Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

For the past ~3 weeks Medium has blocked virtually every article I wanted to read and is asking me to pay. Most of these are programming tutorials related to some obscure Rails features. Honestly, I feel like Medium is the worse place to put your content.

EDIT: For context, I don’t mind people monetizing their content, but in that case I’d rather pay them directly (like GoRails), and not a “subscription” for something I might check once in a while.

I find most Medium tech articles to be written poorly or outdated or written by juniors. They seem to be written by people that want to write an article just to write and article.

There's an interesting tradeoff here, to say the least. Writers want readers. So to some, it's worth sacrificing universal accessibility to gain all of the advantages Medium has to offer.

There just aren't many reasonable, free alternatives for publishing written technical. Medium handles SEO and makes it super simple writers who don't know how to host their own content otherwise to get their ideas in public. Plus, readers who click on a Medium link know they'll see their content in a standardized format.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Medium as a platform for the space between amateur and professional writing, but I don't think it's right for most techie blogs.

For people simply looking to spread ideas and neat little hacks, it's almost always going to be better using either a 'traditional' blogging platform or homebrewing a blog with one of the static site generators.

There also seems to be some sort of 'style' that every Medium writer starts to take on that you don't see other places, I can't put my finger on it but there's a certain tone to many of the articles.

Actually can we stop writing tutorials period. When you search for something I always get a bunch of old tutorials by people who are learning something and writing as they learn. If the official docs aren't great, contribute to them.

Medium, Twitter and other "dark pattern" companies are on my blacklist: I don't open any link that point to them. Life is slightly better this way.

Why not hackernoon or any other blogging platform, then? Stackoverflow is gatekept, not super friendly, and you can only share things in response to people's questions.

Personal websites are great and I’ve been trying to put more content on my own personal website (I made nine decent-size posts this month, and I’m happy with that). HOWEVER,

Running a personal website is a time sink and it can become a real pain as time goes on. It’s not a problem to create a personal website and shove a few HTML files on there, or set up a Wordpress installation, or create something with Jekyll. That’s easy enough.

The problem is that 10 years later, your HTML files are sprawling, or you rely on Wordpress plugins that are no longer maintained, or you’re fighting against your generator for whatever reason.

I’ve somehow managed to get my personal website into a state where posting a new article is little more than adding a file to a Git repo and then running a command to deploy it, but I always feel like I need to modify the scripts, and I always want to revisit choices I made when building the website.

Medium's popularity a few years ago prompted an idea for me. I wanted to be able to remove all links to domains I knew I never wanted to visit from all pages because I kept wasting time accidentally clicking them, not realizing where they were going.

I had hoped to pull it off with uBlock Origin but I couldn't get the filters to do what I wanted. I ended up making a Firefox add-on that takes a regex and some css, searches all attribute values and/or text for a match, and applies the css to the element with the match.

So, I have a regex for a handful of popular domains I never want to see and matched elements get "visibility: hidden". The result is that I never see a link to Medium. In fact, I usually forget the site exists until someone mentions it without linking to it, which is almost always a post about how Medium sucks :) Same for all the other domains in the list.

The plugin works on Firefox for Android, so I've enjoyed the benefits there as well. However, I expect that to be a problem soon. I don't do much browsing on my phone anyway.

It's only designed for personal use, so the interface is terrible, but I had to submit it to the official add-on repository because there's no reasonable way to run an add-on locally for practical every-day use, so it is available for anyone to use [1]. Source [2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/

[2] https://github.com/7w0/ssure

Aren't the writers consciously choosing to monetize their content?

Medium is not StackOverflow

Maybe StackOverflow should add a Medium-like product where people can write tutorials?

As a writer, I believe you can just opt-out of the partner program and your content should be available to everyone, but will not be promoted by them.

If you're a techie, you are likely capable enough to learn and use a static-site gen and host your blog on Github Pages, Vercel, Surge, Netlify, etc. If you're a techie, you probably also care enough to not inundate your readers with a crapton of intrusive trackers and weird browser hacks/overrides that Medium employs.

If you don't want to use an SSG, or if you're not a techie, you can use or self-host: https://write.as/, https://bearblog.dev/, https://rwtxt.com/public, https://the-federation.info/plume

The downside of the above options is that they are nowhere near as prominent and thus don't provide the same level of discoverability as Medium -- in which case, if you're really hurting for cash and are trying to make a career of writing, maybe it is in your best interest to stick to platforms like Medium, despite how intrusive and reader-unfriendly they are.

