> Yes, finally I’ve found the time to buy a VPS and host a Jekyll blog with a nice comment system
Do we really need comment section on blogs? The blog comments are not particularly helpful to have any discussion at least not the way one can have here on HN, reddit, Twitter, etc,.
Besides the poor user interface, the users have to sign up to comment. Why would they sign up when they can have discussions on above platforms? If one does not implement sign up but allow users to comment just by entering username (like the way this blog did) then people start abusing the comment section.
I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I understand that this is terrible idea if reddit/hn chose to be walled gardens someday but then do we have other better solution?
I couldn't disagree more. Comments have been a plus on every blog I've run. I've learned from my readers, been able to answer their questions and even become friends with a few of them.
The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is fundamentally at odds with the open web.
> The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is fundamentally at odds with the open web.
Agree but don't you think there needs to be a better way at handling comments on web. What I do not want is:
Comment based systems built on top of existing platforms such as Matrix may be interesting.
For want of a better word there's a "misconception" that the Matrix protocol can only be used for chat apps, but instead it's defined a fully open, federated and encrypted event transmission service which can be used for any type of multiuser application.
100% THIS! I believe (hope!) that as more people understand that the matrix protocol is *not only* a chat protocol, but far more than that, then we will see many more different ideas flourish. There are already ideas for leveraging matrix for a blog...so why not for commenting, and other scenarios?
I often go from just reading the posts to reading posts and comments to talking about the site elsewhere to signing up and just posting there.
Having used federated comment systems, they've been a complete loss. They increase page load times, lead to more low-quality drive-by comments and then inevitably eventually start trying to load their ads on my page.
The one exception is crypto sites, where people just log in with their wallet creds. Those are pseudonymous, shared across sites and have very frictionless UX. That would be a highly polarizing choice for a non-crypto-focused site, though.
It's the equivalent of sharing your bank account number with scammysitedotcom. Even if there are no security implications, sharing your entire financial history with any website is very privacy hostile.
Not necessarily. You should use a different account (preferably one with 0 transaction history, if no on-chain txes are needed) than your main financial account (and really, anyone not living paycheck to paycheck should have more than one of those in the first place. Cold/hot, have a separate one for any defi activities, use a new one for each L2, etc)
Just like you may not have the same email for job applications and dodgy e-commerce, or bring all your cash and cards with you in a purse to the nightclub.
(GP did say “shared across sites”, which should be a very deliberate decision and not the default. UX needs to improve to have better privacy by default. I could imagine Metamask defaulting to generating and connecting a unique address for each domain, requiring manually selecting accounts to have them shared)
Based on your comment, I'm guessing you've never used Metamask or similar before. You really should check it out and see just how trivial creating a new wallet is. HD wallets lend themselves to this kind of UX.
Got any links to such crypto sites where they’re used for auth for comments and social? It’s something I’ve been theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.
Cheers. It looks like it directly answers my question but not quite what I had in mind (pushes for linking Google account and email; requires phone number verification for the "free" signup airdrop to get the platform-specific coins required to participate; frankly looks quite sketchy and faux-decentralized)
Oh, interesting. I never linked mine to Google or a phone. Maybe they changed the requirements for airdropping later on.
It's not that centralized though. I know of multiple projects that ran custom nodes of it for their own front-ends / customizations of the network. That's something that you just couldn't do with Twitter.
The project did seem a bit like a quick cash grab though, and I'm not sure it will ever return to the peak it hit last spring.
I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles? Make in-line annotations and share them? See my friends’ annotations as I read articles? Etc.
This could be a browser plug-in or perhaps an iframe over the original content. It could even be implemented as a protocol that browsers support (“go to your configured overlay server(s) and load content for the page you are on”) if it were successful enough. This sort of feature gets better the more streamlined and “baked in” it is.
> "I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles?"
that's what disqus wanted to be, and we've largely rejected that because of the privacy and anonymity issues with disqus.
a year and a half ago, i did a bit of a dive into webmentions[0] and bridgy[1] as a federated alternative, but that doesn't seem to have taken off yet.
I see what you mean, but perhaps the key difference I see is that if this is a federated protocol, then you bring your own identity network (for example, someone in another sub-thread mentioned that Matrix could support this usecase). Presumably FB would implement this protocol if it was popular enough, and replicate FB comments, but the cipherpunks could use a Matrix server or whatever privacy-preserving method they prefer. By promoting it to the level of a protocol you can get multiple implementations/networks, but without forcing the communities to be un-discoverable to each other. (E.g. I might be fine with everybody seeing my public post, but prefer not to have every website capture my Disqus ID by virtue of me viewing the page. A bridged privately-run overlay could meet that requirement.)
> webmentions[0] and bridgy[1]
Perfect, thanks - that looks like at least the next evolutionary step towards what I'm envisioning.
I think that until native browser-support is added (if it ever gets there), bridging posts back to "non-protocol-speakers" by posting comments to the blog itself is probably the smart move. That way you don't split your community. But I'd love to see a world where the comments and content are disaggregated, so that I can just filter out the garbage "public" comments, or participate in them, depending on my mood.
