USER55> Sure you can. There are multiple anti-spam plugins out there, and unless you're running a super large high value target, most spam won't be custom made, so very simple things like hiding the "URL" field with CSS and marking as Spam when something has been entered will get rid of 95% of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Side note. I didn't read this post for two reasons. On mobile, the lack of inertial scrolling makes it like pushing hard against some massive slush, and the lack of a scroll bar prevents me from knowing how long the article is and whether I should read it quickly now or check it later.

A criticism on Medium, including its usability (I presume), should do a lot better if it wants to be read.

<comment><USER57> I am mobile and I have inertial scrolling. I think it is probably because you are using iOS safari.

iOS' inertial scrolling for some reason breaks very often. It happened to my website a couple times, and I had to fix with a bunch of css hacks.

Supporting iOS is just a pain. Sometimes, I would even rather support IE 11 than iOS.

(btw, all iOS browsers are forced to use safari render engine.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> But how will I "clap" for top-shelf webshit content if it's not on Medium?

<comment><USER59> Isn't there a "clap" plugin for Wordpress?

<comment><USER60> Yeah there is. Probably quite a few, though this one came up first:

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-applaud/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp- applaud/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I really hope people do. Medium is awful and getting awfuller as time passes.

</comment><comment><USER62> It's fine to dislike Medium and run your own blog, but I find the article intellectually dishonest in comparing Medium to Facebook. One harvests your data and lets advertisers target you with ads, the other charges a subscription to provide access to content.

It's disingenuous to claim they "sell whatever advertising they please", and link to a ToS screen cap that's completely unrelated.

Companies have to make money in order to pay their developers and pay for servers. Personally, I'd rather pay them instead of seeing ads plastered everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER63> Please KEEP USING medium to keep all those uninspired rants, thought leader posturing, and no substance fluff pieces on subjects that are actually interesting behind a paywall.

Please put more effort into creating better content by exhibiting interest and passion into a subject through deep exploration, insights, discussion of core issues and resolution, and great descriptive writing.

It used to be that everyone who wrote a diary had no expectations of their content being anything valuable, and the value of writing was in the exploration of ideas and organization of your thoughts. Now the value of writing is how many people you reach? Philosophically, I'm against that change, so please keep that stuff behind a paywall.

</comment><comment><USER64> To make a parallelism with traditional paper it's like to say that everyone want to publish an article must become an editor and found a newspaper. That's not realistic. Medium and other platform put a lot on work on promotion, positioning and creating an engagement place for writers and readers. I don't think that every writer must became an editor in digital era. It's like to say that if you are a musician you have to host your clone of spotify and bypass all distribution platforms.

<comment><USER65> Medium doesn't provide editing services, nor do they promote your content. Your content promotes itself by merit of engagement with readers.

<comment><USER64> But Medium promote the platform, attract readers and give visibility to you article. I think is the same think a traditional newspaper do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This should be medium link.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm currently working on an alternative to Medium. So far it has all the elementary things like a working editor, notes and highlights, a decent commenting system. There are publications too, with teams, submissions etc. User profiles and publications have custom domains, custom CSS for branding. There's also a somewhat half-working Github integration for advanced writers but I'll need to work on it a fair bit to polish the edges. At some point, I'd ideally want to open-source the editor/bloggy bit and have people self-host it and perhaps push their content back to the platform for centralized distribution if they want.

It's still a work in progress and I'm trying to figure out some sort of strategy, especially a content policy around not allowing clickbait and spammy "how to use learn redis in 3 minutes" type articles. I'd probably have to cap the max number of users and publication to a few thousand since I don't have the resources for this to be anything more than a hobby project.

I'm aware of a couple of others working in the same space. Write.as comes to mind, thought I don't think they're doing publications etc.

<comment><USER68> As a person who blogs on certain areas in ML, the sole thing I look for in any platform is SEO. I tried going on Medium, but because of the lack of LaTex support, I had to go on my own blog, but I'd really like if there's an alternate to Medium with amazing SEO (as you explained).

