Don’t get why people keep publishing free content ...

# feed

[antonis]

Don’t get why people keep publishing free content behind a paywall (aka Medium).
It’s not cool!

[LeoColman]

What would you suggest as an alternative?

[streetsofboston]

With Medium, it's about the only way to get your content noticed.
If you keep it free, your story will not get promoted or highlighted. Then, if you're not already well known, your story will get very very few readers. The difference is night and day

[Jacques Smuts]

I stopped posting on Medium, but I still get ±10 hits a day on my old Medium posts*. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re finding me on google or because of Medium recommendations though.

[LeoColman]

where are you posting now?

[Jacques Smuts]

personal site. Then I do the promotion myself. It’s non-ideal but it means I retain control

[Jacques Smuts]

also don’t have to worry about future unexpected monetization changes or whatever

[Czar]

Netlify is pretty cool for a lot of things, including developer blogs 🙂 (I have no affiliation)

[streetsofboston]

I do post Medium's so-called 'friend-links' in forums like this, making the posts free to read, circumventing the pay wall.

[Casey Brooks]

Dev.to is a great alternative to Medium, check it out!

[arekolek]

How come I never noticed any paywalls on Medium?

[streetsofboston]

@arekolek Maybe you do pay a monthly fee of $5, you get sent so-called ‘friend-links’ all the time, manage somehow to always select non-promoted/free stories or you manage to use your browser’s ‘incognito-mode’ in a very clever way 🙂

[Jacques Smuts]

A lot of people don’t make their articles premium. Which means you can view it without seeing the paywall. However Medium’s internal recommendation algorithm prefers to recommend premium articles. So free articles are not promoted as much.

[streetsofboston]

not promoted as much

They are actually promoted a LOT less 🙂

[Jacques Smuts]

I suppose this answers the original thread question 😅

[Dico]

I also never noticed a pay wall. Good to know.

[Czar]

I never browse Medium, so I've never seen a paywall, usually I get links to Medium articles from places like Twitter, Facebook, some programming themed portals, this Slack, etc. Didn't even know there was such a thing until I saw this discussion 🙂

[Dico]

Same

[streetsofboston]

That's probably because authors publish the 'friend-links' for their paywalled articles on social media.

[altavir]

I've read about how the paywall works only after I've actually published it. Replaced the link by friendly one afterwards.

[louiscad]

Maybe the paywall is not active in some countries? It is in France, but what's the one of people never had it?

[LeoColman]

Its active in Brazil, but only after you've read 5 posts

[LeoColman]

(5 are free)

[antonis]

I keep publishing on my old wordpress blog
Anyway, I just don’t get why Medium became the main publishing platform for tech articles

[altavir]

Well, it allows to easily estimate the interest in your article and comfortable feedback. It is not designed for articles on programming, but wordpress is not better.

[streetsofboston]

@antonis I see your blog has ads. Medium uses a paywall to monetize. At Medium there were long discussions how'd they monetize their authors' content and they decided to go for a paywall.

[Jacques Smuts]

I use Hugo for my site. Generates a nice and fast static site. Hosting is free on GitHub.io since I don’t run ads, and commenting and analytics are easy to implement with Disqus and Google Analytics respectively.