Yeah because such a system should be a standardized layer of the web not something controlled by a single company. The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I’ve long thought that social security numbers will end up as a predecessor to this as the government is already the one entity that knows everything about us (and you could still have private browsing that didn’t use this layer.)
ActivityPub would work well for this, as there are several implementations of the standard, it can be self-hosted, and is already used in the comment sections of some video sites. I wonder if someone has already written an HTML embed that does this exact thing for arbitrary sites...
The holy grail the Internet has been looking for since the Web was launched is a single-sign-on that doesn't suck in some fundamental way. It is definitely a huge friction point for commenting on a random blog that you might only visit one time.
I totally agree that you shouldn't outsource your blog comments to someone else though, because what happens when Facebook decides their commenting system isn't profitable anymore and kills the product? Half the content on your web site suddenly vanishes.
Back when blogs were a thing, my solution was to require all comments to be PGP signed. No spam, and the people commenting on my blog all liked that sort of thing, so it worked quite well.
I post on various blogs with no sign-in. It's the usual wordpress comment thing where it asks for an email address but blatantly fake ones work. Typically the post goes into moderation the first few times you use a given email, then is auto approved. Federation otoh involves a centralized service which I'd rather avoid.
My old blogs all had an email address on them as well as comments. Some people did email me and it was useful, but far more preferred to comment because they wanted to share their thoughts publicly.
It's probably why you wrote this comment rather than just emailing someone.
I do wish there was a way to just transfer ids better between systems. I don’t really want to b have users create an account every time but no good way to prevent spam. Maybe h-capcha but even that is cheap to spam.
As much as it pains me to mention it here, as I wholeheartedly do not support it for a number of important reasons, something like Metamask and an identity on a blockchain could work for this.
The more obvious solution is OAuth (or OpenID Connect), and there are plenty of providers that aren't Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, or GitHub.
Yeah I don’t really care about I’d but the problem is spam. Maybe phone text authentication is an alternative, idk how much that costs to implement though.
You could build one yourself by grabbing some hardware that includes a modem and grabbing a sim card from a local provider with "unlimited" text messages.
My favorite way to do this is to encourage people to email me their comments. If anyone has something to add to the discussion I may ask for permission to quote them in a "Responses" sections, or more often, if they write their own post I'll link to it.
Why do this? Well, for one, it gives me absolutely quality control over my website. I am the final arbiter of what I want to present and how I want to present it.
But this also changes the shape of the comments; it is not a public remark into the void, it is a letter to the author. I've been amazed and the quality and thoughtfulness in some of these notes.
And this is why websites like HN exist, and why people use them to discover new blogs :)
A lot of times I am reading something, and think: "That's a dangerous advice! Don't do this unless you really have to!" If I post this as HN comment, I will get somr responses, maybe confirming my point, or perhaphs saying that I am wrong and that original advice was good after all. And either way, future readers will be able to read whole discussion and make their own judgement.
But if the author asks people to email, I will not bother. Unless my arguments are so good as to convince original author, they will just "disappear" - no one else will read them or respond to them.
> I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow.
I've thought of this as well, but then I read on the HN Guidelines that: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0]
So unless every post you have complies with HN Guidelines, I don't think we'll ever see this.
All the rules say is you should not submit your own blog posts yourself. But if someone else submits it, you are welcome to link to it, and perhaps even embed (I think there is an API to access HN data?)
I can imagine a "smart" blog which periodcally checks HN if the post has been submitted (or maybe verifiers visitors' Refere headers?) If no submission is found, the "comments" link points to HN submission page. If yes, the "comments" link points to existing discussion.
I used to write a blog and the comments that readers posted were always a valuable part of the blog. Comments don't require sign-up depending on the settings of your blog (mine did not require sign-up).
Blogs without the ability to post comments are often static site blog generators - one of the reasons why I don't use them. (I don't consider embedding Disqus a suitable option for comments - a unpleasant experience for readers.)
A frequent occurrence: a blog has no commenting ability and instead the blog author encourages readers to discuss their blog entry on Twitter(?!), or Hacker News or some other discussion forum. For some authors discussion is not very important - it's more about sharing the story to as many sites as possible. I can understand that, but I hope comments remain an important part of many blogs.
> I never said we don't need comments. We probably do not need it on blog.
But my blog has some tutorials, people may want to ask me something, if we don't talk on a personal blog self-hosted, we have to rely on some centralized platforms/socials. There are already lots of them!
>As I mentioned in my comment the disadvantage of that is people abuse it.
If someone (you) write "penis" in other languages, I can delete (as I've done) it. There's a spam filter for these stupid things, but I hope people are a bit more adults than who write "penis" in Indian on someone's blog! =)
HN and Reddit are already walled gardens today, in the sense that they are in no way federated with other sites, and they both reserve the right to delete content at any point. There isn't much different between a blog that links to a Facebook post asking people to "discuss this post on Facebook" than doing the same with HN or Reddit.
