It's important background info that apparently the other commenters weren't aware of.
They basically have, due to their excellent product, deep pockets, and professional promotion, become the default place to post not just start-up posts, but political ones as well.
All that background is assumed in my post because I've written about it many times before, in different contexts, and posted links to other commentary about Medium.
As often is the case commenters on Hacker News don't always thoroughly research the background for THEIR opinions as they excoriate others for the same. ;-)
I don't see anything particularly wrong with Medium that might not be equally wrong of Wordpress or something similar. That being said, don't people who've generated an audience with a particular URL or platform want to keep that URL or platform? I write a Wordpress.com hosted blog at jakeseliger.com, for example, and lots of links point to jseliger.wordpress.com, and I wouldn't want to lose those readers by switching.
At the same time, I contribute to a self-hosted WP blog at seliger.com/blog. From my perspective neither seems dramatically better or worse. But both have years of traction.
Medium is the next generation of magazine where the users are content creators instead of the publishers. You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that people know and look to for content. Not everyone wants or can spin up their own hosted blog and drive people to it at the same time. Many people want to focus on writing, not publishing, so they use something like medium or twitter.
I agree there should be other publishers, but the doom and gloom over medium is a bit strong. Any publisher, social network, or central repo suffers from the same complaints.
Magazines exercise editorial control, so they provide some some kind of signal of the kind and quality of writing you're going to get. Medium doesn't do that, so in an analogy to print publication, it would be more like... paper? a printing press?
Actually, Medium is just like the internet, except there's only one Medium and there's lots of the rest of the internet. Medium is the next generation of AOL.
I don't disagree with the OP's overall sentiment, but it's worth noting why Medium has succeeded in attracting authors despite being yet another blogging platform. The implicit integration with Twitter probably helped adoption...but undoubtedly the "beauty" and simplicity of the authoring and reading interface had an effect...It's always been frustrating me to explain to people who want to get into blogging that _writing a blog post_ is separate from the work of making the blog itself look beautiful, and that should focus on the former and we can then work on the latter.
Medium gives the latter without much work, and for aspiring writers, that's the incentive to finally try blogging out and feel like they've done something substantial. If it gets more people into the mindset of being creators instead of passive web consumers, I think Medium has been a good thing overall.
He never seems to identify anything actually wrong with Medium except that it's popular already. People might be disinclined to write anything critical of Medium on Medium itself? Weak sauce. It comes across as a hipster-ish "I was blogging before it was cool" whine, or maybe somebody from Medium stole his girlfriend. What it's not is convincing. I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.
And another thing: is Medium really that popular? I mean, inside the tech bubble I know it is, but I feel like this might be another case of us having a warped view of the world (like how, outside "tech people" I still have yet to encounter somebody who has heard of Slack). To the general public Medium is just another thing alongside Tumblr and WordPress and Squarespace; I really don't think it's in imminent danger of taking over the web as a monoculture.
I don't know anyone apart from myself who has ever heard of it.
They may have visited it but its pretty common these days to visit sites from following a Facebook posted link and never take notice of the actual site name.
I would hazard that that's half the point. Medium, to the writer, is a centralized blogging platform, like WordPress or Tumblr—but it's an extremely white-labelled one, where there's not much to indicate to the casual reader that an article is "on Medium" rather than just existing out on a "real" blog somewhere. I think people prefer Medium mostly for that reader experience.
With that in mind, there's a much more Hacker-ly way to get the same reader experience—namely, using one of the many services that provide a "blog-post format gateway" for Github Gists:
I don't find Medium to be particularly white label, it seems very overt in it's branding. Loading an article off their front page on my phone, this is what I see:
What's interesting is that I remember back when I first looked at Medium, it seemed more whitelabel than that screenshot. But I guess that's the point of the original authors post. Medium is a for profit company, and they're going to change the platform over time to try to make money. That may involve changes you don't like, but are unable to act on since Medium has all your content.
You're right, that's a more branded experience than I remember as well. In fact, it's worse on desktop as well: they have a bottom-bar now. I definitely had a cached thought that Medium was something I could sign up for if I wanted a fancy white-labelled pastebin, but I guess that's changed.
