There has been renewed backlash against Medium lately. It stems from an idea that Medium has engaged in bait-and-switch tactics and generally has n...
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I posted my final Medium post recently, discussing why I've moved my technical writing to DEV and my thoughts on blogging/content ownership in general.
medium.com/@seangwright/im-moving-...
I'm glad to see reinforcement of the ideas of an open-platform and serving the greater development community - both writers and readers.
This will result in developers holding DEV to a higher standard, and I believe you guys are up to the task.
Thanks for the hard work creating a great place for us! ππ
I do not have much experience with Medium or DEV except publishing my first article on both platforms in the last few days.
I published it on Medium on the 30.05 and so far got three views, the same article I put on DEV on the 02.06 and till now got 62 reactions, 666 views, one comment, and 61 followers.
It looks like this is the right place to publish articles for developers. π
So much this. The way that DEV works to get information to people, doesn't discriminate against new users. It gives a fair platform that allows your voice to be heard.
π
I use Medium as both a developer and non-developer. I agree they do not target the developer community, but have been reasonably happy with them as a literary community. I post short stories, poems, and other editorial pieces there. They tend to have more of an audience there than my programming articles.
It's the story of startups that ultimately you need a way to make money, and unless registered as a non-profit, you need to make profit. Bait-and-switch is almost essential at this point, as the market has been conditioned to want products cheaply. Additionally, services which profit from user data (profiling, such as Facebook), skew the price point at which services can be offered.
It's a difficult challenge to market a community and balance it with financial needs. The pressure only increases as the community increases in size. Many places face an unfortunate situation of either switching the service, or going bankrupt.
I'm glad you'll be open with the intentions and progress of dev.to. Every bit of success will be met with a new set of challenges to deal with. :)
Oh yes, I definitely agree with all of this.
I recently just started using DEV and you mention in your Post Script the RSS feed import and canonical settings. I have to say, it's WAY better than doing it with Medium. So thanks to you and your team for making that process awesome! I think the idea of POSSE (indieweb.org/POSSE) is super important to the web going forward :D
Agreed. And what we really want to make sure is that it's both powerful and simple to do.
We're excited to build cool things along with the community!
"The broader developer community can also be harsh, exclusive, and downright mean. If you've hung out around here, you know that addressing this issue is also core to our mandate."
please never stop addressing this. a lot of learners quit after a visit to those exchange sites (looking at you stack!)
it is important for me to have a place where i can just absorb information and ask questions without negative feedback! i've become much better at expressing myself and coding simply because of the vibrant healthy community.
ps: i always like all 3 ( heart, pink-mane horse and tag emojis) but i dont really know the differences and/or uses, someone care to explain?
pps: if this was asked on some exchange network (:coughs) i'd be downvoted before i even reload the page.
Re: PS: the bookmark icon adds to your reading list.
The other two are the same for all intents and purposes but I promise weβll eventually find some more meaningful ways to differentiate the interactions.
And you can bet that inclusion will always always be front and center in our effort.
I've always wondered the diff between the horse and the heart. I guess i'll just use them both from now, βΊ.
Btw, DEV is awesome but it sets me off when i'm on a slow network and I click a link to a post. There's no sign that it's loading. Sometimes i click repeatedly. I feel something could be done to improve on that experience.
I think the difference between the heart and the unicorn is the unicorn aims to upvote the post...probably to make it a top/hot post for the week or so.
I might be wrong
This is why I always had a love and hate relationship with stack sites. They are invaluable in their sheer number of questions and how much I use it on a daily basis but some of the comment sections are so hostile I never could get myself to take part.
Contrary to Medium, Dev.to is not trying to replace you personal blog or publication, rather its trying to enhance it and bring it to a broader audience. That's why I like your platform and in my opinion that is the reason why Medium is failing, they tried to bait people to move to their platform completely and then lock them in.
I used to like Medium because of its minimal UI. But its UX now-days is really sub-par with its annoying pop-ups and limited capabilities for editing rich text.
I still use it for Index Zero (I write articles explaining computer science concepts) because it does have a pretty UI and my articles rely heavily on pictures and not much code. I actually like how the landing/home page looks.
But if I am writing articles where code is important and I need to be able to communicate things quickly, I use Dev.to.
I took a look at Index Zero. Nice job! Have you considered some sort of video like format as well for your content?
Thanks!
A video format would be interesting but I feel like at least for me personally I prefer static content to video content. I just feels easier to process because I can sort of move through the content at whatever speed I want, if that makes sense.
That is true. I just thought with your illustrations and explaining it could be a nice fit (ex. Khan Academy like).