There are plenty of reasons to avoid Facebook specfically - tracking across the web, real name policy, per-user algorithmic feed, selling info, and many other things. None of them apply to HN, and I am pretty sure most of them don't apply to reddit either.
I agree that having comment sections on blogs can be problematic. Nobody wants to make an account on a random blog site just to make a comment, and you need explicit accounts to stop spam. Comment histories are also nice to have.
There's an interesting middle ground in this space called Cactus Comments [0]. They're part of the Matrix ecosystem. The idea is to create a Matrix "room" for every post so that anyone with a Matrix account can comment in that room. Then, at the bottom of the post there's a preview of the most recent messages in the room, along with (optionally) a text box for anonymous comments.
Admittedly, setting this up to be self-hosted is pretty involved, especially if you're not already with Matrix. But the Cactus people make it easy to get started with their (free) public servers.
I agree completely. I disable all comments on my blogs and if people want to discuss then Twitter or Reddit seem to make much more sense.
Otherwise you end up spending a ton of time just removing spam, never mind trying to make sense of and respond to the comments that may get randomly left years after the original post.
I think so that way people stumbling on it etc can give feedback to the writer. I often will hit some technical blog that mostly answers my question and then someone in the comments will correct the author or even ask a question that further expands on what the blog post is about.
In all these other platforms, he is not the moderator of the comments. They can be censored or removed, and one of those corporations can decide that now you are not allowed to have that opinion anymore.
Sadly, it appears they have discontinued the free plan:
> But anyone who hasn’t created an account by December 31 [2021] at 11:59pm Eastern won’t be able to create an account via our open registration flow. Instead, they’ll need to choose a paid account, or get a Free account through another channel. Read on for details.
OP, please, spellcheck your articles. I found so many typos and spelling errors in that article, I don't even know where to start. So, I'll just start with this: please use a spellchecker - they're free! Otherwise, keep up the good work and be free (self-host / own your stuff)! There's a back-to-roots movement going on, where people want to own their stuff. The more, the better!
There are still a few grammatical errors in the post. But do not worry about fixing them. It was clear that English is not your first language. That is perfectly alright. The meaning of your post was very clear. And that is all that matters.
Every effort to maintain a personal website is inspiring. I love it. There's still a better balance to be had re: maintenance vs. autonomy, and I hope a hosting/publishing service finds that someday and offers it in a way that attracts a broad following.
- the lack of customization meants I didn't get stuck for hours and hours trying to find a template or choose a statist site generator, or tweak CSS, choose images, etc.
Ultimately I moved to github pages where at least I had to get jekyll (which is kinda crap imo, but works), but I have spent a lot of time tweaking it and I still don't like the design. (https://kodare.net if you want to see)
I think there was also a time when many people assumed--not knowing any better--that something published on Medium was more authoritative than something on a random personal blog. I used to sometimes cross-publish to Medium when something was going to be linked from a company newsletter if we wanted it on a third-party site. But I haven't done that for a few years now.
While it's nothing great, I just use Blogger/Google. It's free, clean, exportable, and can handle traffic spikes. You can run ads but don't have to; I don'tI've thought about moving to Wordpress and went so far as to start a more focused blog there at one point. But I dropped it and just continued to use Blogger.
Yeah, I think monetization and discovery were drivers to Medium. Apparently that comes with a lot of trade-offs in terms of autonomy. It was hard enough to play ball with Google as an independent site, and I'm not sure people find that worthwhile at all any more.
Right. But even ignoring all that NFT stuff that others are commenting on, isn't your offering with Papyrus just somebody else's playground not owned by the content creator? Whereas the author has gone for a setup that fundamentally they own: they could move it anywhere, not tied to any provider, pretty easily. There are a ton of options for hosting a jekyll blog.
No disrespect to what you've built with Papyrus, because it does look good, but you've completely missed the point. Isn't this post more about taking back personal ownership and control of content than ceding to yet another "platform"? Here's the third paragraph:
Because I want that my content is my content and not my content on the “Medium’s hands”, plus Medium is not what was in the beginning.
Some of us don't want a "Medium alternative": we want ownership and control. Papyrus might be great now but, guaranteed, if it becomes as successful as Medium, I seriously doubt it will avoid devolving into a similar mess. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Again, with no disrespect to the quality of what you've built, in this context screw yet another company that wants to line its founders' pockets off the back of other peoples' content. I wish you well, but I don't believe what you're offering is what the author of the post is talking about (though it will no doubt suit some, and that's OK).
> Whereas the author has gone for a setup that fundamentally they own: they could move it anywhere, not tied to any provider, pretty easily
I haven't looked into Papyrus but there are many non-Medium platforms that let you export your data easily in standard formats.
Personally my biggest issue with Medium is them imposing a paywall on my writing without giving me a decent salary for it, OR hiding my content. Not a good choice.