I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind?
My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years?
The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem.
[1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?
To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam.
Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?
As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
> What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?
Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this?
You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.
Medium already has an export feature. If you're arguing that they may take it away (which I think is vanishingly unlikely), then that's another thing entirely. The feature is there, though, so incentives about building one don't seem relevant to the discussion.
But even if you can get all your articles and re-upload them (and they look nice still) the URLs will change so anything that links to your channel or individual articles is going to break.
I'm in a similar situation (old, pretty much dead blog, but still there).
If you're not a historian, I'm not sure that longevity is all that important. It seems like someone who writes a lot and changes platforms every so often without worrying about the past might be better off, even if their old posts might not be around anymore.
Perhaps he means that blogging services would be more likely to have user interests in mind as long as there's multiple of them and they have to compete. By this reasoning using a competing underdog service is a useful act even if it's just as 'closed' or whatever.
I would think the same problem exists for all platforms, twitter, wordpress, disqus comments, etc. Why single medium out for criticism? If you want to maintain control over your writing, cross-post. If you don't, render unto Caesar.
As a matter of fact, yes. I've been blogging exactly that long too. Some of that content has gone through four or five software platforms, and twice that many physical hosts, and it's just as readable as ever. You do bring up a good point, though. The reason I've been able to make all those transitions has been because I retained complete control over the data even at the lowest level throughout. I wouldn't have that with Medium. I'd be at least somewhat at their mercy to keep my posts accessible and/or exportable. That's the argument Dave should have made. Maybe he considered it too obvious to state, but the fact that he didn't make it explicit is what turns a possibly-good rant into an incoherent mess.
My first blog post is from 19 years ago. Before the term "blog" hit the scene, I believe.
Just wanted to brag. :-)
But it's also important just as a reminder that your content might last decades. Those old posts will no doubt still be up on my site 19 years from now. At least, if I'm still around and if something catastrophic hasn't happened to our civilization...
What's the over-under on Medium being around in 19 years?
You step into the river, but the water has moved on /
Welcome to the Internet
It's sad, I agree -- but it's naive to expect anything else even from Google, much less some random startup. If you want your content to last, get an FTP account with your ISP, tie it to a domain name you own, upload a static .htm file, and pay the bill every month. Nothing else is guaranteed to work.
He's arguing that Medium owns the distribution rights to your content. Which... if I were to be partial to him, I'd say Medium can monopolize the public's attention as to where we read content. Like Amazon and Books, PornHub and Adult Videos, probably others. It's possible that if Medium goes under, it does everything it possibly could to prevent people from downloading their content.
Not saying that I agree with him. At the end of the day, Medium says the writers own their content. I feel ok with them, though I can empathize with OP, given the amount of shitty things BigCorp companies have done in the past.
Did all the other ones die or was PornHub just better at maintaining mainstream media attention? If I recall correctly there were at least three other equally sized sites along the time I first heard of it.
>I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.
Me too. His explanation of why Medium is thought to be good (before he goes on to explain why he thinks it's actually bad) was very convincing!
>Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often.
You can definitely take issue with his cantankerous and opinionated views on open access to information; but Dave Winer as "hipster-ish"?! That made me spit-take coffee all over my keyboard...
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think a big part of why I don't like Medium either is because it's popular. Yes, it's going to sound hipster-ish to say the posts started out interesting, but now whenever I see a link to a post on Medium I expect it to be someone complaining about someone or something, and most of the time that's what it is.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think a big part of why I don't like Medium either is because it's popular. Yes, it's going to sound hipster-ish to say the posts started out interesting, but now whenever I see a link to a post on Medium I expect it to be someone complaining about someone or something, and most of the time that's what it is.
>See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.
Yeah..weird. I think somehow he is going to rant about how medium is a close platform, bad for the web...But in the end, it seems like all leads to Medium is a start-up and will eventually die???? What the heck...
> So I suggested he post the comment to a blog so I could give it greater circulation by pushing it through my network.
> In the back of my mind I thought that he'll probably put it on Medium. ...
> Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium.
What an ass.
