Facebook makes your content virtually inaccessible and discoverable from those outside Facebook. They are the opposite of the way things were on the open web. Medium "is easy" but they are gradually asking more and more of people visiting too. Twitter is a good platform for streams of thought but it is a terrible "blogging" platform. Having "a series of tweets" does not make for a blog. It is hard to read and terrible.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.
I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.
>I'm actually working on something with that spirit.
Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
Since we won't track users, sell data, or use ads... the only ethical option is having paying customers.
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content.
I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.
This was the model back in the 2000s before monetization was big on the internet. This is really the key issue, not whether RSS feeds or dead or if it is too hard for people to self-host blogs.
The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.
LiveJournal went closed source in 2014. It was also bought by Russians, relocated its servers to Russia, and began enforcing Russian law in 2017, which included laws against "gay propaganda", which was when me and my remaining friends abandoned the service for good.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.