
Ending our Medium integration - thebaer
https://write.as/blog/ending-our-medium-integration
======
new_here
Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually
though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be
fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns.

Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground
but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.

~~~
rjain15
There is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content
writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine,
you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff.

I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we
should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough
garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.

~~~
taude
I'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles
published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic
popup that interferes with me getting to the content.

I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where
content creators better control their content. I don't think the
discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more
discovery other ways and usually only end up on the site after a
recommendation, etc...

~~~
potta_coffee
I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then
there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.

~~~
asark
Not just Facebook. Any site without attention paid to on-site SEO is basically
impossible to find since Google gave up fighting the spammers and
(effectively) stopped trying to provide access to a bunch of the web. That was
back in, like, '08 or '09.

The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used
to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1)
heavily penalizing low-traffic sites to the point of giving me top results
that contain almost none of my keywords when there 100% for sure _had to be_
sites that contained all of them, and 2) barely paying attention to text
_linking to_ a site anymore. I'm not even upset I couldn't find the site I
wanted using my search terms so much as that part of their surrender to the
spammers meant that most of the top results were "legitimate" content-mill
spammers-by-another-name. I don't think I could have found _anything_ like
what I was looking for. Any similarly-obscure sites are just invisible now.

DDG wasn't much better. The spammers won and "web search" doesn't really
search the whole web anymore, or even close to it.

~~~
potta_coffee
There are whole topics I can no longer search for on any engine because the
results are so bad. The example I can think of is product reviews for just
about anything - the results are almost always shitty "top ten" Amazon
affiliate sites. If I want to find a legitimate opinion about certain kinds of
products, it's nearly impossible to find via Google.

~~~
dabockster
Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there
would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to
reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost
always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the
burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad
copy of Quora with each answer recommending the automotive equivalent of
essential oils.

~~~
potta_coffee
Quora is another gross offender.

------
kuhhk
Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice
before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually
close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?

~~~
thefz
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the
majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia
this morning.

~~~
peruvian
Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have
"online presence".

~~~
tonystubblebine
I run a publication on Medium, Better Humans. My understanding is that the
pivot to be a place where most writing is paid for was specifically to crowd
out content marketing. The content marketing is, as the two of you say,
basically Wikipedia summaries and people selling themselves. It's part of the
style guide for their Membership program that writers can't have calls to
action (with a few exceptions, like if it's an excerpt from your book).

It's been a great program for us. We write in the area of personal development
and it's allowed us to pour a lot of money into getting authors who've
actually tested their advice and then working with them to write very thorough
tutorials that other people could follow.

In my biased opinion, what we used to compete with was trash simply because it
didn't work. Content marketers were writing great headlines for productivity
advice they'd never tested, the advice had huge gaps or mistakes, and then it
would stop short of telling you what to do so that it could make some call-to-
action sales pitch.

We've been getting much less competition for page views from these trash
articles based on recent Medium changes. The biggest change was that they
manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by
their algorithm.

As an example, I have an article I wrote that's just creeping up on 1M page
views. That just wasn't possible before.

~~~
criddell
Why stay on Medium? Why not take total ownership and move to your own space?

~~~
tonystubblebine
It's a good partnership for us.

\- they handle distribution and are better at it than us.

\- they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services.

\- it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing,
without managing the other side of a publishing business.

We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18
months, so it's not a full lock-in either.

~~~
criddell
I'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be
around for a long time.

One question though - what do you mean by distribution?

~~~
owens99
I’m not a fan of Medium (mainly because of the UI both on mobile and desktop)
but it doesn’t seem like you have anything to back up what you are saying.

~~~
criddell
Well they laid off a bunch of people, changed their business model, and are
trying to raise another round.

They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space
and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I don't have a Medium account so I'm not sure if this is still true, but there
was once a button in the settings to export your content as a zipball. If
you'd like to migrate to a self-hosted blog, I wrote a tool which will convert
this zipball into a Jekyll blog:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify)

If you want, shoot me an email for free hosting, and I'll rig up builds.sr.ht
to automate deployment for you, too: sir@cmpwn.com