If you feel that strongly about it, say something up front. But don't wait for someone to do the obvious (for better or worse, if you don't have a blog and want to get out two thousand words, Medium is the obvious place to do it) just so that you can lord your self-decreed moral superiority over them.
For what it's worth, I would not for a moment consider that someone might use Medium when publishing something in a blog post. I'd expect some Wordpress install, or perhaps Blogspot or wordpress.com if they're lazy. In fact if I'd have to rank methods of publishing by likelihood among my friends, a text file might be higher up than Medium.
Perhaps in Silicon Valley it's very popular and perhaps this 'friend' (that posted it, to his dismay, on Medium) is indeed from there, but it's not as if it's that obvious that everyone would post to Medium.
But yeah I do agree, if you think of something like that, you might as well say it instead of waiting.
Medium broke the "Signal v. Noise" RSS feed by truncating articles. I complained to Basecamp; they blamed Medium. I complained to Medium; they said they might consider fixing it.
Run your own blog on your own website. Then you don't have to depend on someone else to fix your bugs.
For someone with any amount of tech savvy, I just don't think there's any excuse for not posting writing on your own, self-hosted system. HTML in its most basic form is literally designed for this use case.
Medium's cool now, but it won't necessarily be in a few years. And it's completely within the realm of possibility that they will disappear entirely at some point. It happens all the time. Big sites that people have contributed mass amounts of content to blink out of existence on a very regular basis. Sometimes without warning or the ability to back-up data. But the best case, like Winer points out, is that any links in become broken, comments get lost, etc.
My blog[0] runs on a 30 line bash script that generates the html from markdown, hosted on github pages. It would take about 10 minutes to change the host.
What I write isn't interesting per se, but I don't want to depend on the bon vouloir of a VC-backed startup somewhere to keep a whopping 4.3kB online.
I don't write a blog. I've thought about it quite a few times, but it turns out writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is even harder.
If I ever get over that hump, I certainly wouldn't want to make it harder on myself by hosting my own web server. I would want to write, not manage a server, with whatever complications that brings. That's what makes Medium (and others) attractive.
> writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is even harder.
For the second part, I don't write regularly. I don't look for an audience tuning in every Thursday evening. I write when I feel like I have something to write about; when I learned something new and interesting that I want to share, that more people should (or might want to) know about.
This gives me a URL I can share with friends and/or post on sites, instead of telling friends individually or writing a post on a gated community like Facebook. It gives me some of history on what I've been doing over the years, showing a potential employer I've been doing IT stuff out of school as well (very useful as a young professional). It even serves to remind myself now and then, e.g. my IPv6 post[1] I fairly regularly use to check stuff like "what was the maximum address length again".
In fact, not writing regularly might be more useful to many potential followers. If you only write now and then, they can follow you without fearing their inbox/feed will be flooded, and posts are much more likely to be of quality. When deciding whether to follow back, irregular or semi-regular Twitter users are much more likely to get one from me because they are usually more interesting and not a day to day burden.
I understand. And my comment that "I just don't think there's any excuse" is kind of overstating my opinions on the matter...
If the loss of control is worth the gain in ease, go nuts. Or if you don't really care if what you write stays online or under your control forever. Not everyone does. Twitter, for me: I really wouldn't care a bit if that service turned off entirely and I lost my archive of tweets. They just aren't that important to me. Or my Hacker News comments. They're interesting, but I won't be particularly upset when Hacker News finally dies off and they disappear. But my longer-form writing is important to me.
But I think people shouldn't be under any illusions about what Medium is. They're not a group of altruists trying to archive the world's writings for posterity. They're trying to figure out how to make bank. And if they don't, be aware of what will probably happen...
Depends on a lot of factors. The main reason to do it is that Jekyll - and their ilk - are so damn easy nowadays. And you can push the whole thing to an AWS server in one command with s3website. For $0/m, unless you're a big deal. You can even get free SSL with CloudFlare. Or you can just use GitHub Pages and circumvent that whole process.
OTOH, if something like Medium weren't as bulky as it is and had more awesome CMS features like footnotes, I could totally understand somewhat-technical people sticking with them. It's less the self-hosting and -ownership that should be appealing, just how much easier it genuinely is to publish yourself for your own website compared to managing Medium.
