I didn't expect to have this irritating Medium problem come up in a VC discussion, but it's relevant here, and I 100% agree that companies shouldn't post behind the paywall because it's counterproductive. Presumably, they want every single person to see their posts, and don't care about making $0.40 on a Medium post.

To the companies: make sure that when you post, distribution setting is OFF. This is a kind of dark pattern by Medium, which is why it's confusing, on purpose. What it really means is, distribution exclusively for paid Medium subscribers is off - meaning any person, anywhere, can view it.

Agreed the Medium paywall is not good. But technically, I don't think Indie.vc wrote this post. It's on the marker.medium.com publication and was written by a freelance journalist: https://marker.medium.com/@jennifer_7809

Yeah! Substack > Medium.

The question is: will Substack continue to be better than Medium, or are they just temporarily better than Medium because they haven't been around long enough to have to face some of the medium-run (no pun intended) challenges that made Medium what it is today?

Ghost > Substack

Wordpress > Ghost. Its 2020 and ghost does not support a table, as in normal table copy-pasted from excell.

Or audio. Or a gif, or comments. Sure you can host them elsewhere, but how many secondary services am I meant to use for a personal blog?

As i get older, I seem to be growing respect for legacy software: if people are still using it after 30 years, it probably got something right.

Ghost supports tables via markdown. You can embed SoundCloud and YouTube natively for audio.

As for gifs and comments here's a link to my ghost blog with a gif as well as comments(disqus) https://thoughts.willcipriano.com/weird-python-tricks/

Embedding third party services may go against the values of some Richard Stallman types, for me however it enables me to host behind cloudflare with a $5 a month digital ocean droplet and not have to worry about getting hugged to death. I can live with the tradeoff.

I stand corrected, not sure why i was under impression gifs dont work.

But as I said, it's unfortunate that comments sound and video have to be hosted externally.

In my mind , my domain is where I make the rules. I do not want my self-hosted blog to be subject to flavour-of-the-month demonetisation, copyright and censorship of like 5 different teams. Think of youtube banning any video mentioning corvid.

The medium paywall is what paid for the author to write it. It's not written by Indie.vc. And so to the degree that people want to read this article and talk about it, the paywall is what made that possible.

It's not paywalled. You can read it with a free account.

Or in a private tab.

But the point still stands: they are using a medium that hurts the message, and in a way we are paying - with our time and patience.

"[redacted], get unlimited access. You've read all of your free stories this month. Become a member to keep reading."

There is no such thing as a free account, just like there is no such thing as a free lunch

That's a paid account. It's just paid with Metadata rather than dollars.