Agree that everyone should have their own site but we just want to create another corner on the web where you can read and write interesting, well presented content and find jobs etc.

You're also welcome to cross-post to Able to help build an audience to your blog too. One thing we don't want to do is bait and switch users like other venture funded companies have done recently. We just want to build a good community and charge businesses to advertise jobs to good people.

I understand your skepticism though, hopefully over time we can prove that not everyone has to play that game.

You can read more about our intentions and business model here: https://able.bio/about

I would encourage you to release this under a free software license like GPL. People are increasingly skeptical of "platforms" and proprietary licensing.

The Affero GPL is especially suitable for hosted computing and services: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

>People are increasingly skeptical of "platforms" and proprietary licensing.

And with people you mean ... ? The general public (i.e. "people") don't really care much about their privacy.

This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market.

Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals. Medium was the only good option for that. Features like the table of contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.

> hit the casual crowd

Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.

Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.

Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.

Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.

> all non-tech Medium blogs

> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog

I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.

But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?

If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.

> much more likely

Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.

The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know".

> interesting insights

How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.

You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true.

Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.

Your second statement might more accurately be formulated as "I tend to find the insights of people with a technical background more interesting", or even "I am more capable of understanding what is interesting about the insights of people with some sort of technical background even if it is not my own." Otherwise, you're claiming that there's something objectively "uninteresting" about, like, the majority of human insights that civilizations have ever had and found valuable.

Are there any marine biology blogs on LinkedIn?

Focus is great, but fluff exists everywhere. Tech and non-tech alike (although there are far more sub divisions...). Even tech.

Discoverability isn't real.

It's a term people use when they want to abdicate their marketing efforts.

Whether you use your own platform or build on someone else's - discoverability almost never "just happens." People put a ton of work into being discovered "organically."

Medium is absolute garbage for discovery. Worthless trash.

My typical post on Medium got 5,000 to 10,000 views. I’ve had a few break 100k. Medium provided roughly zero views. All my views came from Reddit, HN, Twitter, or Google.

If you’re using Medium for discovery you’re wasting your time.

I started my blog thinking "at most 10 people will actually keep up with this".

It's a little frustrating to have low traffic levels -- everyone wants to be famous and loved by millions -- but as it turns out I know my handful of readers on Twitter and it's a fruitful interaction. OTOH I'd be constantly trying to tune my writing to please a mass undifferentiated audience. I'd sound like kdnuggets or some such. Life is too short for that.

Good content finds its readers itself.

Personal blogging and discover-ability are reconcilable: why doesn't someone build an aggregator where people can submit their essays and write-ups with RSS feeds?

> Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

Could you syndicate?

For programming topics, I've done that with DZone for years.

Use Ghost. It's self-hosted and gives all the functionality you need for beginners and advanced users alike.

Running it on https://sdan.xyz/blog and it's fantastic. I get RSS/subscriptions (https://sdan.xyz/subscribe)/podcasts/a whole plethora of integrations super easily.

And since it's self hosted, you don't need to worry about it ever going down (unlike if Able.bio ever does).

Also, Lighthouse gives Ghost blogs top scores as well :).

You can even make your deployment easier by using a static site generator like Hugo.

Ghost also supports creating static sites, although I haven't gone that route.

Hugo is a valid option though!

I was super impressed by how fast your blog loaded, but then I got caught in some sort of loop on this page [1], which won’t load.

1: https://blog.suryad.com/datascience/

Also appreciate your comments on how fast it can load! I've been vehemently working on load times across all my websites for over a year now.

Working on a blog post on how I could reduce load times and make it portable, scalable, and reliable (the server itself).

Thanks for the feedback!

My bad! Made this post a while back and I used 10+ repl.it embedded editors.

Although it does seem to load eventually, I should update it to use some better editor that loads faster!

I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site.

Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim.

But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.

Agree.

Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.

Bonus: wordpress.com has some (limited, but nonzero) "discoverability". Blogs can be "followed" so you can have an idea of which are the 15-50 people who look at your stuff week in, week out.

I think part of the point of platforms like medium is that you don't have to pay for the costs in case your blog gets hugged a lot.

That startablog.com thing is terrible does bad and very expensive recommendations, recommend expensive services, and then asks you to pay themselves to build a blog for you that will rely on all these services with no guarantee for a large price.

If that's what starting a blog looks like I think I'll start recommending people to Medium or Able now.

There are a lot of blog hosting platforms. The most popular is Wordpress (which, yes, needs a database back end), whose source code can be downloaded at https://wordpress.org/download/source/

One way to create a static site is with GatsbyJS: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby Or Jekyll: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

For the less-technical crowd, you can put markdown files in a Gitlab repo. You don't even have to know how to use Git. You can create and edit files without leaving the website.

This is the Gitlab Web Editor or whatever it's called right?

This is so true, Medium started paywalling free content a couple of months ago. This means people leading on your blog, wanting to read your content and being prevented to do so unless they pay Medium.