EDIT: I am hesitant to recommend https://dev.to/ because I have this sinking feeling that it will eventually become like Medium. Also, semi-related, but Dev.to uses endless scroll, which I think is very bad for readers (also it makes it impossible to click links in the footer).

I write everything initially on my own site[0].

I will often (but not always) mirror the article on Medium[1].

I'll often post links, here, to the Medium articles, because I have had my site get the "hug of death" a few times.

In the old days, that was cool (The term "slashdotted" came from that). These days, it doesn't really mean much; except that the server goes down. I don't get any real advantage from it.

I think Medium kind of butchers my work. I have full control of presentation, and whatnot, on my site, and I can do series. There are always links to my original articles, because I don't really trust Medium. I could see them try to claim ownership of my work; simply because it's on their server.

As for people applying value judgements on me for using Medium? Eh. Whatever.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

[1] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny

I used to work as a professional tutor and, I think Medium's monetization strategy is overall a good thing for tutorial authors. My nuanced thoughts are pretty split though. I, personally, would never write on Medium. It doesn't fit the hacker ethos. I would roll my own blog and, try to make the content as accessible as possible.

Despite this I still see the value in Medium over what I would do and over other options like blogger, quora, stackoverflow, etc. Medium's premium content ranges from horrible clickbait to significant thought pieces. It's all over the place but it's best content is pretty good and I think the reason why is because of their monetization strat.

I subscribed to Medium briefly during the lockdown and the content was truly, utterly, awful. Terrible writing drowned out the good and great, reams of tripe, inane nonsense everywhere, and advertised like crazy to me. After a few weeks of this, I cancelled and subscribed to some actual magazines with some actual experts.

So quite apart from the nagging annoyance of being unable to access various padded-out articles (tip: private browsing FTW), this has highlighted that a need from 20 years ago hasn't changed: the world still needs better editors.

If the bigger newspapers like NTY, WAPO, The Cardigan would get behind tech in this way AND provide editing and curation, it'd be amazing. Maybe.

So, you would prefer individuals who are the highest caliber in their technology specialty, along with the rare combination of also being an excellent writer, to take the time to write an article for you for free rather than getting paid.

If they made it in book form, would that be ok, or is paying for learning material just not acceptable?

Creators like to get paid, and if they are clicking that checkbox to make it so they get paid, there is a good chance that they wouldn't bother making that content for you if they weren't getting paid. Then the world would be worse off for the lack of their contribution.

Medium is free for all articles in which the author chooses to give it to you for free. This is the same for news, or youtube, or music. Some stuff creators will give you for free just for the satisfaction of you enjoying their work, but usually the output in those cases are small, or just monetized in other ways. Regardless of if you are paying for a subscription or just voting up someone's question on StackOverflow, providing a positive incentive for creators to go on creating is essential if you want to have quality content and a steady stream of it.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

What I always wondered about is why the (good) people that publish free content on Medium actually publish on Medium.

I mean, talking of technical article/tutorials, it is not like nowadays (and in the last - say - 10 years) there are not other ways (personal site/blog or if the issue is expected huge traffic other free hosting sites, like - still say - github).

What is the perceived "added value" by Medium (in case of free content)?

Better visibility?

More than just considering the reader's interests, it's also against the author's interests to use Medium. They've become more and more draconian, bloated, and, well, the same as any other venture capitalist ultra-growth-oriented company. The chickens will come home to roost, and if your content and your audience is on Medium, moving them elsewhere is going to become increasingly difficult over time. Ability to export your content always trends downwards as the desirability of doing so trends upwards - a business which is struggling is not going to make it easy for customers to leave.

Always write on a domain you own. You don't necessarily have to own the server, but if you own the domain, you have the freedom of choice.

AFAIK This is happening due to people enrolling in the partner network to get paid per view. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011694187-Getti...

I wholeheartedly agree. Medium is a cancer in the programming tutorial/article front.

Unfortunately, any such platform will be in due time be trying to seek income and will transform into such an ad-powered walled garden, whatever the good intentions in the beginning may have been.

What could be the solution to this?

As someone who used to run a WordPress blog as a kid and taking a long hiatus from blogging, I'm really happy about all the options there are today. I spun up a blog using 11ty and netlify, and it was just as easy as all the blog posts about them say it would be. I don't think there's a better time to try to self-host a blog if you are at all inclined. I've also been excited about Dev.to (although I haven't dug too deep into it).