<comment><USER67> That's definitely one of Medium's strengths and something I'd like to focus on when I find the time. I still have much reading to do about SEO in general.

LaTex, syntax/code was high on my priority-list while initially building my product since I wanted to primarily target technical writers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Doesn't medium also fill the gap of a sort of easy to use, personalized aggregate site for blogs and such? I'm not aware of any other site that does this.

And isn't that kinda of the point of sites like Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - that provide enough of a valuable service to people by providing a single place for people to view a certain type of content that in spite of ads, centralized control, some pay walls, crappy technology, etc. that consumers and producers still find it worth while to use for viewing and publishing.

I would even go a step further and say such aggregate sites like Medium represent what the "new" internet represents, convenience and monetization. The average user doesn't care about privacy or ads as much as they want easy access to information. The average producer doesn't care about control compared to what runs their operation, revenue and readers. I think many "technologists" and other people who populate sites like Hacker News have values the align more closely to that of the "old" internet, so view many of the new trends negatively.

I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong, just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER70> The authors complaints are valid, but fails to acknowledge that besides Medium, so many great(and not so great) conversations happen on platforms that are now locked behind login gardens. It was fine back in the day to just create a throwaway FaceTwit account but now they demand mobile numbers too.

Pre social media, how did people discover great content? You can go as far back to the 90s or very early 00s as a time reference

<comment><USER71> That's a good point. It was much harder to find interesting stuff to read back in the day. I had my Google Reader with a bunch of blogs, but that ended up being pretty noisy and they took it away. You had to do the searching yourself and be your own data curator, or have a network of other friends pitching in content to check out (eg. forums, Maybe digg?)

It's locked in a somewhat growing, walled garden, yes, but Medium is now basically the Google Reader for a lot of people. Those people don't care about logins if they can get a good read every now and then. And, when Medium goes to crap, some other platform will pop up with no ads (for a while :) ) and lure us all over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I've been amazed seeing some folks I think of as good web citizens who are thoughtful about the web, web development, and etc.... keep using Medium, or at least have recently.

Some of these people would get plenty of attention posting on a personal site and just tweeting it out, but they choose medium, and I wonder why.

Folks less well known, I get it it assuming they somehow get more attention on medium.

</comment><comment><USER73> jeez, could you jack my mobile scrolling any further? not reading that for any longer than 2 seconds

</comment><comment><USER74> A community member built a blogging platform on our permanent, decentralised web (Arweave) today. You might want to check it out:

[https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM- koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYC...](https://arweave.net/egqLRAbESk4BvrPZGwNM- koJZZU3_xYRb_G9-CYCvFs)

Full disclosure: I started the Arweave project.

Sam

</comment><comment><USER75> So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. [https://your- media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/](https://your- media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/) Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use.

I will also mention that [https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/) is doing basically the same thing but more from a "Make life easier for Website designers" perspective.

</comment><comment><USER76> One of the big advantages of self-hosting is that you own not only own the platform, but also the traffic.

When I started my business I had a previous blog with several topics covered.

Because I self-hosted, I managed to redirect the traffic only for a specific set of posts on the topic to my new business blog where I moved several posts over, getting thousands of visits in my business blog (and converting customers) since day one.

The Ghost blogging platform is open source, and you can self-host if you want (I do).

With Ghost, you can also get their hosted service for a monthly fee and you own your own platform, you have a markdown-based editor with markdown on the left and content on the right.

You can run your own ads, have a fixed top menu that does not go away with scrolling with links to your products and services, etc.

If you are serious about running a business blog, you should definitively self-host. I know Medium has the sharing aspect, but it's not worth it because most of the traffic in blogs in general comes from Google searches and not sharing.

The social sharing traffic is a drop in the ocean for most blogs, it's not worth getting potential paying customers blocked due to a medium paywall popup.