What is it and why would people use it? Mentioning something nobody uses and nobody has heard of doesn't seem like much of a a priority when critiquing a popular service.
(Assuming you're not being sarcastic) https://svbtle.com/ is similar to Medium. Mentioning something ~nobody has heard of makes a lot of sense as an alternative to something that is too popular.
It's an invite-only blog network, for people that are sufficiently intelligent and witty. If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because you're unintelligent and not funny.
Oh, interesting. That's certainly what the SV elite need, isn't it? Yet another closed social network for them to preach their wise and monied thought leadership down upon us lowly commoners. cloudbro social all the way.
>Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism.
BZZZT! Wrong! Maybe for you, but not for me!
I have no ingrained suppositions that the platform, free of charge, which hosts cheap-ass text in a usable format, and seems to be stable, would actually be bothered or compelled to promote my material. Not one bit of assumption on my part. I use it as a writing platform simply because it fits a need, and I didn't have to fork over for a domain and the maintenance that goes along with a self-implemented system. Or, if flow simply refers to it working, yeah, I guess I'm assuming that, but that's like a core competency.
It almost reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, the one where a chef becomes a master chef, and then a person asks, "Well, can you farm?" as though they should be a master of every aspect. I write. Medium hosts my writing, and I like the way the software works. Good deal for now, if it changes, I'll tear down and move on (like I did with Blend.io when they pivoted in a way I did not want to follow).
If we're talking ownership, well, that's a "backup" issue for each writer. For serious, lengthy pieces, I'm working in a software like Word before I'm posting online. It's just habit, and I can save locally/backup and Medium is the finished, public product. Simple.
In my experience - coming from music - the distributor is distinct and separate from the promotions arm. Though they may collaborate (PR working in conjuntion with Distributor to announce big release, etc), they are separate avenues in my opinion.
In this piece the author really undercuts their own point by referencing Facebook...mostly because if I had to write a correlative article about the one website where NOT to host music or artistic endeavors because of the single-platform lock-in risks mentioned...it would be Facebook. Anywhere but Facebook.
Distribution and Publicity are moving targets, faster now than ever. ReverbNation. That's a site that does distribution and promotion, and I don't think it's very good. BandCamp is more about distribution than promotion, and I see a lot of pretty happy customers over that route. Facebook is, for lack of a better concept, a necessary evil but simply one aspect in a fully functional, diversified approach to coming to market. Which also includes YouTube, the radio of the internet generation.
Interesting. I have my own reasons why you shouldn't post to Medium. It makes you look like an elitist blowhard. The majority of Medium blog posts that I have read are:
* 25 year old founder wants to explain how the reason his startup failed wasn't his fault.
* 25 year old founder has a list of "10 ways to live a meaningful life"
* 23 year old Javascript programmer proclaims "Node.js is dead, long live Node.js" (3 paragraphs)
* 20something Bay Area resident thinks he's solved the housing crisis in 4 paragraphs.
95% Egotistic tripe. I can't think of any Medium posts I ever shared with someone else.
I think that says more about you and the content you choose to read than it does about the content on Medium. I've read some great posts there with no egotism involved.
I tend to notice the same thing. What I choose to read on Medium is from the posts that it decides to bring to my attention, either on the front page or through the email newsletter. I would bet posts with a lot of egotism tend to get more eyeballs and thus more suggestions.
So I shouldn't post to Medium because other people, who to you are essentially just assholes, post there?
Assholes use blogspot, or tumblr, or WordPress, or really anywhere on the internet. So my only option would be to host my own or go through some fairly unknown blog hosting service to avoid being included with the assholes of the service?
I've only used Medium once, so I'm not really here to defend my use of it, but from my use it was incredibly easy to type up and piece and have it look decent.
Is there anywhere that you recommend someone writes what they want to write without being included with assholes? Otherwise, They're just going to go with the easiest solution, which happens to be Medium.
Well, it's not quite the same. Medium recommends pieces from other writers at the end of a piece, right? I'd say it's that, and not sharing the platform, that's the killer association.
Well, yes, actually. Tumblr has most of the same echo chamber problems as Medium does.
