Do we need something other than medium.com? | Hacker News Reader

Do we need something other than medium.com?

14 pointsSupunKavinda11 comments

I think world needs a website that allows you to write and read for free, but works like medium.

Medium is awesome because of

It allows us to write efficiently

It allows us to create new publications. (This is the power of it)

It allows us to customize publications and make the page a little bit our-like.

But, it is paid. (Until you use some illegal softwares like browser extensions to bypass)

So, I checked the internet whether there's some alternatives to medium and found this out. https://beebom.com/medium-alternatives/ But, any of this doesn't do the job clean as medium does.

So, Is it the time to create an open-source publications website? Or is there really one?

Happy to discuss>>>

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I'm making https://epiphany.pub , Medium + jupyter.

it supports github like collaboration, (pull request, fork)

it supports latex math,

live coding, in js and python

social publishing, similar to Medium.

It looks beautiful :- ) (looking at https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=2684bc94f9fcb9ffe637ebfbeba2... )

You have any example of a page with comments?

Who is the target audience? (Live coding? Is it mainly for software people?)

Social publishing — how does that work? (which features from Medium do you have in mind?)

Is it ok if I ask, does it have a business model?

Which rich text editor & Markdown editor libraries do you use? I'm thinking about using ProseMirror myself :- )

Thank you very much!

> You have any example of a page with comments?

https://epiphany.pub/post?refId=3e123914a88818452d7f2c24fd8a...

> Who is the target audience? (Live coding? Is it mainly for software people?)

This is a solo side project so far, but I really want to turn it into a startup. I started by scratching my own itch. As a tech blogger, I want a platform like medium, where I can connect with new interesting contents and interesting people, and I can have my work pushed to wider audiences. I also like the expressiveness of live programs, such as those on jupyter notebooks.

My initial targeted audiences would be tech bloggers, who could only show static images, prerecorded videos and embedded github snippets on their old platform. I want Epiphany to grow into a community like dev.to. Then I also want to attract academic content creators.

I'm attending YC startup school now. I badly need feedback on this idea to see if it has potential. I will appreciate if you could provide some feedback.

> Social publishing — how does that work? (which features from Medium do you have in mind?)

I wrote tech articles on medium that one day I want to turn into a book: https://medium.com/mlreview/l1-norm-regularization-and-spars...

on Epiphany, anyone can start a "publish" in one of the two forms, a journal or a book. Then other bloggers could contribute to your journal or book. You can select a group of editors to proof read and approve the submissions.

> Is it ok if I ask, does it have a business model?

My initial focus is a digital textbook marketplace. Imagine professionals from all different places collaborate on a book about a latest technology with demonstrations in runnable programs, like blockchain. And Epiphany will be a market place for those contents. Students will subscribe with a monthly fee, which will distributed to the creators.

> Which rich text editor & Markdown editor libraries do you use? I'm thinking about using ProseMirror myself :- )

The current version is based on the Monaco editor. But it's more ideal for programs, not so for writing markdown. I'm remaking the markdown editor with ProseMirror now, which should be deployed this week. The new editor supports realtime markdown, inspired by https://typora.io/ . the markdown parser is markdown-it.

Don't we have https://write.as/ as well?

We really need to get people to be able to type math and code.

Basically, bring back the proliferation of blogs! All the net needs is a standard API (non-disqus) which will allow people to discover and comment.

> All the net needs is a standard API (non-disqus) which will allow people to discover

How can a discovery API work? Please describe :- )

- What API endpoints are needed and what would they do?

- How do they help with identifying good blogs?

- How do they help people discover blog posts they want to read, among all good blog posts?

- How can cheating, be prevented? (like, pretending one's blog post got 999 999 visits & "upvotes", to boost it's populartiy score)

I'm interested because I'm developing an open source Disqus alternative. (It's called Talkyard Blog Comments. There's also Commmento, also open source under active development.)

Well, the ideal API would have JS endpoints, since that's easiest to work with. I envisage a sort of client-side validation system, instead of a central server. Something like dat (https://dat.foundation). That would prevent cheating I guess. The idea is to not really aid discovery without having the current blog author endorse it. Either that or there might be a sort of voting system. What they want to read is something I would rather not work on. The discovery process should be for the site, not individual posts I guess. Talkyard is nice, I couldn't find Commento though..

You should check at what's happening/the story behind Hacker Noon. I think it's an interesting read, whether you agree or not.

There's certainly a need to make an alternative, but I don't think the problem is easy to solve because it's not just technical. Creating the community is what Medium was able to do (and the "average" dev usually can't, me included), and this new payment model seems to be what's killing it. Time will tell, but finding the right balance doesn't seem a trivial task.

> a website that allows you to write and read for free, but works like medium

I'd rephrase: A network of blogs, whose articles are discoverable in the same way as good articles at Medium. Somehow takes into account what people actually stop and read.

But not a single website. It would, I think, sooner or later, go greedy and self destruct. A single point of failure.

(Maybe not noticeable until after many years, when there's an owner shift, and the new owners have different goals.)

> it is paid

Who pays? The blogger, or the readers? How does the money get distributed?

Interesting topic you brought up b.t.w. :- )

Anything that helps kill medium is a good thing, IMO.

It exists, https://dev.to

I'm a fan of dev.to as well as a writer. But, it's totally focused on development related things.

The super power that I see on medium.com is that it allows any topic to be published user-wise or publication-wise.

Dev.to doesn't allow us to create our own publication and make a community for a business which medium.com allows.

I'm totally in love with "publications" on medium which allows us to grow a "brand name".

But, I think reading and writing should be free :)

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