</comment><comment><USER77> What happens if you are a popular blogger, and one day you decide to take your business elsewhere, and make the announcement on Medium in your last blogpost there? Will they take that post or even your entire blog down?

Similar question for YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER78> Medium should be used as a means to distribution (like a mirror) but not be the canonical source. Make your personal blog be the primary source of storing your articles but copy post on medium for discoverability

</comment><comment><USER79> Is there a suggested alternative people should be turning to as opposed to building their own, especially if their expertise is in writing or some other field than computer science or web design?

<comment><USER80> Though I also kinda resent the idea that, just because I have the skills to build my own blog from scratch, I'd want to waste even one second building it, setting it up, configuring it, maintaining it, fixing it, implementing basic features that other platforms already have, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I have yet to figure out the 'persona' for Medium users.

From time to time you can come across some decent content, but the loops and hoops you have to go through to read it are simply not worth my time.

<comment><USER82> It seems to mostly revolve around resume-enhancement spam. The sort of empty filler that people write, just to appear like a "thought leader" when potential employers or clients google them.

There are two categories of resume-spam:

1\. "Sunny" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. " _The Future Is Serverless_ "). The preferred platform for this seems to be LinkedIn.

2\. "Edgy" filler that doesn't really say anything new (e.g. " _Serverless Considered Harmful_ ", or " _Why I Don 't Use Serverless_"). The preferred platform for this seems to be Medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I am happy to pay for well articulated content that can sometimes reach 45min/piece in reading duration.

Medium will slowly learn what you're interested in and send you opt-out'able weekly newsletters with recommendations.

I'm surprised the OP has this much distaste for a platform which not only has good content, but rewards such, yet without ads. I'd happily pay to see less ads in my life.

</comment><comment><USER84> A lot of content creators have posted their experiences here. It matters for SEO, while being shitty to content creators.

From this readers perspective if it's on medium it's not worth reading. I've literally thought this "awesome that sounds like it will solve my exact issue...oh fuck it's on medium...next"

</comment><comment><USER28> A big chunk of the comments are about the problems of self-hosting video. The reality is that if you're not hosting on Youtube, or aggressively promoting the video via FB Ads or something, you will never get anywhere close to the number of views that would necessitate thinking about "video at scale".

</comment><comment><USER85> I have decided not to post on internet platforms that take my content and put it behind a login wall. I guess if I post a blog or video, I expect that everyone must be able to view it without having to login. Only then I will give my content to your platform. This will stop the web from being a bunch of islands.

</comment><comment><USER86> There is definitely something I miss in the discussion self-hosted blog vs medium.

But the simplest solution isn't to just write on your own self hosted blog and cross post on medium setting the canonical URL?

Doesn't this give the best of both worlds?

You still have control over your property and you still get the SEO benefits from the medium domain...

</comment><comment><USER87> Medium is also bad for SEO [https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform- seo](https://abot.app/blog/medium-blogging-platform-seo) . Selling your personal brand for a fancy WYSIWYG editor does not seem to be the best trade- off.

</comment><comment><USER88> I can remember praising Medium as the ultimate solution for professional bloging. I stopped using Medium when a pay wall was introduced. I didn't follow what happen since then with the platform. Can someone shortly introduce me to the topic why Medium is considered now as evil corp?

</comment><comment><USER89> Medium will often pop up when I search for something programming-related, but I'm less likely to find someone's blog post. What if we had a search engine that would only show programmer/technical blog posts? Then we could bring more traffic to the self-published.

</comment><comment><USER90> _Prediction_ : next week on HN: an article titled "Why Medium is super great"

</comment><comment><USER91> Your page still won't display in built-in webview of Materialistic Android HN client. And it has trouble parsing HTML. Just like Medium and many other modern (=broken) websites full of javascripts and ads.

</comment><comment><USER92> Just came here to say I hate Medium. I frequently get a strobing green bar at the top of the page that is permanently there and as far as I can tell doing nothing. WTF?