WordPress isn't a destination, it's a background technology, so it doesn't have these issues. Blogspot isn't popular anymore, so it doesn't have these issues.
There's nothing wrong with using Medium as a glorified pastebin; the OP does that by having Medium mirror content they post elsewhere, and it completely avoids the "assholes."
The problem only comes if you actually go in on the "game" of the platform—allow your writing to be led around by the incentive system inherent in the structure of the platform's network effects: recommendations, promoted posts, likes and shares, front-page status, etc.
If you "buy into" the platform like that, then the culture of the rest of the community on the platform (i.e. the other people who have "bought into" the platform) will start to matter. If they're mostly assholes, you'll have been tricked into playing a zero-sum game against assholes.
You know what a private Minecraft server with no moderation is like? It's an infinite expanse of dick-shaped monuments, where anything genuinely creative is quickly torn down or blown up. The parent poster is basically saying that Medium is the same way. The dick monuments are figurative, but they're still dick monuments; the tearing-down is social, but it's still tearing-down.
If you don't play the platform's game, none of this matters; you just get your little sandbox within the dickscape and can ignore the community around you. But the platform wants to engage your readers—through links back to a front page, or recommended follow-up posts, or whathaveyou. Building your sandbox in a dickscape leaves open the possibility that your readers might look out the window.
As with the Mac App Store I think the danger is to think about your content as something that only should live one place.
I decided to treat my content as I do my apps. As individual assets which are just looking for distribution.
That's why I have my personal blog and then use medium as just another distribution channel for the content I write there. I also post it on linkedin and a couple of other places.
If something else comes up I will also put it there if it makes sense.
I normally get a healthy number of visits on my blog and while I wont get the traffic to my personal post I still get my thoughts out there when i use Medium (and some of the readers do cross from one destination to another)
So, Medium is big. That's pretty much all I took from that. He lists no problems with it, except maybe they might one day be the sort of company to do something you don't like.
This isn't a criticism. It isn't even a rant. It's not focussed enough to be either. It's somebody worrying about writing on the Internet being largely controlled by a single company. Which, of course, it isn't. Never was and never will be.
I don't use anything I don't own. I spend maybe a hundred bucks a year on a good virtual host and operate four websites off of it, along with a CloudFlare subscription for speed. I run an ownCloud server at home, everything is backed up locally and then offsite to one company I trust. If any of these entities went under I'd be out a small amount of money and some time getting setup somewhere else, but I'd be dinged, not dead.
I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it.
And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company.
> Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web
Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible.
The very same reasoning could be applied to any market leader. So then why is this guy hosting his repos on GitHub? Hell he should host his own GitLab instance, or even go all-in and ditch git altogether...
TL;DR: Medium is a single platform with many blogs, instead of having each blogger have his own server to host on. Posting on Medium centralizes (as in, the opposite of decentralization). And Medium does not publish a 'statement of principles' to declare that they won't not put things on the front page just because they're critical of Medium itself. And the Medium page is larger than the plain text version, how terrible. We should not let Medium 'own' the media type called 'blog posts' (like Youtube 'owns' videos).
My thoughts: he's saying Medium is evil because it's like every online platform ever. Now I'm a sucker for principles and host my own email, vpn, ftp, btsync and web server, and I indeed don't use Medium because I want to own and have control over what I publish, but saying Medium is evil because of these properties... maybe if it had been a post about online platforms in general, it might have had a point.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118
It's important background info that apparently the other commenters weren't aware of.
They basically have, due to their excellent product, deep pockets, and professional promotion, become the default place to post not just start-up posts, but political ones as well.
All that background is assumed in my post because I've written about it many times before, in different contexts, and posted links to other commentary about Medium.
As often is the case commenters on Hacker News don't always thoroughly research the background for THEIR opinions as they excoriate others for the same. ;-)
At the same time, I contribute to a self-hosted WP blog at seliger.com/blog. From my perspective neither seems dramatically better or worse. But both have years of traction.
It does not fix the branding problems of every other looking the same and having to shove self-promotion at the end of every damn article.
I agree there should be other publishers, but the doom and gloom over medium is a bit strong. Any publisher, social network, or central repo suffers from the same complaints.