~~~
kkarakk
ooops

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Jesus christ, dude. Lots of people have praised the design, too. Not
everything suits everyone.

~~~
make3
?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Looks like they edited their comment. They were railing on git.sr.ht's design.

------
kareemm
Somewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to
businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were:

1\. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check,
and run through tools like Hemingway

2\. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static
site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe
missing some others.

3\. Formatting the posts for each service is a PITA. Need images in different
sizes and need to place them in the posts.

Ideally I'd like to be able to do all three using a single tool, connect my
publishing platforms, click publish (maybe schedule them) and would have
drafts in LinkedIn, Medium, Drip, etc.

This would save me so much time that I'd easily pay $50/m for this (and we're
bootstrapped and cheap/"capital efficient"). Looks like write.as is heading
somewhat in this direction but sadly doesn't hit the major platforms (yet?)
Huge market, painful problem, selling to businesses, can build a great tool
around content marketing workflow. Got the hallmarks of a great business.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
This isn't what you're looking for, more an indication that there is a real
need for these types of services. Checkout:
[https://www.wordable.io/](https://www.wordable.io/) \- which focuses solely
on Google Docs to Wordpress.

It's kind of nuts to think that these somewhat "edge" cases are so large as to
be able to build a business around.

~~~
yxhuvud
It is not an edge case - the PR tool market is huge and there is a lot of
business that serve it. Perhaps not super many that serve the micro/small
sized segments (which this would be), but there are several alternatives to
chose from.

------
thebaer
Author here -- just got a response from Medium, though it's still confusing:

> We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to
> generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled
> that feature.

This doesn't really explain why our 2-year-old integration suddenly stopped
working (we didn't need to generate a new application). So I'm asking for more
clarification.

~~~
TheGRS
> We recently experienced an interruption with API

It sounds like kind of an amateur deployment/test problem. The lack of
explanation would have me worried too. Their platform is pretty large and
widely used, so you'd think their API would have tests for such a thing.

------
rco8786
Seems like Medium's slow death may be speeding up a bit. I used to be pretty
excited for the platform, but lately I don't even want to click on their
links. And it seems like we're seeing reasonably large content creators
announcing they're leaving the platform at an increasing rate.

------
projectramo
Services exist if you pay for them with:

1\. Labor

2\. Cash

3\. Personal Data/Ads

With a few exceptions (I can't think of any, but presumably you might) you
have to pay through one of these methods.

If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self
host (1 + less 2).

To put it another way, are we annoyed at Medium or just the inevitable
friction in the world. No matter what they promised, they can't sustain giving
away a free service without 1,2 or 3.

Edit: write.as looks like an interesting one because it lets you toggle
between 1 and 2. I assume everyone knows about wordpress.

~~~
eitland
> If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self
> host (1 + less 2).

FWIW you can also use write.as now.

I finally made a paid account the other day after wanting to for a long while.
(You can have free ones as well but paid offers a few benefits and as a bonus
it also felt great to support open source and pay for hosting at the same
time.)

As others has mentioned it is part of the fediverse and there's also a lot of
other details to like about it (like not having to give away your email
address if you don't want to).

~~~
projectramo
Good point. I added that as an edit.

------
callahanrts
With all my frustrations with medium, I decided to build a desktop app--for
myself, and maybe to monetize later. It's basically the medium WSYWYG editor
combined with a static site generator that automatically hosts on S3. Out of
curiosity, is that something that anyone else would be interested in?

EDIT: Here's a google form for anyone who wants to keep in touch
[https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23](https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23)

~~~
dabockster
So we're so fed up with the "modern web" that we've resorted to reviving
Microsoft FrontPage?

Hang on, lemme eat my own foot.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Say what you will, but FrontPage was a great way to get into webdev for people
who were new to development.

------
jordigh
In case someone needs more context, write.as uses ActivityPub to federate with
Mastodon and itself. It is an instance of WriteFreely:

[https://writefreely.org/](https://writefreely.org/)

So to me, knowing that write.as was getting important enough for Medium to
shut them out is more interesting than whatever Medium does.

------
athenot
Does anyone here use Write.as for blogging? This is the first time I've seen
them and the simplicity look appealing to me.