</comment><comment><USER93> Ironically this page doesn't work on mobile. It doesn't have inertial scrolling, and I just have no patience for that. I stopped reading after the first paragraph.

<comment><USER94> Works on Firefox 66.0.5 on Android 9

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> > When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?

Stallman was right.

</comment><comment><USER96> > _When did reading stuff on the web become pay to play?_

That's what happens when there are no ads. This is what the HN majority keeps saying they want.

</comment><comment> ga-vu Had a friend lose hundreds of posts after he complained on Twitter about the company's annoying popup. They deleted his account within hours.

</comment><comment><USER97> What is your best alternative? I'd say dev.to is a good one for the context of software/programming related content

<comment><USER98> Blogger is just fine

<comment><USER99> It does still work well but I have the sense no-one is really using it for new stuff any more - it has a sort of unloved feel to it, and Google have recent form in dropping stuff...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Thankfully medium required a Google account to register, saving me the trouble of learning the hard way how bad they were.

</comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Somewhat relatedly, does anyone else need to adblock/disable medium.com JS in order to scroll through articles?

</comment><comment><USER101> Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too by posting to Medium AND your own domain, or wherever you want.

<comment><USER102> Do you mean using your own domain on a Medium blog? If so, that was disabled a while ago. Or do you mean cross posting the same content on Medium and your blog? That's tricky, how do you tell Google that it should consider your blog as the owner of the content? Otherwise you can get punished for duplicated content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> For someone with such strong opinions on personal platforms, he'd do well to fix the scrolling in his site.

</comment><comment><USER104> I don't read medium. It's just another stupid website that takes your time and gives nothing.

</comment><comment><USER105> Fine. I'm going to make a Medium alternative this weekend and this person better try it out.

</comment><comment><USER106> TLDR; The article says that Medium locks up content behind its walled garden, requires login and then payment in some cases.

I think the article is not well researched and doesn't understand the basic premise of Medium: _Enable professional writers to make living off of writing._ Medium is not your usual free blogging platform. There is an expectation that people _will_ pay for good content and the hope that good writers should be able make living off of their writing. Medium wants to take on doing SEO, infrastructure, payments and let authors focus on just creating content.

Here's some stats on how much writers can earn on Medium: [https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update- fr...](https://medium.com/s/partner-program-updates/april-update-from-the- partner-program-1bf39020f3f4)

If I have to be devil's advocate, I would ask why can't Medium use ads as revenue source. Their $5/mo subscription may look like cup of coffee but honestly I am tired of having dozen such subscriptions in my life. Also, people outside developed world, kids, teenagers, college students will still find this unaffordable.

</comment><comment><USER107> I forget Medium exists until some complains about it. Several years ago, the popularity of Medium and several paywall/signup-wall sites posted on HN and Reddit inspired me to write a Firefox add-on that is able to apply CSS to any element that contains any text or attribute value matching a given regular expression on any site. So far, I've only used it to apply "visibilty: hidden" to sites I don't like, but it theoretically has other uses. I use a variation of the filter in Newsbeuter to keep them out of my RSS feeds. The result is that I do not see any links or any embedded content for sites I know I never want to interact with, ever. Search results, Reddit, HN, blogs, etc. The sites I add are basically erased from my personal internet experience. It is glorious, and I think if a lot of people used it, misbehaving sites would be more scared of it than ad blockers because they don't even get the chance to grab your attention. It's called ssure if anyone is interested. It's a bitch to configure but it works on desktop and Android FF.

</comment><comment><USER108> So just my personal take, I definitely benefit a lot from Mediums recommendation system, however it might work. Probably because I'm brand new to programming, and even fields like machine learning are very fresh to me even though it seems like everyone and their mom already knows the basics. So having a system that can see that I looked up a specific topic and recommend similar articles from that domain. A lot of the time I don't know what I don't know, so having this recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit more for me. And the general style of medium where the posts can be a more casual overview of a topic compared to the deep dive of a whitepaper, helps me grasp concepts faster. The recommendation aspect also helps me explore domains in a more focused way compared to the random nature of social networks that just bubbles up whatever's popular. I'd be lying to myself if I said I haven't benefited from Medium.