As noted in the article, that is exactly the problem as Medium is not an impartial judge.
Magazines exercise editorial control, so they provide some some kind of signal of the kind and quality of writing you're going to get. Medium doesn't do that, so in an analogy to print publication, it would be more like... paper? a printing press?
Actually, Medium is just like the internet, except there's only one Medium and there's lots of the rest of the internet. Medium is the next generation of AOL.
Medium gives the latter without much work, and for aspiring writers, that's the incentive to finally try blogging out and feel like they've done something substantial. If it gets more people into the mindset of being creators instead of passive web consumers, I think Medium has been a good thing overall.
> I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.
They may have visited it but its pretty common these days to visit sites from following a Facebook posted link and never take notice of the actual site name.
With that in mind, there's a much more Hacker-ly way to get the same reader experience—namely, using one of the many services that provide a "blog-post format gateway" for Github Gists:
• http://www.roughdraft.io/
• http://gist.io/3135754
• http://bl.ocks.org/
Etc.
http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png
What's interesting is that I remember back when I first looked at Medium, it seemed more whitelabel than that screenshot. But I guess that's the point of the original authors post. Medium is a for profit company, and they're going to change the platform over time to try to make money. That may involve changes you don't like, but are unable to act on since Medium has all your content.
My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years?
The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem.
[1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?
Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?
As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this?
You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.
If you're not a historian, I'm not sure that longevity is all that important. It seems like someone who writes a lot and changes platforms every so often without worrying about the past might be better off, even if their old posts might not be around anymore.
As a matter of fact, yes. I've been blogging exactly that long too. Some of that content has gone through four or five software platforms, and twice that many physical hosts, and it's just as readable as ever. You do bring up a good point, though. The reason I've been able to make all those transitions has been because I retained complete control over the data even at the lowest level throughout. I wouldn't have that with Medium. I'd be at least somewhat at their mercy to keep my posts accessible and/or exportable. That's the argument Dave should have made. Maybe he considered it too obvious to state, but the fact that he didn't make it explicit is what turns a possibly-good rant into an incoherent mess.
My first blog post is from 19 years ago. Before the term "blog" hit the scene, I believe.
Just wanted to brag. :-)
But it's also important just as a reminder that your content might last decades. Those old posts will no doubt still be up on my site 19 years from now. At least, if I'm still around and if something catastrophic hasn't happened to our civilization...
What's the over-under on Medium being around in 19 years?
You step into the river, but the water has moved on / Welcome to the Internet
It's sad, I agree -- but it's naive to expect anything else even from Google, much less some random startup. If you want your content to last, get an FTP account with your ISP, tie it to a domain name you own, upload a static .htm file, and pay the bill every month. Nothing else is guaranteed to work.
A good rant should be like a well-optimized piece of code, and not waste a lot of the reader's mental CPU cycles.
Not saying that I agree with him. At the end of the day, Medium says the writers own their content. I feel ok with them, though I can empathize with OP, given the amount of shitty things BigCorp companies have done in the past.
https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
Did all the other ones die or was PornHub just better at maintaining mainstream media attention? If I recall correctly there were at least three other equally sized sites along the time I first heard of it.
Me too. His explanation of why Medium is thought to be good (before he goes on to explain why he thinks it's actually bad) was very convincing!
>Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often.
>See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.
I think his most important point is right there, and that's a pretty good one.
> In the back of my mind I thought that he'll probably put it on Medium. ...
> Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium.
What an ass.
If you feel that strongly about it, say something up front. But don't wait for someone to do the obvious (for better or worse, if you don't have a blog and want to get out two thousand words, Medium is the obvious place to do it) just so that you can lord your self-decreed moral superiority over them.
For what it's worth, I would not for a moment consider that someone might use Medium when publishing something in a blog post. I'd expect some Wordpress install, or perhaps Blogspot or wordpress.com if they're lazy. In fact if I'd have to rank methods of publishing by likelihood among my friends, a text file might be higher up than Medium.
Perhaps in Silicon Valley it's very popular and perhaps this 'friend' (that posted it, to his dismay, on Medium) is indeed from there, but it's not as if it's that obvious that everyone would post to Medium.