* Shameless plug: my blog lives at salem.io, and I'm more than happy to answer blog-related questions (or any other, honestly) if you're interested in starting but need a little push. My email is in my profile.

well, I was not going to say anything, but I think this applies to every other type of post.

Lately every third link I click there's this HUGE div blocking the content and I need to pay or sign in to read.

It's very frustrating and I leave immediately.

Writing on your own domain and blog, and then re-publishing on places like Medium and dev.to etc seems to be the best combination.

You get the ownership of your own site, and the reach and SEO of medium and 3rd party publications.

I concur. why not use github itself?!

Most internet "content", including Medium articles, are definitely not worth money. Even worse, there seems to be a massive increase in "articles" coming from a particular part of the world that has churned out masses of sort-of-developers.

I'm even starting to wonder if part of their pedagogical process includes "Every week you write an article". Perhaps by sheer number of posts, an individual has been trained to believe they will be more likely to get hired.

So given that most content on the internet is garbage, I will never, ever pay for access to content before I can assess the value of it. I will (and do) subscribe to some writers/musicians on Patreon.

Medium might as well be the next Experts-Exchange... cluttering up search results with paywalled trash.

I dont remember when was the last time I read a tech article on medium as it keeps blocking me to read, I lost the habit of visiting medium and now I dont even think of clicking on medium links. I would suggest to checkout alternatives and more programming focused communities/blogging platform like Hashnode (https://hashnode.com)

To be frank, I could live without yet-another-half-cooked, tutorial on Python/ML/DL/Data Science anywhere, not just on Medium...

Well, Medium has higher quality/$ ratio than virtually any other journal I know.

Yes, it has its issue but for many it is an easier writing experience than setting up one's own blog. In fact, a few people I mentored started writing precisely because there is Medium.

(I subscribe them. I wrote a few article on Medium. Yes, if for one there is no difference, I suggest GitHub pages a way to disseminate knowledge.)

Medium is not stackoverflow, definitely. It's great for authors and getting to know new technologists and others. Ofcourse quality is going to differ but eventually people will improve, that's the idea.

I would say medium has better way to identify content you like as well. And sort of introduce you non IT content at the end of this daily newsletters. I like that.

I think it's interesting how quickly this posting dove down the rankings, even though it has over 300 upvotes.

Seems to be hitting some nerves.

I recently took an email-course on blogging for devs. One of the key points were to use your own domain, and the course showed a few tricks about creating traffic there.

If you're interested, here is it: https://bloggingfordevs.com/

The way Medium works is impressive for those who wish to have some income writing. I wish there was a similar blockchain based / decentralized app where authors and editors would get their fair share and is not owned by just a company which could change policies at any time.

Medium does help with a lot of distribution through internal members. That's really nice when you're trying to get an article to many people quickly but, point taken. We'll be reblogging all our content on a self hosted Jekkyl instance and Substack from now on.

I have tweeted the same a few days back, I found this very irritating. https://twitter.com/niksmac_/status/1317859294465830912?s=20

Is it just me, or did this rise to the top of and drop off the front page incredibly quickly?

Although I use incognito mode as a workaround (if you open the article on incognito it shows it without the paywall, at least it does for me), I find Medium tutorials badly written or written by people with limited technical knowledge.

I'd say 95% of my process with medium goes like this:

1) Finds a blog with a tutorial or something relevant. 2) Opens it and sees a paywall 3) Opens it in incognito mode 4) Browses through the article 5) Leaves the page and learned nothing

Medium is also terrible for SEO. Writing there is a waste of time and resources https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo

But then how does a bootcamp graduate with no experience whatsoever writes and article about some basic shit that takes 5 minutes in the official documentation to grasp can pretend to be a subject matter and get a high paying senior job? /s

I agree. I use Google for news/article recommendations and I ended up banning medium.

Honestly, stackoverflow works but other than that, most bloggers end up putting ads on their website for monetisation. I'd rather pay a 5 dollar subscription than view ads that could possibly be tracking me.

I guess people in use medium for visibility? What does Medium offer? SEO? Brand recognition (by hosting a few well know authors)? Some special relationship with google? It s hard to tell why it became popular

Agree! dev.to for example is a nice place.

However, Medium is a like a book publisher for articles. It's a good way for simple and/or new articles to get an audience that wouldn't elsewise.

