Medium

From IndieWeb

Medium is an article hosting silo, and as of June 2016, the owner of Superfeedr[1].

Why not

Why not to use Medium, see:

How to

How to migrate away

The best option to migrate away from Medium is currently micro.blog.

Note that micro.blog explicitly has medium to long form blog posting support:

See https://help.micro.blog/2019/medium-import/ for instructions on how to migrate from Medium to micro.blog.

For other options, see [[Exporting_your_data]

How to update canonical URLs

Medium can add a Canonical URL when importing posts. To update/set a canonical URL of an existing post, modify the story settings > Advanced Settings > Customize Canonical Link [2]. This will help sites know that your site is the primary version of the content.

Features

Medium provides the following features:

POSSE

It is possible to manually POSSE articles to Medium via their import tool. Automatic publishing tools that previously worked were shut down around 2017.

Manual POSSE

  1. Publish on your own site. Copy the permanent link's URL.
  2. Click on your avatar in the top right corner.
  3. Click on Import story.
  4. Paste in the URL.
  5. Edit the post on Medium if it took in a footer or put content in the wrong place (a header into the Medium title, for example).

Medium will automatically add an “Originally published at” note to the bottom of the post. It will also add a rel="canonical" link to the page pointing to your original post, making it so parsers know to get the post from your website when they are looking for the canonical version.

Automatic POSSE

As described in Creating Medium stories via RSS, Medium used to have an IFTTT trigger which allowed publishing from RSS. However this has since been removed. Remy Sharp set up a cross-poster in 2018 but has not posted to Medium since 2020.

WordPress Plugin

  • Update the WordPress plugin has been deprecated and will no longer be supported. This maybe related to Medium shutting down their write API.

    Unfortunately, we are unable to support the WordPress plug-in any further. As this is an open-source tool, we suggest you file a ticket for the community to review and fix. Additionally, you can always manually import your stories into Medium using our import tool:

https://medium.com/p/import I am sorry for the inconvenience, and if you have any specific questions please let me know.Medium WordPress.org Plugin Support Page

IndieWeb Examples

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith is using Medium's API to automatically post copies of articles to Medium: Syndicating to Medium.

Shane Becker

Shane Becker is manually POSSEing his articles to Medium since at least 2013-08-08 (maybe longer) e.g.:

Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks is manually POSSEing his articles to Medium since 2014-04-21, e.g.:

Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer manually POSSE’d a blogpost to Medium on 2015-07-29:

He described his problems with the process in a follow up post that was first published on Medium and then manually PESOSed back to his own blog, 2015-07-30:

David Mead

David Mead used the WP plugin to POSSE a blogpost to Medium on 2016-01-24:

Other Examples

Examples from more people with independent sites:

Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston started “experimenting with x-posting to Medium” on 2015-08-07:

POSSEing likes

If you post a like of a Medium article, what is the best way to POSSE that like to Medium?

Exporting your data

Official Export

Official documentation. Export format is HTML with microformats

  • go to https://medium.com/me/export
  • click the export button
  • wait for an email
  • click the link to download a .zip file full of HTML documents
  • these have a footer appended linking to the medium url that has the date exported
  • they break embedded tweets and youtube videos,
  • they replace external links with a redirect to a /r/?url= link that obviously doesn't work locally or on a server without you adding code

Medium-to-Markdown

Python script to output a Markdown version of a Medium post: https://github.com/markbiek/Medium-To-Markdown (If you have experience using this, please make notes here.)

Medium-to-own-blog

Node.js package to convert to a Gatsby site: https://github.com/mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog

API is write-only

Issues

buggy rel-canonical implementation

If you set the rel-canonical for a post on Medium using their API, it both fails to do so correctly, and then resets (via JS?) the rel=canonical link to a medium.com URL, not what you set it to.

Downtime

Criticism

Nagware

Since at least 2017-08-19 Medium started showing modal popup nagware when viewing an article after you have read some number of articles that month. The dialog tells you how many Medium posts you've read to guilt you into signing up. (current limit is 3)

Nagware modal 2024-03-12

On mobile, e.g. viewing https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/marking-the-webs-35th-birthday-an-open-letter-ebb410cc7d42

Same article, on desktop:

Nagware modal 2018-05-29

Note the now 3 (used to be 14) articles per month limit since at least 2018-05-29, likely earlier.