But yeah I do agree, if you think of something like that, you might as well say it instead of waiting.
Run your own blog on your own website. Then you don't have to depend on someone else to fix your bugs.
Medium's cool now, but it won't necessarily be in a few years. And it's completely within the realm of possibility that they will disappear entirely at some point. It happens all the time. Big sites that people have contributed mass amounts of content to blink out of existence on a very regular basis. Sometimes without warning or the ability to back-up data. But the best case, like Winer points out, is that any links in become broken, comments get lost, etc.
Your writing is yours. Own it.
Doing it yourself means it's as simple or complicated as you like it, and you can add whatever feature you want.
For instance, my blog displays a seasonal emoji next to the year: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TazeTSchnitzel/blog/75d789...
Why does it break in Chrome on OS X, yet work in everything else?!
It was almost embarrassingly easy (code is on there).
Really should write more content for it though.
What I write isn't interesting per se, but I don't want to depend on the bon vouloir of a VC-backed startup somewhere to keep a whopping 4.3kB online.
[0] http://toastedcornflakes.github.io/
If I ever get over that hump, I certainly wouldn't want to make it harder on myself by hosting my own web server. I would want to write, not manage a server, with whatever complications that brings. That's what makes Medium (and others) attractive.
For the second part, I don't write regularly. I don't look for an audience tuning in every Thursday evening. I write when I feel like I have something to write about; when I learned something new and interesting that I want to share, that more people should (or might want to) know about.
This gives me a URL I can share with friends and/or post on sites, instead of telling friends individually or writing a post on a gated community like Facebook. It gives me some of history on what I've been doing over the years, showing a potential employer I've been doing IT stuff out of school as well (very useful as a young professional). It even serves to remind myself now and then, e.g. my IPv6 post[1] I fairly regularly use to check stuff like "what was the maximum address length again".
In fact, not writing regularly might be more useful to many potential followers. If you only write now and then, they can follow you without fearing their inbox/feed will be flooded, and posts are much more likely to be of quality. When deciding whether to follow back, irregular or semi-regular Twitter users are much more likely to get one from me because they are usually more interesting and not a day to day burden.
[1] http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6
If the loss of control is worth the gain in ease, go nuts. Or if you don't really care if what you write stays online or under your control forever. Not everyone does. Twitter, for me: I really wouldn't care a bit if that service turned off entirely and I lost my archive of tweets. They just aren't that important to me. Or my Hacker News comments. They're interesting, but I won't be particularly upset when Hacker News finally dies off and they disappear. But my longer-form writing is important to me.
But I think people shouldn't be under any illusions about what Medium is. They're not a group of altruists trying to archive the world's writings for posterity. They're trying to figure out how to make bank. And if they don't, be aware of what will probably happen...
OTOH, if something like Medium weren't as bulky as it is and had more awesome CMS features like footnotes, I could totally understand somewhat-technical people sticking with them. It's less the self-hosting and -ownership that should be appealing, just how much easier it genuinely is to publish yourself for your own website compared to managing Medium.
Edit: I just visited the site for the first time in ages, and noticed it's no longer free to sign up.
I take back any implied endorsement thereof.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314
What if I'm unintelligent, but funny? Can I get a part-time account?
BZZZT! Wrong! Maybe for you, but not for me!
I have no ingrained suppositions that the platform, free of charge, which hosts cheap-ass text in a usable format, and seems to be stable, would actually be bothered or compelled to promote my material. Not one bit of assumption on my part. I use it as a writing platform simply because it fits a need, and I didn't have to fork over for a domain and the maintenance that goes along with a self-implemented system. Or, if flow simply refers to it working, yeah, I guess I'm assuming that, but that's like a core competency.
It almost reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, the one where a chef becomes a master chef, and then a person asks, "Well, can you farm?" as though they should be a master of every aspect. I write. Medium hosts my writing, and I like the way the software works. Good deal for now, if it changes, I'll tear down and move on (like I did with Blend.io when they pivoted in a way I did not want to follow).