That NFT hype makes it look like yet another get-rich-quick pyramid scheme to me. Can you please clearly explain exactly what you're using NFTs for that you couldn't easily and less destructively implement some better way, without burning so much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the environment?
If your business can't grow and succeed without shilling NFTs, then you don't have anything of actual value. NFTs aren't magic pixie dust that make everyone rich. Unless you're running a money laundering operation.
It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum NFTs' environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but it's currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption, and within 1 - 3 years will likely be reduced to the cost of running something like the Tor network: https://ethereum.org/static/6b5219d652112f88202e9768e27f5db1.... (Especially since there's no specific marginal energy cost to minting or trading an NFT, so it can't be compared to something like choosing whether or not to drive a combustion engine car.)
To me the massive concern is all the financial fuckery. Anyone trying to shoehorn tokens (fungible, non-fungible, or semi-fungible) into something is almost always the reddest of flags.
For one, the proposed "token-gating" makes no sense. What's to prevent someone from buying one token and then sharing the private key with a million people? You can try to create a sophisticated token-sharing detection system with invasive fingerprinting and tracking and proxy/VPN detection and such, but it's endless whack-a-mole and it's barely feasible for the world's top companies, on top of being the antithesis of what cryptocurrency people stand for. This is why consensus algorithms like proof of work exist in the first place: you can never ensure one identifier (a private key, an IP, whatever) = one person. They have to sacrifice something fungible and scarce.
And "Your super-fans can collect NFTs of your published content." Just... what? Why? This strikes me as ridiculous and, frankly, cringe-inducing. It makes the whole thing feel gross.
> It's odd to me that people focus so much on Ethereum NFTs' environmental impact. It's certainly not good, but it's currently nowhere close to Bitcoin's consumption ...
In a conversation about NFTs why is it odd to focus on NFT's environmental impact? Most people who hate NFTs also hate bitcoin, I assume they also hate racism, child labour, and COVID. Do you also find it odd that people don't mention their feelings about those issues when talking about NFTs?
I totally agree with meowface that bigger problem with people shilling Bitcoin and ICOs and NFTs and other shams is that they're obviously snake oil salesmen pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.
But when trying to deprogram cryptocurrency cult members, it's easier to focus of the more tangible irrefutable problems like the environmental and heath impacts, and ask them to justify why they don't give a shit about the environment and the health problems of burning coal.
Because simply explaining to them that they've been duped by scammers is a lot harder sell -- they've bought into the cult and are shilling it themselves, so they don't want to admit it.
The same way it's harder convince a Trump supporter that he's a con-man, and easier to get them to admit that they don't think injecting bleach and inserting an ultraviolet flashlight up their rectum is a good way of curing Covid-19.
If course there will always be a round of them parroting stock excuses like "Some day <insert name of scam here> will be environmentally friendly!!!" or "Only 79% of the energy is produced by burning coal!!!" or "Wasting as much non-renewable energy as possible will hasten the adoption of renewable power!!!" or "Proof of Stake!!!".
But those are all bullshit excuses that are easier to shoot down than convincing somebody they're not a member of a cult and they're not going to get rich quick if only they shill the cult's products a little harder.
(Because they're circular arguments, analogous to Trump's ongoing excuse that he was going to publish his wonderful health care plan any day now -- you just wait, and "Proof of Stake" is just Oligarchy on Steroids that certainly isn't going to help any starving artists, and any useful financial services end up being as centralized as Visa and PayPal anyway, but much less trustworthy and run by incompetent unregulated criminal scammers just like MtGox, with exactly the same exit strategy as Confido if they're not shut down by the Feds first).
> I totally agree with meowface that bigger problem with people shilling Bitcoin and ICOs and NFTs and other shams is that they're obviously snake oil salesmen pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.
Oh, yeah, they are definitely a ponzi scheme, MLM or, at best, Beanie Babies. At some point this will all come crashing down, either by regulation or lack of new patsies.
It's like the dotcom boom all over again; where co-workers, friends and family are all buying these crazy stocks at insane valuations.
I was just curious why the meowface was focusing on the "whataboutism" of Bitcoin vs. ETH.
I was (first and primarily) focusing on the environmental impact for the reasons I explained above, but then (secondly) asking the NFT shills to explain exactly how NFTs solved any problems that couldn't be much more efficiently and less destructively solved, because I know they can't and won't answer. Their silence on the matter speaks volumes about their lack of integrity and competence.
Some people simply don't have working bullshit detectors, and those are the ones who need to be influenced emotionally instead of logically, because that's how they were influenced by scammers in the first place, and no amount of logic will change their minds.
When I wrote that, I hadn't even seen the ridiculously cringy part about "Your super-fans can collect NFTs of your published content" and the link to https://papyrusnft.io/ yet, but all I can say is "just wow".
You've REALLY got to be gullible to fall for that kind of unmitigated bullshit, but unfortunately a whole lot of people are. I mean, the background color and stock artwork and ad copy on papyrusnft.io is just mind-bogglingly tacky and ridiculous, but maybe it serves the same function as the frequent and obvious mis-spellings in Nigerian Prince scam emails.
