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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

The canonical handles the indexation. Your content on your own site gets the credit, rather than the corresponding content on Medium. In theory, you're getting a bit of domain authority passed over from the Medium article. Here's an example:

https://medium.com/@w00t/the-2018-burning-man-ultramarathon-...

Has a canonical tag pointing here: https://johnvantine.com/2018-burning-man-50k-my-first-ultram...

When I search for a snippet of text from the article, the one on johnvantine.com ranks.

And you're leveraging the community on Medium, too, so there's some discovery that can happen on that end. Best of both worlds IMO.

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.

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)

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).

An archive, you own it, etc...

Also you can choose on a post by post basis to publish to Medium or not, and to different publications there, so you could have your site as a hub holding all your stuff and niche audiences on your Medium pubs. Stuff like that.

The someone in question is a search engine. Telling them where your content originated from helps you when your content matches future searches

At any time, Medium can decide to require login to view articles, if they think it is in their best interests.

Anything you post on Medium is subject to their whims.

That’s interesting - does the canonical tag identify the Medium article or the WordPress article as canonical?

IIRC you can choose..

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