First of all, whoever came up with that cover image should has a Madmen level marketing chop. Just clever and hilarious.
On the topic, now that I come to think of it, Medium free clapping feature might have been a form of manifestation of the bait-and-switch strategy. It's difficult to trace how many claps a user gives to an article. If you have a few close friends give your article as many as possible and it's behind the pay wall, then your article becomes a revenue generator for the wrong reason.
Yours truly, thank you. π
And yes, I agree with that assessment. Medium is a funny little game in terms of how the claps and the paywall and everything in that ecosystem fits together.
Admittedly I'm appalled by how easy I've earned from my articles though.
I have to admit, as a developer two main points led me to write here instead of Medium (I only have a few posts cross-posted there because some curators asked me to).
The syntax highlighting was a huge issue and something my readers would get upset with. I would post images of code and end up linking to repos or gists because I wanted to show the code, but I wanted it to not just look like a wall of code.
But what upset me the most about Medium is the enormous drop in engagement. Even with editor curation on certain posts (I have 3 that got picked up via the "programming" tag), I'm seeing significantly less views, reads, and comments. The whole promise of curated posts was around getting your content in front of Medium's audience. Had they not picked up those posts, I feel I would have had more engagement because my audience of developers doesn't appear to be Medium members. Maybe at most they are Medium users, but they don't seem to be paying for access to content.
Medium seems great if you want to write some shock-and-awe viral opinion piece for a mainstream audience, but you are totally right in saying its not part of the developer ecosystem.
Great article Ben!
I want to know what is the monetization model of DEV.
You know I have been reading and following articles on DEV from quite 2 years or so.
I'd love this platform to thrive but would like to know your thoughts, roadmap etc. :)
PS: sorry if it is documented somewhere.
We have a few pillars of monetization, some mature, some more in the works:
We would describe our model as hub and spoke: We have a core community platform we are not interested in trying to directly monetize all the traffic from, but as a company devoted to the dev community, we have a lot of adjacent areas where monetization fits nicely.
We think this is all pretty scaleable, but very longterm thinking. The fastest route to monetization (and often exploitation) are obtrusive ads and paywalls. These are not in the roadmap.
This stuff isn't all that well documented in any one place, but it should be.
Is there any plan for Reddit style donations? Like Reddit Gold but similar. If you can do humblebundle style book things I think that will be quite interesting too and promotes a lot of goodwill from the community.
A conf where topics and speakers came from the community!
Writers and readers meeting and discussion everything DEV/dev!
I would love to see something like the Technical Writers Summit find a home at an event like this!
Yes, please!
Amazing! I know some of them previously. Definitely looking forward for a conf (happy to volunteer!)
Wish you all the best. Looking forward to do participate in this journey with the community.
And, honestly, bait-and-switch is so common with Internet startups, they must teach it somewhere.
Yes they do. It's called growth hacking.
I will acknowledge I have been in rooms where these concepts are taught, and I have been witness to blatant instruction towards really unethical deception.
It's weird to be in a room where everyone laps it up without thinking through the broader ethics. I'm all for clever growth tactics, but when there is an obvious victim in the scenario it's fairly ludicrous.
There's gray area in that things do need to change, and sometimes a segment of a userbase can be affected negatively. But the way it's taught rarely offers concern for all of this.
It's quite difficult to question all this when you're someone desperate for traffic. Worryingly, we're seeing other industries like the gaming industry also applying these ideas. Fortunately, there are others out there who are writing about alternatives to "growth hacking" (ironically hosted at Medium). Perhaps we could serve the community better by offering and researching alternatives.
The root problem I guess is that growth brings more clout/bargaining power to the table when it comes to VC money I think. There is an incentive to produce growth by whatever means necessary.
I do cross-posting! That's one of the big reasons I love using
dev.to. I usually release an article here and whenever I finally get to it (and usually after the article's popularity wanes), I post it back to my blog and set the canonical url so that my personal blog has a canonical copy.It's such a killer feature and I don't think I'd be on here without it.
Yes, Medium was never really well suited for Devs. Lack of proper syntax highlighting is a good example.
But what Medium could give, and maybe one of the main reasons that it became popular among developers was reach and visibility for their posts. At least compared with unknown personal blogs.
But then Dev.to appeared and is blowing Medium apart. ;)
Never expected to write an Article and get almost 200 reactions in 2 days, and more than 200 likes and 50 retweets on Twitter.
There is a sense of community and sharing, being focused on developers, that Medium doesn't have. And their comment system is awful btw.