Not trying to excuse them for what they're doing, just trying to point out from my personal experience the value they've added to me and why following personal blogs or places like reddit, which I see mentioned as alternatives, isn't a one to one replacement for me. I don't know what or who I'd need to follow if the domain is new to me.

I guess continuing on this train of thought, and not wanting to complain without putting out an idea for a solution...if something were to come in and be a viable alternative to Medium it would have to

>Allow for easy publishing (editor)

>Have reliable distribution/hosting (network)

>And have some way to explore related topics or publications (discovery)

For publication I think the community would have to come around to a standard format. Like a simplified latex, or something similar to it, with an approachable interface that even my Mom or Dad could write something up without needing to read documentation.

As for distribution, the only thing I can really think of is an ipfs style network. Similar to how torrents can provide some security in the survival of a file even if the originator decides to stop seeding (hosting). And also similar to torrenting, I can see ppl willingly giving up resources for 'the cause' if they themselves benefit enough from the network existing.

The only thing left, that also contains all the things I liked about Medium, is the discovery aspect. Also seems like it'd be the most difficult to implement on a distributed network. Maybe a few designated community servers, similar to tracker servers from the torrenting analogy, carry the information of what files are in the network. Im not sure exactly what the ipfs spec implements for this aspect of file discovery. But it seems some sort of designated 'discovery nodes' would be necessary. Maybe graph network nodes that ppl can query using their own discovery algorithms or ones shared within the community? Idk how well those would scale, I've heard from the Neo4j pitch that Behance rolled over their infrastructure to neo4j from cassandra and reduced their server requirements by a factor of 10. Maybe that kind of efficiency would be enough to support the network in general with a minimal number of critical nodes?

I haven't worked on an infrastructure level with anything I've mentioned, mostly just know of the technologies, so I might be completely off base with the individual things I proposed, but I feel like the general concept is worth dissecting.

<comment><USER55> > A lot of the time I don't know what I don't know, so having this > recommendation system helps illuminate the domain a bit more for me.

That's a very good point. Before the advent of Google, we used to have curated link lists for topics that you could explore. It's become rare, and it's probably harder to do now that everything moves much faster (or maybe it doesn't and I've just gotten much slower).

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> So what alternatives are there? Either as a service or code?

</comment><comment><USER110> We need a Zeitgeist service returning Overton window for each company and automate hiding articles/content that are no longer fitting inside it.

<comment><USER111> what

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I've seen a lot of complaints about how Medium is becoming worse in terms of writing / publishing / blogging your thoughts on the internet [1]. I just don't see why no one (or group) has taken to building a similar service less the cruft and could still be a viable business.

[1] [https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits- medium/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/)

</comment><comment><USER113> He is right. Medium was cool around 2016. Before the content was behind a paywall and the free content was accessible in a visible way. They send you a mail with interesting stuff everyday and now it's dead to me. The mobile site is horrendous, a banner where it says to download the app which can't be canceled after five or so tabs. The asshole that designed it should never get a job in the business again.

</comment><comment><USER114> Can we all stop posting articles from Medium on HN? While we're at it let's stop posting articles residing behind paywalls. That'd be great.

</comment><comment><USER115> No

</comment><comment><USER116> This site appears to break scrolling inertia on touch screen devices.

</comment><comment><USER117> > You know. That old internet that used to be open and free.

This is bullshit. Medium is free, you're free to use it, it's open (unless an author explicitly asks for a paywall for compensation) and you're free to register an account to have your own content published there.

Medium isn't using a proprietary protocol nor does it require a licensed client to access it and everyone has a browser, so I really don't get the issue with publishing there.</comment>