Don’t Use Medium
Medium is a BloATED platform, and you shouldn’t use it.
by spitemim, 2021-05-27
It may seem obvious to most people in the free software crowd that Medium is a useless, bloated platform which poorly accomplishes its one stated goal. However, the fact that it has over 85 million users goes to show that, somewhere out there, poor souls are hosting content on that platform. In this post, I intend to demonstrate why shouldn’t use Medium, and hopefully provide some options for more elegant ways to distribute content on the internet.
What is Medium?
Medium is an online blogging platform originally created by Evan Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, and creator of Blogger. Millions of journalists, bloggers and corporations use it for its ease of use, wide audience, and visual appeal. However, the site comes with one pretty obvious drawback: loading speed. An informational blog post which may only contain a few kB of useful textual information is megabytes in size due to the over-abundance of trackers, CSS, external fonts, Javascript, and other pointless garbage.
To put it bluntly, Medium.com is b l o a t e d.
But just how bloated is Medium? Is it even possible to quantify website bloat, or are we making blind guesses based off of loading speed and elitism?
The Bloat Test
Many atttempts have been made to calculate web bloat before, the most popular being Web Bloat Score. However, as one would expect from a site who’s self-proclaimed abbreviation is WebBS, the site’s method of determining a website’s level of bloat is BS. Webpage functionality is not considered anywhere in the formula. This means that, according to WebBS, a bloat-free Amazon would be a static screenshot of the Amazon webpage. So if there isn’t a standard way to calculate website bloat by giving it a “score” of some kind, how can we calculate just how bloated Medium is?
In Luke Smith’s video, A Demonstration of Modern Web Bloat, he uses cooking/recipe websites as an example of how bloated the modern web is. To show just how obese modern sites can get, he compares the download size of a Chicken Parmesan recipe on SimplyRecipes.com with the size of just the images and text information. Interactive websites are a bit tricker to classify than this, because their functionality often depends on Javascript and it’s difficult to pick out what Javascript is essential for the website’s functionality and what isn’t. However, for simple, informational websites, this method of calculating how bloated a webpage is proves to be very accuate.
In order to find Medium’s bloat level, I employed a modified version of
this method. First, I measured the download size of the original page,
including all trackers, analytics, and other garbage. Next, I checked
the filesize of the plain HTML of the page (e.g. the output of
curl https://medium.com/xxxxxxx). I then calculated the percentage of
the site which is useful information. Here are my findings:
| Article Link | Medium.com Filesize | Plain HTML Filesize | Informational % of Page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Streaming IO in Go | 11.50mb | 184kb | 1.6% |
| My month-long quest to become a chess master from scratch | 10.40mb | 956k | 9.19% |
| You should read random articles. Start at this one | 4.51mb | 104kb | 2.3% |
| How to get the most out of developers | 3.79mb | 144kb | 3.8% |
| Web Design 3.0: When Your Web Design Really Matters | 4.44mb | 288kb | 6.49% |
As you can see, Medium articles are, on average, 4.7% information and 95.3% garbage.
When I say garbage, I mean it. You don’t need megabytes upon megabytes of Javascript and CSS to make a responsive and good-looking website. I wouldn’t call this site the pinnacle of web design, but I think it looks nice, and only uses a few kB of CSS (not minified).
Problems w/ my Methodology
My method of calculating webpage obesity is far from perfect. For one, the plain HTML filesize doesn’t include images. Many of the Medium articles I tested had pictures, albeit most were pointless/unnecessary. Secondly, the plain HTML included a lot of CSS and Javascript information embedded into the HTML. I’d like to imagine that these errors cancel one another out, however this is unlikely. Regardless, the information I collected still demonstrates a problem with Medium’s website design, and these technical innaccuracies with my methodology don’t invalidate my main point.
What now?
So, with all this in mind, how does one start an online blogs without forcing their readers to download 2mB of useless garbage for every 100kB of information?
Here are a few ideas:
- Use a paid server or unused machine as a server. Install Debian and set up NGINX.
- Github/Gitlab/Sourcehut/Sourceforge have options to create “pages”
- Flounder (for Gemini websites only)
- txti.es isn’t perfect, but it’s minimal and works
There are a lot of ways to distribute content online. Sometimes, it’s tempting to rationalize choosing the easiest solution, (“most people who will visit my site are on good internet connections anyway, right?”) but it’s important not to give in to these temptations. Ease of development is important, but user experience is too.
In general, follow the golden rule: try not to be a soydev.