So keep the amazing job.
One thing that Medium has is that I never explored is their Parner program. A friend of mine managed to get 5$ in one week with an article, which I think is not bad. Ben, what is your opinion on this? Would a program like this possible within your vision for Dev?
This article is great...and is on the nose. Iβve been migrating to Dev recently because I can read in depth or light hearted articles while commuting. And Medium keeps asking me to pay for something I used to get for free.
But the biggest reason Iβm a daily Dev consumer is that Iβve noticed collaboration and genuine kindness. Im learning so much each time I read, and it makes me proud to be a part of such a great community. Thanks for creating this space.
After I got fed up with Medium, I set up a Hugo blog and hosted it on Netlify. Nice to have a free option, but it's a lot of machinery to go through to post - new branch,
hugo new blog.md, commit, push, create PR, make sure it looks good on the preview page, and then merge. For most of my posts, it takes longer to do all of that than to write it.For a while I wanted to own all my writing no matter what. I'm setting up some CMS stuff to make my personal site easier, but I really like this platform, Ben (and the rest of the team!) because it feels like it's the right place for developers to write things that are longer than a StackOverflow answer, but still a blog post (not a GitHub README etc..)
These days, I write some stuff here, some there, and a lot of it posted here using
canonical_url. Honestly the things that got me to start here were that the whole platform is open source, all my posts are stored as Markdown, and I can usecanonical_url.Nice insight! I remember first stumbling on Dev.to a few months ago. I can't really tell why, but I didn't like it much at first. It felt like a strange place. It might be the rather generic name, but I first thought it was one of this sites that basically steal articles, Q&A and documentation from other sites to make money. Well... first impressions can be so misleading sometimes. But since then it popped up more often in my search results and I spent more time here. Turns out I have rarely misjudged a platform more. You built a great place here and this is actually the first platform where I wrote more than one article because it' just fun! What I like most is that people write both long and short articles. So whenever I learn something that is not StackOverflow worthy, I can just dump it here and help some other people out. TL;DR: weird first impression, been soo wrong, really enjoy it now, keep it up!
Love that little review of your experience! Glad you're enjoying it here.
Thanks for being so open! Really refreshing!
I know that this post wasnt all about the money etc, but its obviously a driving factor, for both users, and DEV being able to survive long term.
I understand that you need to make money to be able to host and support such a great ecosystem. As long as you kept the core the same (free to publish/read without much bias in results) then I would have no issue paying a small fee for "premium" services, such as the mentor scheme and a lot of the newer features you are developing.
I would also have no issues with dev related adds which approached you directly (i.e. not google adsense/other shitty ad services). Look at how other dev targeted sites somewhat tastefully, css-tricks have a jobs board, stack overflow target job listings at users. I know you have your sponsors and sponsor posts, they are great. But if you are ever struggling for funds, there are options that people would pay for without it having to feel like bait and switch.
Im sure you have considered all of this, but I dont know how/if you would go about floating these ideas with a community that is migrating from services that exist purely for financial gain. So I probably speak for at least a small handful of people, I will pay for and support an honest product.
Keep being as you are with this, its exciting and new with a grassroots feel. We can all make this work, and if there are some costs associated, then if its honest π€·ββοΈ no issues here.
I never saw Medium as a place for neophyte writers to gather a following by latching on to topics that developers search for. There are enough blogs out there, and Medium rose above that mess by focusing on long form, detailed subjects. That happened to include software engineering topics.
I saw Dev as a place where community is built. Not another blogging platform. If the community here is overrun by bloggers it will be less useful for me. I have enough of that mostly useless noise from other sources.
Obviously this is your gig, carry on in whatever way best fits your needs. I just don't feel Medium has to be viewed as Evil for Dev.to to be awesome. :)
Great post. Honestly, I moved to DEV because a dev buddy of mine Michael Solati recommended me to move from Medium to DEV. I did catch myself subscribing to Medium a few times for some Dev articles I needed for a small project. It became a nuisance.
After reading this post I will be making the switch to DEV 100%.
Medium is a sellout... I've never seen any site that does what they do. I mean blocking content unless you link to it via Twitter, then it's free to read, otherwise, you need to pay, even if you contributed...
What I don't like about medium is that there are no legal / copyright checks when someone posts an article. I recently discovered a couple of my more popular how-to articles that I wrote back in 2009 had been copied verbatim (including all the code examples that contained my name as sample values) and published under someone else's name. They eventually took down the articles after I asked but I checked out the same author's other posts and he had copied many other peoples' work, as well. I'm hoping DEV takes the appropriate precautions.