Sorry, maybe I worded my comment poorly. I'm not trying to say "why are you talking about Ethereum and not Bitcoin instead?", or something like that.
Here, it's a tiny bit like trying to link NFTs to racism because there's a certain subset of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who are Nazis. (And some do say this.) Not the best analogy, I know, but in this case Ethereum is commonly thought of as environmentally unfriendly basically due to guilt by association with Bitcoin.
Ethereum does have an excessive environmental impact, because proof of work is fundamentally environmentally unfriendly. But the point is it isn't a very big impact right now and probably won't ever be an impact because before it can reach that point there'll probably be a shift to an algorithm that reduces the energy cost to that of any other ordinary software. And even if it did pose such an impact right now, NFTs pose no direct marginal energy cost (though they do so indirectly by encouraging more use of the network, which raises the incentive to mine).
In my opinion, there are so many other good arguments against (most/nearly all) NFTs that when you pull this one out, it instantly causes the opposition to flag you as someone not worth listening to. Especially when it's couched in dramatic language, like that NFTs are "burning so much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the environment", as the previous commenter wrote.
It's good they're trying to find less environmentally-costly alternatives, but the mere existence of this domain makes the whole enterprise feel much more sketchy and greasy to me, honestly. Not to mention the content on it.
What makes it even sketchier and greasier is ahelwer's spurious claim that PapyrusNFT made any claims on that site that they're "enabling non-Ethereum chains which will address the environmental concerns".
And the bizarre, unfocused little Japanese company I found at the "Company" link at the bottom of the page doesn't inspire any confidence either.
Scammers assume that if they just toss out a URL and say it proves something, most people won't even bother to check, and just believe them. And unfortunately that trick usually works.
Even if the site actually did claim what ahelwer falsely claimed it claims, the claim that all the environmental problems will be solved "real soon now" is such a painfully tired cliché that shills and apologists make all the time, but never deliver on.
It worked for Trump shilling his "incredible" health care plan that he'd reveal "real soon now", so why not apply it to shilling NFTs to the same gullible suckers? Incredible, indeed.
If that's true, then why doesn't everybody just immediately stop minting NFTs and mining Proof of Work cryptocurrency and wasting so much energy and burning so much coal right now, and simply wait until the problem's solved, since the shills always claim that it will be solved "real soon now"?
Can't those money-laundering pump-and-dumping spoiled brats with $300,000 to burn wait another two weeks for the bragging rights to yet another computer generated monkey cartoon?
Please provide links showing where exactly on https://papyrusnft.io/ it says anything at all about "enabling non-Ethereum chains" or "the environmental concerns".
I clicked on every link to see if there was anything about what you claim, and I can find absolutely no useful information about anything at all on that site, and certainly not the words you quoted.
I performed google searches for "site:papyrusnft.io ethereum" and "site:papyrusnft.io environmental" and that also turned up absolutely nothing (although the site is indexed by google).
I even used the tab key to enumerate through every link on the web site to make sure I was not missing any due to the manifestly horrendous web page design.
The ridiculous clip-art icons over the bullshitty captions "What you feel", "Your decision", "Words for posterity", "Future projections" aren't even links, they're just decorations, like lipstick on a pig.
And the only actual link with any more information that I found was to their twitter feed, which was mostly in Japanese, but made some typically scammy claims in English like:
>You can also use Papyrus to make your words NFTs, and then sell those NFTs on Opensea.
>"I can't make art" "I'm not interested in art" so "I can't be an NFT creator.", Is that true? Why not write your thoughts on a blockchain and make it an NFT?
>NFT can make any digital data unique, and NFT art is only a small part of it.
Can anybody please explain exactly how NFT can make any digital data unique? What does that even mean?
There's also a link to some shady little Japanese "Lifestyle Change" / "Blockchain Technology" / "Creative Solution" / "System Development" / "Ethereum staking agency business" company called Moblo. Who are they, anyway, and what is their actual focus, credentials, reputation, and qualification to be in this business?
Those silly tweets, plus that shallow landing page of glossy hype devoid of meaningful content, not to mention that bizarrely unfocused and unqualified "Lifestyle Changing" Japanese company, all make it pretty obvious this is a scam that is targeting gullible suckers, and they have no idea what they're talking about.
Your unsubstantiated claim that PapyrusNFT is making an also unsubstantiated claim that "they're enabling non-Ethereum chains which will address the environmental concerns" sounds about as believable as Trump's repeatedly broken promises to roll out his wonderful health care plan any day now, which he never did.
So I'm simply asking you to prove what you claimed, and if you can't, then explain why you claimed it.
Why are you making false excuses for these scammers by quoting words that aren't even on the web page, if you're not an NFT guy? What kind of guy are you then?
That's certainly not what you claimed it said! You said, and I quote:
>"they're enabling non-Ethereum chains which will address the environmental concerns"
That's quite a leap from "You can choose a chain from multiple chains to write to" to "they're enabling non-Ethereum chains which will address the environmental concerns".