For the record I was really excited when Medium came out and loved the simple,
open, no-clutter style it had. But fast-forward to today and it's now very
different.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Yes, I just started this month with a paid account ($1 a month) and it's
basically what medium was supposed to be - custom urls and rss.

See the dead simple layout: [https://kemendo.com/](https://kemendo.com/)

I do wish they allowed email subscriptions but from what I understand that is
coming soon. I also don't love the "published with write.as" text at the
bottom of every page for paid accounts but that's no big deal.

~~~
eitland
Same here. Been lurking around for a while and finally got around to it.

The combination of open source, reasonable (actually directly inexpensive IMO)
hosting, simplicity (but not dumbness or lack of features), the fact that they
are already part of the fediverse and seems generally nice was my reasons for
subscribing.

------
sfarhat
Secretly hated Medium for a long time. Didn't know everyone shared the
sentiment. I'm reading this and smiling.

~~~
ehsankia
While I dislike Medium too, I think this post as well as the comments are very
quick to jump to conclusions and assume the worst possible intent with very
little information. The much more likely explanation, which is almost always
the cases in these scenarios, is that it was a bug or bad push.

It's perfectly fine to dislike Medium, but I dislike how easily everyone
throws them under the bus at the slightest issue without even looking to
understand what actually happened.

------
messo
I loved to use Medium in the early days. I just realized that I haven't used
their app or logged in to my account for ~1 year – probably because Medium
stopped being simple and focused on the writing and reading experience.
Applications that integrate with the fediverse seems to be a much better long-
term solution, as it is not dependent on VC money to survive.

------
drcongo
I just cancelled my Medium membership. This is a step too far and I no longer
feel comfortable giving them money.

~~~
criddell
Was it easy to cancel?

------
miguelmota
Medium seems like people are on there to build their personal brand valuing
quantity of posts over quality. Programming articles in particular are most
disappointing. For programming there’s better open source platforms like
dev.to or even better just host your blog and not be at the mercy of VCs

~~~
alienspaces
Completely agree! Quality is poor and content is often entry level, I only
ever navigate to medium if it's a post on Hacker News.

------
shaqbert
First they came for the developer ecosystem, but I did not speak up, as I was
just a publisher. Then...

Wanna be in control of "your" blog? Run your own software on your own server.
Ghost, Gatsby, etc. to the rescue.

~~~
StavrosK
I run my blog with Lektor on Netlify (no affiliation with either, except I
recently became a Lektor co-maintainer) and deploying literally gives me happy
feelings. It's amazing to be able to just deploy your blog wherever you want,
and Netlify have done a great job at being a deployment target.

~~~
feistypharit
I used to live lektor, but thought it died. Hope to see it start moving again.

~~~
StavrosK
I don't think it died, plus it's pretty feature-complete as is, I've never had
difficulty doing anything. The upside is that it's _much_ easier to use than
Hugo, which I never managed to get running. I haven't played with many other
alternatives, if anyone knows of a static site generator that isn't
specifically blog-oriented (i.e. something with an agnostic model), please let
me know.

~~~
Kihashi
> if anyone knows of a static site generator that isn't specifically blog-
> oriented (i.e. something with an agnostic model), please let me know.

Is that not what Jekyll is? or maybe it's become more blog-centric since I
used it.

~~~
StavrosK
Last I checked it was pretty blog-centric, but I didn't try in depth, I saw
that somewhere and it put me off. Is it not?

------
davedx
Wasn't Medium founded by ex-Twitter people, and didn't Twitter do exactly the
same thing to third party developers?

------
pier25
I have a number of articles on Medium with thousands of claps and 100K+ hits.
I'm already working on my Jekyll blog for my next articles.

The writing experience is still great, but the reading experience has become
bad, specially on mobile.

I don't need the social features Medium offers. Most of the interesting
discussions happen here on HN, Reddit, or Twitter anyway. I don't care about
claps and such stuff either. I mostly write because I need to get something
out of my system.

------
colemickens
It's one thing for users to give their membership, patronage and data to a
centralized for-profit, startup type company. It's another, totally absurd to
me, thing to cede control of your company's online presence to some other
startup... just for a simple blog. And _still_ no one seemed to care even when
Medium started nagging users to signup when just trying to read an article...

I just don't get it. It's not a good look when I go to read a technical
article from [startup], and wind up staring at a fullscreen popup begging me
to signup for a Medium account. Really?

I'm adding it to my list of lessons that apparently people have to learn first
hand - make personal backups [no, really, it's not that hard], use a password
manager [no, really, it's easier than not], don't use GoDaddy [they were just
on HN again in the last few weeks]... and don't use thin little SaaS that
don't do anything and just want to posses your content and your users and
eventually go under or go dark, leaving you holding the bag.

------
andrew_
If you haven't given write.as or WriteFreely a look recently, do make a point
to. Great folks working on that project and a great platform. I happily
donated in the form of a pro account to help their efforts.

------
kiba
I think some things are more suited as not-for-profit entities.

Blogging is hard to monetize without coming off as evil or desperate, so why
bother?

But then again, you still need to fund servers and such.