Medium Nagware screenshot showing a modal obscuring the article saying you have read 3 articles and must now sign-up

From tweet: https://twitter.com/geddski/status/1001590716265512961 since at least 2018-05-29

"2017: maybe I should just use medium instead of my own custom blog?

2018: whew"

— @geddski May 29, 2018

Nagware modal 2017-08-19

Note the 14 articles per month limit since at least 2017-08-19, perhaps earlier.

Walled Garden / Content Farm

Promoting App over Web

Lightweight Marketing Articles

More of a criticism of *reading* Medium (e.g. clicking links through to Medium posts)

  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570227:

    The articles on medium.com seem to be lightweight, designed for marketing purposes. All carbs, no protein.

    …

    Lately it seems they are very much marketing pieces

    • more criticisms there that could be extracted and quoted like bad TOR UX, 'they do signal "low-quality"' / "not enough real world depth of experience behind them", iOS app crashes "using an iphone 4s with ios8 and medium crashes"
  • 2019-10-01 The gaming of Medium by clickbait merchants by John Naughton

Multiple Business Strategy Pivots

  • 2018-05-10 Shan Wang: Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners
  • 2018-05-11 Kelsey Sutton: ‘We had no idea that it was coming’: Medium pulls the rug from under publications
  • 2019-03-25 Laura Hazard Owen: The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present
  • 2021-03-23 Ross A. Lincoln: Medium Pivots Again, Offers Voluntary Buyouts to Editorial Staff
  • 2021-03-25 Mathew Ingram: Medium has pivoted so many times it has now come full circle
  • 2022-07-13 @tchambers: https://twitter.com/tchambers/status/1547017293791633408

    One more silo, on its way to dying. Bye, #Medium. So much better to go with open, indieweb, or federated solutions for long-form blogging. #microdotblog #writeas https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/business/media/evan-williams-leaving-medium.html

  • 2023-01-12 @kissane: (thread)

    As with Substack, there are always going to be a ton of people who very understandably feel like they have to keep quiet about the bad stuff because most writers live in various states of perpetual precarity—which is exactly why this clownshow history drives me up the wall. Tech companies buy new toys and throw away the old ones and real people get hurt.

  • 2023-02-10 @tonystubblebine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747015

    I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article.
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222
    It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:
    1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.
    2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.
    Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.
    What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.

3rd Party API Shutdown

In January 2019, Mastodon revoked all existing 3rd party integrations without prior notice. Over a week later, Medium announced that they had identified a spam vector in the publishing API and had to existing revoke tokens.

  • 2019-01-24 @macguru17: (tweet)

    What the hell… Did @Medium just really kill of *every* 3rd party integration?

    Without *any* prior notice. Issuing new tokens only by request through a *form*. And also just silently revoking *all* existing integration tokens. Suddenly, out of nowhere.

    https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/213480228-Get-integration-token

  • 2019-01-30 Write.as: Ending our Medium integration

    Sometime in the past few weeks, Medium abruptly deleted third-party access to their publishing API. There was no warning before, or notice after, this happened — apps just stopped working (including ours).

  • 2010-02-04 @MediumSupport: (tweet) (tweet)

    Hi Michael! We recently identified a spam vector emanating from our API, and took immediate steps to mitigate that. In doing so, some existing systems were disrupted, and we apologize. To request access to integration tokens, please contact us at yourfriends@medium.com.

Jumping on Mastodon Bandwagon

  • 2023-01-12 Medium embraces Mastodon — In which Medium launches a Mastodon instance rather than say, "just" supporting federation/ActivityPub directly on existing Medium profiles, which would have enabled such things like comments on Medium articles from across the web.
  • Criticism of separate Mastodon instance: bifurcating users's "Medium" identities across two accounts like that is not very user friendly, and adds the cognitive load of "which medium-ish thing/account should I post my medium-ish thoughts today?"
  • ^ more criticism: feels a bit more knee-jerk FOMO-based launch than something well thought out with their existing service(s), community, etc. E.g. they could have instead deployed their own instance of Bridgy Fed.

Censorship

Other


Articles


See Also

  • article
  • silos
  • Scribe: an alternative frontend to Medium. Example.
  • Criticism: 2024-10-38 WIRED: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium / The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.
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