Name which chains they are they enabling, and tell us exactly how each of those chains "address the environmental concerns", and how long we have to wait until they do that, and also explain how you know that even though it doesn't say it on the web site.
I asked for specifics, not handwaving and optimistic guesses and links to totally unrelated web sites.
Are you affiliated with that https://papyrusnft.io/ web site you're shilling, or the Japanese company "Moblo", and is that how you get your insider information that they don't publicly reveal on their web site, or did you just make up the convenient details about "environmental concerns", and also fabricate the connection between papyrus.so and papyrusnft.io?
Either way, you're shilling if you're making up stories or refusing to reveal your affiliation.
So please explain the relationship between https://papyrusnft.io/ , which you were the first person in this discussion to shill, and https://papyrus.so/ , which is what this discussion is actually about.
There are no links or references from papyrus.so to papyrusnft.io, or the other way, so how do you know that they even have anything to do with each other? Why are you saying they're related and doing business together?
Did you really expect people not to check your claims?
And honestly, after reading the web page you linked to, and their tweets, how can you actually believe they're not scammers? Are you really that gullible?
I think you need to replace your bullshit detector if you can't see something as obvious as that, and if you think it's a good idea to shill https://papyrusnft.io/ by making up stories about how they're addressing the environmental issues that they don't even claim themselves.
Ethereum is the only major smart contract chain that uses proof of work. Any other chain would use proof of stake, which doesn't have the environmental concerns you laid out. If you're passionate enough to take the time to write giant posts on this topic maybe take the time to learn something about it.
I have no relation to either of those places and found that website via an internet search for the terms "papyrus NFT". Your tone is weird and erratic so this will be my last interaction with you on this thread.
It's completely understandable why you don't want to continue the conversation or admit to having read something that refutes your false claims, since you posted weird erratic misinformation in the first place, and don't want to answer any questions clarifying why or correct your mistakes. Please don't shill and make up apologetic lies and lame excuses for sketchy scammers in the future, and try not to fall for such blatantly deceptive scams again, or "hodl" your breath until those scammers whose water you're carrying actually "address the environmental concerns".
But who knows, maybe Trump will finally roll our his "incredible" health care plan and build his wall, once he gets reinstated as President in two weeks!
> With 1000 subscribers paying $7/month, you'll earn $79,800 per year.
Do you have many users who reached this goal?
(What I dislike most about platforms like Medium/Youtube/AppStore is that they lure people to work for them and giving them false hope where the winner is the platform, so it would be great to see some transparency for a change, and have some actual statistics like we have in the real economy.)
For some reason everyone around me was treating it for a while as if it was a curated source of high quality writing (and I have seen people brag about writing Medium articles). I am still confused how anyone saw it as anything more than a blogging platform.
Was it? I remember it as a platform that always tried to force me to signup for a free account even just to read a blog post. It appeared in the age of Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous which were much less hostile.
Like many VC-backed startups I think it was a bit of a darling for a while and then there was the inevitable realisation that something needed to change if it was going to have a viable business model.
That's the charitable version. After all, they did amass a decently sized userbase in its darling stage, all ideological and disruptive as it was.
Now it's yet another domain I exclude from search results.
It went downhill since its launch. Some things that I enjoyed when it came out.
1. it had any easy way to bring on board a collaborator to help out with a draft article (without them needing to create an account, for example).
2. it had a clean and minimalist UI, and better editor experience than tinyMCE and other popular editors at the time
3. while the curation process wasn't open (as far as I recall), I was expecting it to lead towards a centralized blogging platform (a la reddit) but where personal submissions are front and center.
The VCs poured a ton of money into paying popular writers to write on Medium, which got a lot of attention. That lasted until everyone learned that the VCs needing to cash out meant that Medium needed to sell ads and behavioural data, and that also meant that user-hostile things like dark SEO patterns were seen as necessary.
It did somehow manage to have a lot of good content, but it made it too difficult to access. I haven't looked at any Medium stuff in a long time, but if I recall correctly highlighting text wouldn't allow you to copy it, but would allow you to tweet it. Infuriating if you want to save a link to it and a snippet someplace for your own use.
If you have a copy of it, you have a backup. Which is good, but not really groundbreaking. You still depend on the hosting provider who lets you keep your stuff on their servers.
You are always going to depend on someone - web host, or VPS host, or colo service, or ISP (if the server is in your house). Not to mention domain registrar.
The webpage is "yours" as long as you are the one in control of content, can migrate anywhere else without users knowing, and third parties can only disable your site but not edit. Both github pages and machine in the basement satisfy that rule.
With a static site, the git repo is the main database and the stuff that's publicly accessible is the copy. I could seamlessly host it on three different providers at once (GitLab, Netlify, DigitalOcean) if I cared to, all mirroring my repo. I can't lose access to my repo unless GitLab decides to ban me and I simultaneously wipe my hard drive.