~~~
pferde
Perhaps this will lead to less blogs-for-profit, and more blogs-out-of-
interest. The internet was just fine before money arrived and took most of it
hostage, I'm sure it will be just as good when it all goes bust and money
leaves.

------
cooperadymas
Going back through Hacker News history to some of the earliest posts on
Medium, and the earliest articles about it, it is evident that the community
was somewhere between skeptical to downright antagonistic from the beginning.
It makes sense, developers / IT people are most qualified to build and host
their own websites, and more likely than the average person to understand the
implications of allowing someone else to host their content.

So it seems that the HN crowd and the general programmer community are not the
audience for Medium.

Despite this, it seems that a large percentage of development tutorials and
articles I come across today are hosted there.

Personally, I will be happy to see better alternatives start popping up.

~~~
notatoad
To be fair, "skeptical to downright antagonistic" could describe HN's reaction
to almost anything.

~~~
RosanaAnaDana
Well at least we know we're among good company.

------
sizzzzlerz
Don't worry about it. I stopped clicking on Medium links when they limited me
to 5 articles a month, articles written and hosted elsewhere but linked to
through Medium.

------
boycaught
And castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually. You're not really
building your business on someone else's API: you're building theirs.

------
MKais
History repeating itself: Evan Williams did the same thing years ago with
Twitter. Dozens of third-party apps saw their access to Twitter API revoked

------
orta
I've been thinking about this problem from the perspective of running an
engineering team blog, Medium is a dependency that doesn't really pull its
weight: [http://artsy.github.io/blog/2019/01/30/why-we-run-our-
blog/](http://artsy.github.io/blog/2019/01/30/why-we-run-our-blog/)

------
stickfigure
I feel like there's something missing in this article. "The API broke and we
assume they did it deliberately." All the other comments here on HN assume
they are shutting down the API.

Has anyone checked? I can't find any sort of announcement. I get there's a lot
to hate about medium now but this seems like a story that deserves a little
more investigation.

------
evrydayhustling
Lame move, and especially unusual since I don't see Medium as having anything
like the market dominance that "successful" API retractions (looking at you,
Twitter) have. Doesn't medium still need its integration landscape to reach
more users? Or is this a desperate move to secure a much narrower niche?

------
realityking
Medium has a great low barrier to entry but if you're a developer looking to
post your own content or are setting up a site for someone I seriously
recommend looking into a static site set up.

With services like GitHub and Netlify (for hosting) and Contentful (as a
content editing GUI) the day-to-day experience is seamless, you don't have to
worry about security issues like you have with a traditional CMS, and you can
make use of amazing tools like Gatsby.js (React based static site generator).

My colleague Khaled made a great tutorial specifically about Gatsby.js:
[https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-
gatsby...](https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-gatsby-video-
tutorials/)