I’ve moved to substack. Medium is very aggressive about their sign in to read tactics. I just want a platform where I blog once in a blue moon and want my subscribers informed.

Medium is pretty awful for that.

I agree. Are there any good alternatives (except for personal blogs)?

Medium is not StackOverflow, it limits the number of articles that can be freely read.

On the other hand, StackOverflow simply limits the number of interesting discussions that can be had.

Most technical content on Medium is a waste of time. It's now mostly shallow and low quality. If you are a developer you should have your own blog or write on a platform that's not paywalled. If you are writing to share information do where it will be publicly accessible.

Make an account just to upvote this. Fkn preach brother.

Might I suggest publishing your articles over at DZone.com? It is free for anyone to publish there, and all of our content is free to access!

I blocked medium results in my DDG settings.

If you find the content useful there, maybe consider paying the $5/month to get access?

Sounds like you place enough value that it would be worth it to you, and you can feel good knowing you're helping contribute a small way back to the author (who gets small proceeds based on how long you read the article) and supporting one of the leading platforms for an ad-free experience to read interesting content without all the distracting popups.

My mail issue with Medium, except the paywall, is the clutter. It feels like all the articles are having big, usually unrelated images that make the whole site inclined toward sensationalism.

> you are putting them behind a paywall

Read this:

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018677974

Quote: If you are a writer enrolled in the Partner Program, when you click Publish on a story, you will be prompted to choose whether to make your post eligible to earn money as part of Medium’s metered paywall. [...]

Only writers in the Partner Program see this checkbox. Stories from writers who are not enrolled in the Partner Program will no longer be part of the metered paywall.

So authors obviously have the choice whether their tutorial is behind the metered paywall or not. Here an example of a free article: https://medium.com/@rochus.keller/implementing-call-by-refer.... Can you access it or not?

Learn to use private browser window, man

And don’t spoil market valuation for good guys :)

I don't even know if some of the authors are aware that their contents are now behind a paywall. Yet, people keep recommending those articles as if they're openly accessible (because for some reason they have access). Yesterday someone linked to this series from Guido van Rossum https://medium.com/@gvanrossum_83706/peg-parsers-7ed72462f97.... I opened and was greeted with this message:

Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from.

Upgrade Read any story. Access everything on Medium across all your devices with no limits or ads.

Reward great writing. A portion of your membership fee will go toward the writers you read most.

Considering the author you have to wonder.

Thanks for publishing. Have been wanting to say this for a while. Developers posting tech tutorials behind Medium paywalls is deplorable. Just use a different platform.

Have you heard of anonymous windows ?

"Ctrl shift p"

Maybe I missing something, but I've published several tutorials on Medium, all outside their paywall, and all appearing in google search results. It's a nice blogging platform. Not sure what the issue is.

For instance, this article I wrote is still available outside their paywall: https://medium.com/@alsargent/monitoring-aws-with-telegraf-i...

I doubt paywall is true for all articles. I think paywall applies only to articles that the author elects to get curated by Medium team and gives up monetization opportunity. https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006543813-Frien...

> it limits the number of articles that can be freely read.

It's literally right click, 'open in private tab'

Thank you. Completely agree.

THIS !

i stopped reading medium because of large amounts of click bait.

I agree on contributing back to a community and there's many ways to do that. That's not every producer's motivation though. Some do this to get paid and it makes sense to publish behind a paywall to do so.

Follow up question. What are opinions on publishing technical books?

It's like when searching images on Google, you'll find a significant part of them behind Pinterest. I keep hitting Medium when I search and cannot access whatever it is because it's behind their paywall... frustrating.

A useful tip that most people probably wont see, use notion's web scraper, it can get behind the paywalls. Or just set your cookies for medium to delete every time you close the window. I do the same thing for HBR.

Just use https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium - Paywall solved :P

You can publish on medium and chose not to be behind the paywall. The thing is that most individuals that publish on there want to get paid for it, hence paywall.

the author can turn off the paywall "feature" they consciously chose to use them, no?

Oh, for a moment I thought you were arguing people to stop writing those notoriously low-effort, beginner level tutorials which Medium is filled with.

I guess I'll have to do it myself: dear beginners! We don't need your (n+1)-th "how to do [basic thing] in React" tutorials. Please stop polluting our search results.

I also request free access to everyone's hard earned knowledge. I deserve it afterall because information wants to be free.

User that right clicks Medium articles and opens them in incognito mode, here: what paywall?