This is very different from a typical VPS, where if I'm not conscientiously making backups my provider could pull the plug and wipe my data.
Some of the greatest posts are paywalled, and the user experience for it it's terrible. The benefit of Medium is the exposure and that if you're good enough, you can actually be paid via Medium Partners Program, but on the other hand, these benefits are at the expense of decentralization and owning your content. You don't own your content when you publish on Medium.
Once it happened to me that a post wasn't open to read and it claimed I could read it for free if I signed up. Then I went ahead and signed up, and it was still paywalled[0]. The experience was frustrating.
Yes, I'm not against profitting off your content, though you can make money with your own blog as well, with the upfront cost of having to build your own audience, of course. I'm not saying it's easy, just saying it's also possible without the need giving away your content rights/ownership.
What I am against it's to clickbait your readers into "Sign up to read for free", then you sign up and find out you still have to pay. It leaves you with a poor taste impression, because of the bait and switch dark pattern right there, after you've given out your precious personal information at the sign up form.
I'm a big fan of the GitHub Pages + Jekyll + Cloudflare "stack" for getting a fast, cheap (free, usually) website or blog up and running.
If you're strong in a particular ecosystem you can switch Jekyll out for something like Hugo, but Jekyll continues to be rock solid for my purposes, and there's usually a guide or plugin for additional features.
I'll usually want to use a custom domain, like carrot.blog, in front of a GitHub Pages site. But it's not strictly necessarily if you're OK with something.github.io
The idea is that Apache/PHP handle the loading/displaying of markdown files from a directory, so to add a new post you just create a new markdown file. It's very basic, but it's easy to customize with a bit of HTML/CSS/PHP.
Congratulations. A big win for Internet decentralization! (It's not sarcasm, I'm all in for having your own space on the Internet).
I invite you to try Grav CMS[0], it's what I use for my personal blog[1].
Grav is a flat-file CMS, it doesn't use RDBMS. It's highly performant. I also have CloudFlare in front of it, but it was already faster than the typical WordPress you see elsewhere.
Grav also adheres to the latest PHP version, so you don't have to carry along legacy syntax around like other CMSes. Its error pages are comprehensive and the stack traces are actually readable.
I personally think it's the best out there technically speaking, the best of both worlds (Flat-file and at the same time, dynamic instead of compiling the build every new post), the only drawback is that its plugin ecosystem it's still in the early stages, so if you're to create marketing landing pages or similar, you'll still fall short there.
It's supposed to work just by extracting the .zip or .tar into the 'public_html' directory. At least that was my experience, I run it from the cheapest cPanel shared hosting I could find (the ones of $3/month). My cPanel shared hosting provider also provides me with SSH access, and I got used to it as well.
I could have gone with the VPS route, but the typical cPanel hosting come with sensible defaults that just works like it's supposed to.
What I did was to download one of these skeletons (prefilled with data) and start from there. It's almost 99.9% guaranteed to work that way.
The Admin plugin helps a lot to reduce that obscurity you mention.
Full disclosure: I'm not a PHP developer as well, I know nothing from it, I only know Python, some C++11 onwards and Delphi.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. Great to see Grav still going, and still lead by Andy Miller.
Andy Miller was the founding design lead for Joomla! CMS. He also started the first template/theme shop and club long before there was anything like it in the CMS world.
An idea for someone. Set up a site "adiosmedium.com" or whatever with a list of these blogs, and an RSS aggregator link of all of them. Take submissions based on old medium link and new blog link. Proof being a post on the medium link saying "i'm moving to ...", and a clear history of good posting.
I moved my blog off Google-hosted Blogger a year or so ago, and the last thing I wanted was another place that would go directions I don't care for and have to migrate off again. Moving blog hosts is a huge pain in everything.
I went to self-hoseted/self-rendered Jekyll, with Discourse embedding handling comments, and it's been working fairly well so far. Cloudflare caching covers traffic spikes fairly competently, and if I want to host the content on something else, I literally just have to upload the rendered files.
As a bonus, it now works perfectly well without cookies or Javascript. Not perfectly, there are some JS features that improve things, but it should render and be entirely readable, with images, without JS.
This is one of the reasons i am not implementing a rich text editor and instead i am using Notion as CMS.
A lot of individuals and companies are already using Notion and this makes it easier for them to write blog posts with it.
I know that for developers like me and you markdown is everything we need but non technical people need something more high level, just the act of embedding an image in markdown is very difficult for them
Looks cool! I'm not a much of a blogger so I'm probably not your target audience, but I've love to see more of an ecosystem around notion.
I would say I'm personally aittle dubious of the only two options being free and $50 a month. You might want to consider another price point in there in between. Although I'd do see that you're still in beta so I recognize the prices might not be final anyways.
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty you can publish a static blog using Github Actions + AWS S3 + Cloudflare for cheap - the only cost being the price of the domain per year.