Full disclosure: I work for Contentful

~~~
treis
Takes some cajones to post a stealth promotional post in a thread of people
complaining about just that.

------
tnolet
I started writing blog posts on Medium around 1,5 years ago. Some got pretty
popular with 6k+ claps and many shares.

But almost exactly when I started everything went downhill:

\- viewership dropped

\- shares dwindled

\- short, copy & paste non-valuable content flooded everything.

In 1,5 years it went from "pretty cool" to "not publishing there ever again".

------
16th_hop
To add onto this - I have had my entire account shadow-banned when I wrote a
popular technical article about blockchain technology (also about my startup).
It looked fine to me when I was logged in, but it showed up as a 404 to people
who clicked on it. No notice. No explanation. I wrote about this Kafkaesque
expereince here. Make sure to post in multiple places.

[https://honest.cash/chicken/mediumcom-is-engaging-in-
ongoing...](https://honest.cash/chicken/mediumcom-is-engaging-in-ongoing-
stealth-censorship-why-all-crypto-discussion-should-migrate-off-of-
mediumcom-670)

------
jonmaim
What a surprise: developers getting screwed by big centralized companies.
Nowadays wasting time and money building anything on the shoulder of another
company is crazy. It's not if but when are you getting screwed: Twitter,
Facebook, Apple, this is history repeating itself plenty fold.

I'm just surprised nobody mentioned any decentralised, blockchain-based
platform where spending time and money building on it is just worth it for the
future.

Have a look at the Steem blockchain: social network like publishing and
commenting are free and even rewarded with crypto-currency payouts. And as a
developer it is very elegant to develop on it.

~~~
phoe-krk
> I'm just surprised nobody mentioned any decentralised, blockchain-based
> platform

What about decentaralized platforms that are _not_ blockchain-based? The
Fediverse (a part of which is write.as) achieves this goal of being
decentralized without using any kind of blockchain technology.

~~~
jonmaim
Thanks for mentioning the Fediverse.

Who is paying for server costs?

~~~
phoe-krk
The owner of each instance pays the costs for hosting a given instance. So,
basically, domain + hosting.

Note that these costs can be really low; Pleroma[0] can be run on a Raspberry
Pi 3 or a $2.50 Vultr instance[1]

[0] [https://pleroma.social/](https://pleroma.social/)

[1] [https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-
pleroma/](https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/)

------
scarface74
It looks like everyone is burying the lede:

 _We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to
generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled
that feature._

It was a service outage, they didn’t remove the API.

~~~
notatoad
the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications being restricted doesn't
explain why an existing application would be terminated though.

~~~
scarface74
If they were planning to disable the API permanently, why would they reenable
it? Maybe their explanation wasn’t thorough but to attribute it to malice is
premature.

How would it benefit Medium to not allow third party apps to publish to their
platform? This isn’t like Twitter where they had an incentive not to allow
users to use unofficial apps to force advertising on them.

------
rdiddly
Sounds like it wasn't a "let's shut this down" decision, but rather an
ordinary screwup or attack or whatnot... an "interruption" as Medium's
response puts it.

Which isn't to invalidate recent criticism of Medium. They're basically trying
to be the Netflix of blogs: a platform situated between readers & writers -->
profit. But where Netflix gives you something cheaper & better for which you
were formerly paying more, Medium is giving you something that used to be free
and now I guess trying to do something profitable with that. I dunno...

------
crooked-v
I really wish I could find a service like this, with dead simple Markdown-
based publishing and a minimalist interface, but that also supported anonymous
paragraph-level commenting. It's something that would be perfect for the
tabletop gaming community, which right now has a heavy bias towards Google
Docs for public drafts almost entirely for the easy commenting on specific
sections of text.

Medium used to seem like it could fill that role, but then they moved towards
being as annoying as possible to logged-out users.

------
cabaalis
The only integration you can trust is one with a contract in place, and
probably one you are paying for access to. I think the days of monetizing a
cobbling of free services are limited.

------
ngngngng
I started using ghostjs recently for personal writing. It's probably the most
enjoyable writing experience I've ever had. Makes me want to come up with more
reasons to write.

------
sergiotapia
Medium sucks - and they are totally locked down.

Did you know they don't even have a search API? It's like they're afraid of
letting the content you wrote go outside their walled garden.

------
amrrs
Signal v Noise - recently exited [https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-
exits-medium/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/)

Previously, a Wired's Publication did similar thing.