I tried to give this post 23 claps.
Sadly... I couldn't so this will have to do.
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Great article! I could feel that something was wrong with Medium, but I couldn't put my finger on it until this article.
I think a great addition to DEV will be the possibility of buildingin personal blogs to host in our own sites (of course, linked to DEV). This is something that Hashnode is doing, and I really love how it's implemented.
I used to write on medium, but the paywall really irritated me, which is why I started looking around and found DEV. My experience here so far has been way beyond anything I expected for writing, not just the tools, but interaction with the community just seems easy. I appreciate all your work on this platform. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.
I never was a part of Medium and started my tech blog here, just because I've always had a feeling that all posts with code snippets shouldn't be on that platform - it wasn't easy to read any text with code at all.
This is music to our collective developer ears!
This post is both pleasing and inspiring.
Big respect for having the foresight to stick to principles that you know people will appreciate.
When I found DEV I got it instantly, and realised it was the thing I didn't even realise I was looking for (f**k Medium).
I had switched to here waaay before this Medium thingy. I've been blessed.. Really.. Looking forward to start writing my own articles very soon.
Can we do polls too? I've been thinking about this for a week now. Can we? Pleeeeaase?
I'm trying on medium to write technical articles for a month and see what the statistics are. Then I'll try DEV and I'd like to create a final article about the adventure and the experience and even the feedback.
Honestly Medium wasn't ever a great place for this. The sheer trouble I had getting code snippets to work nicely with gists (yes there are tools for this but it shows bad design in the first place) that I used Jekyll for a while.
I think a push from larger groups like Freecodecamp, Hackernoon etc. also helped, and many people published tutorials that spurred it's growth. The interface also felt fresh and clean which is why people liked it.
Medium started out better and slowly went that path, and Dev.to seems like a good community today, but what if it too goes the same path?
I love this excerpt, it really speaks to what i do most of the time on the internet (when in developer mode), i even use discord for answers now as its the modern IRC chat that i never had being a Gen-Zer
Since I found Dev.to, I progressively reduced my time spent on Medium until it was down to zero, I even stopped reading their "weekly summary". Paid subscription? Absolutely not worth it, time spent reading all of the clickbait on Medium is time wasted.
Dev.to is less click-baity, less "addictive" in a wrong way, and much more community oriented. Stopped caring about Medium a long time ago and my life is better for it.
It's never meant to be!
Why?
Simple!
They don't provide Syntax highlighting...
What are the plan for i18n on the platform? The DEV world is global now and being able to find localized content on a global platform has always been something sorely missing.
I'm glad I found this post before I started blogging, I was really ready to just jump into Medium and start writing.
This made me consider alternatives like having my own blog.
Many machine learning practitioners π½ would join the platform if dev.to supports MathJax π
How does DEV plan to make money? What's your business model?
Checkout Ben's explanation above on monetization options.
I also found this information kinda hard to find when I was learning about DEV's business a few months ago.
Will DEV be sustainably free on the long term? Medium is paid, for the avid reader:
These are why I switched to Dev from Medium and resonates with what you said.
Why Iβm moving away from Medium
Deepu K Sasidharan γ» Jun 13 γ» 3 min read
Does this apply to both Substack and Ghost too (even through I don't have an experience running a Ghost instance yet)?
I left medium along time ago and started searching other blogging websites which were built by developers and for developers.
I have tried Medium, even got to join some publications, but I just can't get into consistently posting on there. Something about it feels off to me
I assume it was meant to be part of the rah rah ontapanureship hustle culture ecosystem. I haven't seen any other subculture really thrive there.
What is a developer Relations role?
black magic to get a girl
Completely agree. And I love that DEV allows for discussions.
What I like the most about DEV is how it has no cost barriers for people to read and learn.
Thanks for the hard work and for creating a place where knowledge is accessible to all!
That's the problem when a startup uses VC funding, it's debt so VCs wants their Return on Investment... fast especially when stockmarket's liquidity is drying :)
I love Dev @thepracticaldev
Most of my technical articles were being published here.
I am a good fan of this great platform. β€οΈ
@ben and co.: are you all hiring? You sold me on the vision Of dev.to long ago and now I'm sold on the leadership. I really hope dev.to goes far.
Weβre not actively hiring this very moment, but maybe in the not-too-distant future. DMs are open, happy to chat more.
I genuinely thank you for existing.
Dev supports real Markdown. I had to do a lot of work to get my post reformatted to Medium and it still had severe limitations...
strongly agree , my article has more than 500 views in DEV , however the same content got only three view in meduim