> Additionally, if you create or log into your Medium account through a third-party platform (such as Apple, Facebook, Google, or Twitter), we will have access to certain information from that platform, such as your name, lists of friends or followers, birthday, and profile picture, in accordance with the authorization procedures determined by such platform
This isn't a Medium issue. It's the "price you pay" for the convenience of such social-based authentication.
I did this at the end of last year, exported all my data from medium, ran medium-2-md, cleaned up a few posts and was away.
I now use Pelican with GitHub Pages and any new posts are generated from a single org file. It’s a really frictionless workflow.
You can even have medium import your new posts with a link back to your own site and if you want your site to look like medium, medius is a nice theme but needed a little tweaking to get it working with the latest pelican version.
These articles always prompt people to share what blogging platforms they recommend. I decided to create a list that references all of the medium alternatives. Happy to add others that people know about.
I am currently in the process of moving things over from hosted services to Hugo / Netlify.
For the last month I've been messing around with various ssg's and jamstack solutions. I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex, since my goal is to focus on publishing work over personal website development. Sometime I always struggle to find a balance with and why services/social media probably won out for me for so many years. Hugo has just been a more straight forward approach.
Like the author, I've been thinking a lot about my work and where it's published/owned/controlled by and determined that I want to port all my relevant social post over the years back to my website for archival purposes. Maybe a Posts/Feed type website, more like tumblr, that is self contained and relatively simple to move/manage and maintain.
> I spent a week tinkering with 11ty and loved a lot of my time with it and would love to explore it more, but after a few days it ended up being far too complex
Yes, unfortunately is not easy, if you want a more fast and easy way is use GitHub Pages. With Jekyll is very fast to set up (like 15-20 mins), I think it's the same with Hugo (I've never deleved in Hugo).
You don't have the full control on your content like if it's hosted on your server, because you have to rely on GitHub, but you have your content and is a lot better than any other blogging platform and is also easier to maintain.
For me was a goal to understand how Jekyll works self-hosted, I love learn new thing, that's also why I moved my blog to my VPS.
Anyone on Medium writing about programming languages trends should also be pre-screened and have their own original (non-forked) source code repository listed on their profile. Each time I see a Medium article in form of "Top [insert number] [insert topic] to [insert a verb]", it nudges me ever closer to canceling my subscription.
I remember when Medium first came out, it was "all about the words". Today it couldn't be further from that. Medium articles are slow, janky, filled with pop ups and paywalls.
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I use gitlab pages which lets you use any static site generator (not just jekyll) and is otherwise just as good as github pages. I use hugo for ahelwer.ca although I really should get around to putting effort into learning/customizing the site instead of using the default gitlab theme.
Yes but GitHub is “another garden”, surely is way more open than Medium but you still have to rely on other resources (Microsoft), you are not the true owner of your content.
Instead, using my own VPS I can have the full control on my blog (yeah there are still the laws obviously).
Anyway Jekyll has some limitations with GitHub, but is a lot easier to setup, especially for the comments and builds.
Given that you have all your content locally and can push whatever you want as long as it's static, it seems like the only part you "don't own" is the maintenance.
I think the hate for Medium is really overstated, it's quite absurd for people wanting it to die altogether, just because it has some annoying UX.
Everybody wanting to mess with self hosting a blog very much should do so, but to some it's just a minor side thing of low importance, and in that case, Medium serves a purpose. It's free and you can even link your domain to it, also for free. The writing experience is quite good and you can publish your articles for free or behind the paywall. There's no ads.
We really live in the age of entitlement to not be thankful that it is an option, even if it's not for you. Instead, we wish for it to "die".
Subjective as it is, the new blog is harder to read and looks worse than the new one. It has no internal search. It won't feed into any recommendation engine, there's no audience management, feature pages, newsletters (I assume) and a whole bunch of things you get at Medium. It's now impossible to follow the blog automatically, except for the very small group of people still using RSS readers.
So what have you achieved exactly? You spent time to make something worse, not better. If it's just for technical tinkering, fine. If it's to "liberate your content", this too is a vague claim. Medium doesn't delete content and has an export option allowing you to back up posts should you want to.
If you want people to pay you for writing, you end up doing something. Right now "something" seems to consist of walling it off, begging for donations, or running ads. Everybody would love a better option.
If all you want is to be read, you have more options. But it's still hard for people to find you, since everyone else has the exact same options. Turns out lots of people will write for free.
Yes, I agree. The only trouble is where all the people are inside this garden…. (that -fortunately- is not the case of Medium but other socials are very centralized in one name: Meta). For that every little effort to open the fences of some gardens is precious. Translated: go away from any sort of centralized web.
Do we really need comment section on blogs? The blog comments are not particularly helpful to have any discussion at least not the way one can have here on HN, reddit, Twitter, etc,.
Besides the poor user interface, the users have to sign up to comment. Why would they sign up when they can have discussions on above platforms? If one does not implement sign up but allow users to comment just by entering username (like the way this blog did) then people start abusing the comment section.
I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I understand that this is terrible idea if reddit/hn chose to be walled gardens someday but then do we have other better solution?