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What are the best platforms to write technical articles?

Suraj Vishwakarma on October 10, 2022

Introduction One of the most asked questions in my DMs is to where put the technical articles. There is various platform for general art...
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Mohamed Mayallo

IMHO, the best platform you can use as a beginner is Medium. It has a very fantastic feature which is publications. Some publications you can join easily like Illumination push your reach significantly.

Unfortunately for Dev.to and Hashnode, it is pretty hard to be noticed even though your article has high value. It is like your article gets lost in the storm.

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Joe Mainwaring

I was a fan of Medium until they erected the pay wall. I avoid it like the plague now.

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Ryan Jentzsch

A few months ago they laid off I think it was 20% of their staff.
I understand that Medium is a business and wants to be profitable but pay walls where there are other competing content management/blogs/etc. That don't have an annoying barrier to content....

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Eduardo Cuomo

Remove cookies :-)

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Jakub T. Jankiewicz

Great alternative is FreeCodeCamp but you need to get accepted. Check How to Write for freeCodeCamp News.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

I don't how they accept/reject technical writers. I applied for the program in February but didn't get any message from their side.

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Jakub T. Jankiewicz

That's interesting, I've applied and got acceppted. Maybe you should try again.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Yep, I will again fill the form.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Definitely a goodreason to drop Medium.

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leob

But ... but ... but ... the paywall, it's absolutely off-putting.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

I can agree on getting low reach on Hashnode but dev.to is superior than Hashnode in term of getting reach.

I haven't used medium that much but from your view looks interesting.

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Efosa Collins EVBOWE

Dev.to is still okay about reach. I wrote my first article and I had 20. I guess that's okay for a newbie writer

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Efosa Collins EVBOWE

My second post How I Solved Heroku H10 / 503 Error - A Story had 40 in a week. I'm so happy. 😍😍

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Suraj Vishwakarma

It's good that you are improving😀

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Efosa Collins EVBOWE

Thank you very much. I'm inspired by the likes of you

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Thanks for your kind words 🙏

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Shai Almog

Or: All of the above...

Pretty much all of them support canonical links. I just publish on one and then repost on the others with canonical pointing back. That way people can see my posts where they are.

I use hashnode as my main option since I can use my own domain. That's crucial to me. I then repost on dev.to, medium, hackernoon, dzone and fojay.io.

One big advantage in medium is publications. By submitting to a publication you can expand your reach significantly e.g. better programming, etc.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Yep that's my last point and my way of posting articles online. You should have a blog which is platform independent.

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Sloan the DEV Moderator

It’s true that we prioritize making DEV an inclusive space for all developers, regardless of gender identity or presentation. Hateful comments about transgender people and their choices (or those of any other marginalized group) will be flagged as hateful, and users making them will be suspended from the platform. If this is a problem for you, you are welcome to host your technical articles elsewhere.

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Wade Zimmerman

From my experience its been fairly easy to go semi-viral on Dev, but its hard to get retain readers despite having a follow feature. It's also difficult to earn substantial revenue.

Medium has never been great for programming articles. They lack basic features such as syntax highlighting is annoying. The best workaround is to embed GitHub Gists but that is a tedious process. Medium used to have decent revenue, but they recently added minimum requirements to get approved and expect they will continue to change the barrier to entry Like YouTube has.

Will be checking out some of these other platforms for sure, and will leave my review.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Explore the platform make a choice. Platform sharing revenue is not possible on dev.to and Hashnode. But you can get external client and eventually you can earn

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Daniel Schulz

And they'd be right to flag that. Your political views are not welcome on DEV either.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

You give good insights on where to post the articles.

The mistake I made when I started is to think it was required to have actual articles ready for publication before doing anything.

Not at all!

The key is to understand that Content is king. The distribution platform is just a tool. A tool for what?

Start with content. Start with writing a lot of shitty first drafts in Notion or * Obsidian The rest will sort itself out once you have enough content.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

That's also great. It's all about exploring what's best for you.

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Juan F Gonzalez

Agreed with selection of sites. I've tried all of them over the last 2 years. The one I wouldn't recommend for technical writing is Medium.

There are several things not good with Medium and I've came across a post like a year and a half outlining all the disadvantages of using it for technical writing.

Starting out, DEV is hands down the best place to post content while getting the hang of it.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Yep, I totally agree with you. I only once posted on Medium but did not work out for me. DEV.to is quite the best for technical writing.

