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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Right and how do you get people to read your blog? Ads? Billboards? No one will find a new blog with no Google juice. I used to get 300K a year but it took more than a decade to get to that level. I gave up on it (job burned me out). Now I get 100 readers a month. If I start up again, it will take years to get a decent readership (never did ads). At least with Medium someone would see it.

It entirely depends on what the goal of your blog is. Do you want to make money? Do you want to just post random thoughts online? Do you want to share solutions to interesting problems you've come across?

I post maybe once a month tops, and for very specific niche queries I'm on the first page of results for the three main search engines. The goal for me isn't to make money or get famous, just to fill in some gaps where nobody's tried something before.

I'm not a medium expert at all, but I would wager that most incoming traffic is going to be from google searches either way. The sad reality is that search & social is the only place traffic really comes from, practically nobody uses RSS or subscriptions anymore.

Here is a questions: What happens if Medium decides to cut your blog from there?

I am not saying they are doing, but what happens with all this knowledge when Medium decides to pivot (I am not saying they do) or to close (hope this will not happen).

I see better chances for the content to outlive when it is spread in separated smaller blogs. Not all of them will close, maybe some of them will be archived, maybe moved to other domains, maybe cached somewhere. But having a lot of content under paywall, without any license on the code shared (or at least I don't know about it) is not creating a comfortable feeling for myself.

Of course if the purpose is to monetize then maybe Medium is the right place.

Pretentiousness?

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