
Anywhere but Medium - minimaxir
http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/0900.html
======
notacoward
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.

~~~
jerf
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?

~~~
tejaswiy
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.

~~~
pluma
> 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.

~~~
Futurebot
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.

~~~
slyall
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.

------
pc86
> _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.

~~~
lucb1e
> don't wait for someone to do the obvious

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.

------
chasing
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.

Your writing is yours. Own it.

~~~
npizzolato
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.

~~~
lucb1e
> 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.

[1] [http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6](http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6)

------
redwards510
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.

~~~
evanriley
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.

~~~
derefr
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.

------
ak217
WTF did I just read? The guy relates so many ways in which he thinks we
shouldn't use Medium, but never presents an argument on _why_.

~~~
eva1984
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...

------
ThomPete
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)

Just my 5 cents.

------
lucb1e
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.

------
danso
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.

------
redthrowaway
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.

------
blt
_> 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.

------
krallja
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.

------
minimaxir
Relevant discussion: "Why have most tech and startup-related bloggers moved to
Medium?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118)

~~~
davewiner
Thanks for posting that link.

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. ;-)

------
valar_m
In case you want to read it on Medium:

[https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2c1#.1y9dqf7v7)

------
funkysquid
This is more fun to read as the cross-post on Medium
([https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2c1#.6dawtzuj4)), especially the parts about how people can't
criticize Medium on Medium.

------
FussyZeus
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.

------
jseliger
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.

~~~
minimaxir
Medium now allows custom URLs which alleviates that particular branding
problem slightly.

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.

------
dexwiz
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.

~~~
minimaxir
> You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that
> people know and look to for content.

As noted in the article, _that is exactly the problem_ as Medium is not an
impartial judge.

~~~
davewiner
And of course Medium didn't pay you to write the post, another difference from
magazine publishers.

~~~
LukeB_UK
And of course Medium didn't charge the reader, another difference from
magazine publishers.

------
bootload
_" When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium,
you're stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which
depends on diversity, not monoculture."_

If you have read enough of Daves posts you'll realise this is the Internet
version of what happened with Microsoft and Apple. Something about absolute
power and corruption. Dave has been remarkably consistent in this observation
over the years.

 _" 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. I asked if he'd consider
putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet."_

One reason not to put things on medium is the poor url design. Try remembering
then typing this url into your browser ~
[https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h)

The design is ok. We can understand up to the end of the title, _' anywhere-
but-medium'_ then we get robot vomit _' 5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h'_, junk parts
of the url no use to anyone except machines.

------
Futurebot
For anyone confused about Medium's export feature, it's available under
Settings->Export Content from the user menu. Worries about platforms not
providing this are warranted, but I think Medium already has this covered,
even if some of the export HTML is messier than some would like.

Until Medium, I hosted my own blogs on my own web servers (for ~17 years). I
eventually got tired of dealing with updates, comment spam management (even
with Akismet and friends), breakin attempts, and all the rest, so I moved
there. I'd still like to see friendly URL and custom domain support, as well
as some fixes to the editor (bulleted lists + blockquote indentation bugs are
very frustrating), but overall, I've been fairly satisfied with it.

His concerns might be a tad overblown in this instance, even if I agree with
many of his concerns about the open web (and I personally still think RSS
should be everywhere by default. It's still incredibly useful, even if only
used for API consumption.)

------
6stringmerc
> _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.

------
zachgersh
If you wanted both a platform and an OSS approach why not just deploy
something like ghost:

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

I like supporting OSS business models that allow me to host my own platform or
just post my content to their hosted version of said platform.

------
ageitgey
Dave Winer makes a point about how he posts to his own blog and only
syndicates his content to medium.com via rss because he wants his content to
live on for years.

Ironically when you visit the medium.com version of his post[1], all the links
in it were hijacked by ifttt.com and turned into ift.tt shortlinks. So his
effort to escape the medium.com content jail landed him right inside the
ifttt.com content jail as well. Double jail.

Will those ift.tt shortlinks still load in 5 years? Who knows.

[1] [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-
medium-5450cb19f2c1#.53guhnze5)

------
Ecco
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...

------
kmfrk
I think everyone using Medium at least owe it to themselves to try out the
export feature and migrate one blog post.

I did that with a few for archival purposes and such, and the export feature
is basically an HTML file with all kinds of stuff going on in it.

The idea of Medium is awesome, but the combination of their weird CMS and the
way in which they store blog posts is annoying. Pros and cons and all that.

That said, it's not like other blogging platforms are saints. I'm sure it'd be
a mess to export my Tumblr posts too.

------
microcolonel
Can't read this page without Javascript.

Anything but scripting.com.

------
ph0rque
No mention of svbtle?

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.

~~~
seiji
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.

~~~
cballard
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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314)

~~~
DrScump
<If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because
you're unintelligent and not funny.>

What if I'm unintelligent, but _funny_? Can I get a part-time account?

------
kzahel
The text is too large on this blog post on a mobile device. If it were written
on medium, at least it would be more legible.

------
needz
Well, at least medium.com loads. (site is down this moment)

------
strictnein
We need to all go back to GeoCities.