Despite all, (as someone who writes on medium) - I see it's one easy platform
anyone to get started - kind of what blogspot used to do.

~~~
arc_of_descent
Wordpress is great. I've signed up for a yearly plan, I get to use my own
domain. And their editor is really great.

------
danielkay
Shameless plug - I built MyTube.FM few months ago as an attempt to give
alternative platform for those who prefer to voice rather than write.

I am curating few profiles myself; for example:
[https://potus.mytube.fm/](https://potus.mytube.fm/)

------
owens99
Medium is blocked in China. So anyone writing on Medium is preventing 1.5B
people from being able to access your information. I am not sure about
write.as, this is the first time I am hearing about it. But generally the best
way for access is to host your own content.

------
fidla
I tried medium a while back, but when they started blocking posts (without an
account), I stopped.

------
consultSKI
Very telling post. Some may recall that once upon a time Twitter did the same
thing. Cut the API for third-party apps and basically said [in my words], "We
don't need you." Was Ev at Twitter when that happened?

------
pawurb
Medium is poor choice of publishing platform anyway
[https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-
seo](https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo)

------
bernardlunn
“We trusted that Medium might not do what many VC-funded platforms have done
before: open an API, attract developers and users, grow, then shut it all
down. “ That trust was misplaced. Pleased I stuck with Wordpress.

------
hobgoblin1234
I'd personally be extremely happy if Medium blinked out of existence.

------
paulie_a
So when medium folds, I wonder what line of work the ux/UI people will
transition to.

At this point you are better off saying unemployed or I delivered weed.

------
vietvu
Medium is like Google+ for me now. Don't go there.

------
thomasjudge
Medium == Not Well Done

------
munificent
I should write a blog post about this, but I'm like the last person on Earth
who feels like writing articles about tech biz finance stuff, but I feel like
somehow in the past twenty years one of the basic principles of transacting
with other humans got lost.

If you're using a product or service, partnering with a company, using their
API, buying their stuff, selling stuff to them, whatever, you should at some
level understand their incentives. And, in a capitalist economy, "incentive"
is mostly synonymous with "money".

If you don't know how the businesses you interact with make money, you're
setting yourself up for heartbreak. As far as I can tell, tech companies make
money one of four ways:

1\. VC funding.

2\. Selling your attention to other companies.

3\. Selling your data to other companies.

4\. You pay them for stuff.

1 has a finite lifespan which means, eventually, they will switch to one of
the others. Unless you are certain which of the others they'll switch to and
how, committing to use a business at this stage is a crapshoot. In practice,
it seems businesses that currently rely on VC funding to stay solvent more
often than not pivot to sad shady shit. Much of this has to do with not giving
themselves any other options. Once they have a big userbase used to spending
zero for their product, it's very hard to change, so they end up having to
find money other sketchy ways.

2 is OK if you're OK with it. However, your attention is literally the most
priceless commodity you own. Everything else you will ever do with your life
begins with you spending attention on things. So if squandering a bit of that
looking at dumb ads so that you can read a free article is worth it to you,
that's fine, but I think most of us could probably find better things to do
with our limited brain juice.

3 is _maybe_ OK, but, man, it's dubious. The more a company knows about you,
the more leverage they have to influence you. With machine learning is going,
the amount of actionable intelligence companies can squeeze out of a given
blob of data keeps going up. Stuff like Cambridge Analytica doesn't keeps me
up at night. The long trajectory of this path looks an awful lot like straight
up dystopia to me.

4 has served humanity fairly well for thousands of years. Its main point
against is that you have to pay for stuff.

Personally, I try to do 4 when I can. Whenever I use a business that doesn't
do 4, I assume anything at all could happen in the future. They owe me nothing
because I've paid them nothing.

Anyone who's surprised by formerly-beloved-VC-backed-startup-that-turns-evil
today must really be willfully blind.

------
dymk
The response from Medium was that the service interruption was caused by a
bug.

This website owner went all nuclear and indignant because they couldn't wait
back for a response from Medium, indicating the interruption was _because of a
bug_.

Then they try to backpedal: "We don't get why a particular bug manifested this
specific way so we're waiting for more details, but our heels are still dug
into the ground".

~~~
thebaer
They didn't explain why the "interruption" has existed at least a week, or why
they didn't notify anyone in that time. Our application doesn't seem to exist
in their system anymore, even after their most recent email response. Before
this, it was working steadily for two years. That's what we're waiting for an
explanation on.

~~~
dymk
So you're sure they're lying about this being a bug, and you're really
_really_ sure that they're being malicious?

~~~
thebaer
I never said either of those things.

