Substack vs Medium: What Is Better for a Coder?

Fundor333 | | Reading time 5 minutes | Word count 896

Card image cap by IA Midjourney

I am first and most a Developer and a Coder and I think that coding and developing software (site, app, AI, etc…) need to be a share experience. So I think a dev must share knowledge in the web. Somebody help people on StackOverflow and someone (like me) blogs.

In the last X years1 I understand the important of blogging and why a dev or a coder need to write a blog/newsletter/magazine about what is doing2 and how big time sink is developing and maintaining a custom blog so I have this question:

For sharing Dev/Coding experiences is better Medium or StackOverflow?3

We need a “generic” Dev!

This is Bob. Bob is a BackEnd Developer, a Python Developer and he is learning some FrontEnd stuffs. So he wants to write about what he knows, what is learning and his doubts.

Bob Avatar

What a Dev need to share in a post

Bob need to share fragments of the code he writes, some screenshot (images) and a lot of texts. The latest are a simple request because it is the minimum requirements for all the blogging platform.

The code part is the “difficult” one.

The best situation is if the code is highlighted something like this

print("Hello World!")

and the platform need to support all the types of the files Bob’s code but we only need the highlight for the languages… If Bob needs to blog about Cobol or Pascal4

Customing and theming

Bob need to have a solid site/blog with a mobile and a desktop layout (more and more people read blog only with the tablet or the phone) and he need to make no changes or as little as possible for making HIS SITE/BLOG.

He also need a notification system for the followers (newsletters, feed, app with notification, …) and a SEO integration (analytics, meta, etc…) for becoming someone on the web.

Less edit he must do for posting better the platform is.

Money

Bob is a developer for money so he doesn’t want to spend money so… The all budget is 10€ (all needed for the domain) so the platform is a good one if it is free but is better if pay Bob.

So he needs a free platform5 and some way to make money from the posts (advertising, subscriptions, etc…)

NewsPapers

And now the platforms

Now we know what Bob needs and wants, we find some platforms.

Wordpress, Jekill, Ghost, GoHugo and some other platforms aren’t the “right one” because they aren’t a “out of the box” expirience. You need to customized it and you need to have time for the updating of the platform soo we have SubStack and Medium as the platform.

Medium

The old one, Medium is the platform which is trying to become a blogging space for magazine and journal’ blogs. He is online from the 2012 and have all the need for a writer, with tool for automatic sharing, automatic posting and seo tools Medium is a complete platform.

SubStack

The new one, SubStack is the platform with two faces: one is a blogging space and the other is the mail-list space. SubStack out of the box way to work is a mail list for your followers, but the site part is not a bad one. It has automatic sharing, automatic posting and a micro-blogging part. But for SEO and promotion it all on you.

It also has one of the better subscribe platform of the web, where you can set some post to pay to read and some free to read.

Some other considerations

After all this considerations I need to show somethings behind the curtain : Medium has a lot of negative attention[^mediumproblem] because they have a lot of low quality post6 and SubStack has its share of problem with the paywall on the newsletters and some problems for the authors.7

Oz

In my opinion, if you want to blog about what are you doing, do it and this two platform can be a good starting point for start with your blogging journey but if it become something more you need to invest time in something more tailor to your need and understand what you need and what the platform give you.

If someone make me choose one between Medium and SubStack, I will choose SubStack because I love the idea of having a newsletters but I also feel the limitation of the close platform, bacause I had years and years of blogging on platform I hacked every way.

For example this blog is a GoHugo installation with a out of the box theme but I put so many changing in the code I have something more similar of the Monster of Frankenstein than a well coded theme…

  1. Where X is a big but not too big number ↩︎

  2. This is also explained in one of my old post  ↩︎

  3. This is my blog/webspace so I say my opinion (coder for more than 5 year) ↩︎

  4. Cobol and Pascal are two of the oldest languages and almost every highlighter in a generic blogging platform don’t support them, so you need to use a more professional blogging platform and lost time with the custumizations ↩︎

  5. Some function can be hidden by a paywall but if all the needed function are free, the platform is a good one ↩︎

  6. Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium  ↩︎

  7. Substack Is Both Great and Terrible for Authors  ↩︎


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This post is part of the A Dev Need a Blog series
  1. Good Developer Must Be Blogger
  2. Why Have a Blog in the Fast Social Media Era
  3. Substack vs Medium: What Is Better for a Coder?

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