If we're talking ownership, well, that's a "backup" issue for each writer. For serious, lengthy pieces, I'm working in a software like Word before I'm posting online. It's just habit, and I can save locally/backup and Medium is the finished, public product. Simple.
In my experience - coming from music - the distributor is distinct and separate from the promotions arm. Though they may collaborate (PR working in conjuntion with Distributor to announce big release, etc), they are separate avenues in my opinion.
In this piece the author really undercuts their own point by referencing Facebook...mostly because if I had to write a correlative article about the one website where NOT to host music or artistic endeavors because of the single-platform lock-in risks mentioned...it would be Facebook. Anywhere but Facebook.
Distribution and Publicity are moving targets, faster now than ever. ReverbNation. That's a site that does distribution and promotion, and I don't think it's very good. BandCamp is more about distribution than promotion, and I see a lot of pretty happy customers over that route. Facebook is, for lack of a better concept, a necessary evil but simply one aspect in a fully functional, diversified approach to coming to market. Which also includes YouTube, the radio of the internet generation.
* 25 year old founder wants to explain how the reason his startup failed wasn't his fault.
* 25 year old founder has a list of "10 ways to live a meaningful life"
* 23 year old Javascript programmer proclaims "Node.js is dead, long live Node.js" (3 paragraphs)
* 20something Bay Area resident thinks he's solved the housing crisis in 4 paragraphs.
95% Egotistic tripe. I can't think of any Medium posts I ever shared with someone else.
> "Some Precious Thing a Design Student Came Up With That Wouldn't Work in Real Life"
Assholes use blogspot, or tumblr, or WordPress, or really anywhere on the internet. So my only option would be to host my own or go through some fairly unknown blog hosting service to avoid being included with the assholes of the service?
I've only used Medium once, so I'm not really here to defend my use of it, but from my use it was incredibly easy to type up and piece and have it look decent.
Is there anywhere that you recommend someone writes what they want to write without being included with assholes? Otherwise, They're just going to go with the easiest solution, which happens to be Medium.
WordPress isn't a destination, it's a background technology, so it doesn't have these issues. Blogspot isn't popular anymore, so it doesn't have these issues.
The problem only comes if you actually go in on the "game" of the platform—allow your writing to be led around by the incentive system inherent in the structure of the platform's network effects: recommendations, promoted posts, likes and shares, front-page status, etc.
If you "buy into" the platform like that, then the culture of the rest of the community on the platform (i.e. the other people who have "bought into" the platform) will start to matter. If they're mostly assholes, you'll have been tricked into playing a zero-sum game against assholes.
You know what a private Minecraft server with no moderation is like? It's an infinite expanse of dick-shaped monuments, where anything genuinely creative is quickly torn down or blown up. The parent poster is basically saying that Medium is the same way. The dick monuments are figurative, but they're still dick monuments; the tearing-down is social, but it's still tearing-down.
If you don't play the platform's game, none of this matters; you just get your little sandbox within the dickscape and can ignore the community around you. But the platform wants to engage your readers—through links back to a front page, or recommended follow-up posts, or whathaveyou. Building your sandbox in a dickscape leaves open the possibility that your readers might look out the window.
I decided to treat my content as I do my apps. As individual assets which are just looking for distribution.
That's why I have my personal blog and then use medium as just another distribution channel for the content I write there. I also post it on linkedin and a couple of other places.
If something else comes up I will also put it there if it makes sense.
I normally get a healthy number of visits on my blog and while I wont get the traffic to my personal post I still get my thoughts out there when i use Medium (and some of the readers do cross from one destination to another)
Just my 5 cents.
https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-medium-5450cb19f2...
This isn't a criticism. It isn't even a rant. It's not focussed enough to be either. It's somebody worrying about writing on the Internet being largely controlled by a single company. Which, of course, it isn't. Never was and never will be.
I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it.
And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company.
Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible.
My thoughts: he's saying Medium is evil because it's like every online platform ever. Now I'm a sucker for principles and host my own email, vpn, ftp, btsync and web server, and I indeed don't use Medium because I want to own and have control over what I publish, but saying Medium is evil because of these properties... maybe if it had been a post about online platforms in general, it might have had a point.
Anything but scripting.com.