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Juan F Gonzalez

Funny how I only posted there once and then was like "nehh no more" and then found about DEV 😄

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Yeah same for me

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Joe Mainwaring

I think the answer to this really depends on your goals with your writing.

If you're tryin to build an audience, then that plays into some of the comments shared on this thread. Me personally? I don't care about traffic, it's icing on the cake. I write for the benefit of the community, but 99% of you aren't my true target audience with publishing posts.

So who am I writing for? My future business relationships. I like being able to provide reference material as a follow up to interviews for jobs or contracts. That way, I don't have to get into the weeds during a discussion but still provide details to validate my reputation.

Aside from posting here, I also use Gitbook to serve true technical documents (also to demonstrate I know how to implement a public docs portal)

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Suraj Vishwakarma

It is one the best way of starting a blog while learning. As you can share your learning and views with the other people.

For blogging, I would recommend you using open source CMS for publishing article on your own domain/website. WIth canonical URL post on other platform.

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HaxNet

I was a fan of Medium, but until they kept pushing their democratic/liberal articles constantly during the Trump vs Clinton time. I could careless who you want to side, but they lost me when they kept shoving it in my emails constantly.

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Juan F Gonzalez

Agreed.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

👍

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Lorna Watson

I love dev.to and dislike Medium due to their paywalls BUT have found some articles really really interesting. I use 12ft.io/ to get around the paywall and works lovely.

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ranelpadon

You could just use an Incognito/Private Window to browse the paywalled content.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Dev.to is the best for technical writing and nice way of bypassing the paywall articles.

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nick mielser • Edited

Market research is an important part of software development. It helps software companies identify their target customers and determine how to best reach them. It can also help companies decide which technologies and tools are best for their businesses mlsdev.com. The purpose of market research for software development is to help software companies understand their customers and the trends in their industry.

 
surajondev profile image
Suraj Vishwakarma

You can try Ghost

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Samuel Viana

Medium it's very barebones, only text basic formatting like bold, italic. No way to format source code with usual monospaced font

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Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

Currently, Tealfeed is pretty awful for writing technical articles. It is not possible to link articles together in a series. Their editor has numerous issues (two big ones being not interpreting Markdown correctly, and not having syntax highlighting). The site itself also has many annoyances and bugs.

I have to say as well, that their staff are also very unprofessional. I was contacted by them (directly on LinkedIn) to ask me to be an early contributor for the site and was offered incentives to do so. I spent a lot of time and effort navigating their poor editor/tools to transfer some of my content there, only to be greeted by mostly silence (or extremely late replies) when I asked questions or mentioned bugs to them in reply on LinkedIn (none of the bugs I have mentioned have been addressed). The cherry on the cake was them emailing me to tell me they were not selecting me as a promoted author (something they had explicitly told me previously that they would be doing).

Overall, not a site I would recommend - at least until they make substantial improvements

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Lorenzo Zarantonello

More or less same story here!
Quite unprofessional, total lack of analytics.
I might give it a try in a year or so.

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surajondev profile image
Suraj Vishwakarma

On which platforms do you write?🤔

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Devarshi Shimpi

I write on Hashnode, DEV and my blog.

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Always good to write on your own blog.

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Devarshi Shimpi

Yes!

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fruntend

Сongratulations 🥳! Your article hit the top posts for the week - dev.to/fruntend/top-10-posts-for-f...
Keep it up 👍

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Thanks for mentioning the article in the list🚀

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official_dulin

I write tech articles on my GitHub Issue

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surajondev profile image
Suraj Vishwakarma

Interesting place.

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Gamerseo

There are really a lot of places where you can publish an article for free, apart from those presented in the article.

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Denis

please no Medium or Dev, better write it on your own blog

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Suraj Vishwakarma

With a canonical URL, you can post on this platform which is the best option

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Yongchang He

Thank you for sharing this!

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Glad that you like it👍

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Arthii

Wow, thanks for sharing 😀 .

I believe that these platforms can help you gain more followers:

substack.com
arthii.com

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Suraj Vishwakarma

It's not the waste, you can create a good portfolio on platforms

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Yep, there are lots of article regarding that as it is not strictly for developers.

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Mahmudul Hasan Rifat

Good article

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Suraj Vishwakarma

Thanks for you word!

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Dimash Kudaibergen

nice!

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Kacper Turowski

What the frick does that have to do with technical articles?