
Ask HN: What do you think about Medium? - rayalez
Recently I have been very fascinated with medium.com, because I really love the idea of merging a blogging platform and a social network, and nobody has done this right up to this point. And also because I am thinking about working on a competing project, since I have many ideas on how this can be done better.<p>I would really love to hear your thoughts about medium, and I would be very grateful if you could answer a few questions:<p>- How do you feel about medium? Love&#x2F;hate&#x2F;indifferent?<p>- What did they do right, and what are it&#x27;s flaws?<p>- What would you do better? What needs to be changed?<p>- What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what twitter is now, or will nobody care about it? Will they be able to maintain the content quality, and if yes then how?<p>- How do you think they are going to monetize it? How would you do that?
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miguelrochefort
> I am thinking about working on a competing project, since I have many ideas
> on how this can be done better.

This, kids, is the biggest problem we face today. Whenever someone needs
something out of something that doesn't offer it, a competing product is
created.

Even if your product truly is better, a compromise is born. People who use
your product will miss the community and content of Medium, and people who use
Medium will miss the benefits of your product. Even if 50% of Medium users
switch to your new product, you're both losers. The Medium community won't be
as good as it used to, and your community won't be as good as Medium's used to
be.

Until we move away from the application/website/service paradigm, this problem
will remain. Fragmentation will continue to hurt everyone.

What we need is a decentralized and extensible platform that can be improved
without introducing competition that leads to fragmentation. Too bad people
don't know they want this yet.

~~~
trcollinson
I am sure you are somewhat correct that people don't know that they want this.
However, there is more to it than that. This is actually a very hard problem
to solve. How exactly do you propose we create a decentralized and extensible
platform that can be improved without leading to competition. This seems like
a pipe dream.

~~~
miguelrochefort
> This is actually a very hard problem to solve.

It's not difficult to solve. It's just that nobody considers it to be a
problem that deserves being solved. If the challenge was in solving it, surely
people would at least be talking about its existence.

> How exactly do you propose we create a decentralized and extensible platform
> that can be improved without leading to competition.

\- The protagonist: Semantic web

\- The antagonist: Privacy

We need more semantics and less privacy. Together, we can create a more
efficient communication platform. That's the base of the platform.

Then, all we need is a predicate-orientated UI, intents as contracts, and IoT
sensors.

All of this has been known for decades. One would need to live under a rock
not to know this. How we got where we are today really is a mystery.

------
miguelrochefort
> \- How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

I like a lot of its content.

> \- What did they do right, and what are it's flaws?

Good: People talk about things people care about.

Bad: Trends define what people care about.

> \- What would you do better? What needs to be changed?

People hate reading. What makes an article popular on Medium is:

1\. Its title

2\. Its bullet points

The future of communication is:

1\. Don't tell me things I already know

2\. _Show_ me the stuff I need in ways I can relate to

This requires some kind of intelligence or AI. This also requires a new
language that's not English. Something more visual, easier to consume. In the
future, we will never write for humans. Machines will read us, customize the
message for each individual human being, and then communicate it to that
person.

> \- What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what
> twitter is now, or will nobody care about it? Will they be able to maintain
> the content quality, and if yes then how?

Medium is dead in 5 years. Twitter will be dead in 5 years. People will
communicate through a semantic graph. We won't read text, we will read nodes
and edges.

> \- How do you think they are going to monetize it? How would you do that?

Most posts are actually ads in disguise. People will pay to get their posts
professionally improved (with A/B testing) and cheat the recommendation
system.

------
perlgeek
> How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

I've read good content on medium, which makes me feel (a bit) positive about
it.

Most medium blogs seem to have huge header images though, which require me to
scroll before reading the first sentence, which is very annoying. So slightly
less positive.

> What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what
> twitter is now, or will nobody care about it?

I expect it to be a bit like wordpress.com now: well-known, still around,
though not a huge hype.

> How do you think they are going to monetize it?

Like everyone else does: Ads, sponsored posts, sponsored rankings.

------
teaneedz
Wrote this yesterday:
[https://ello.co/teanee/post/P2T1UI14Rr3YZYfsIwFPlQ](https://ello.co/teanee/post/P2T1UI14Rr3YZYfsIwFPlQ)

Ello vs Medium

~~~
pavornyoh
>Personally, I prefer the business policies and user respect that the Ello
platform offers. A no-ad policy (forever) is a huge reason to support Ello for
me. Although Medium has the tech crowd, Ello has a community and team with
lots of heart. When Ello releases an API, I'm sure that the community will
increase.

Are you working for Ello? How do you know the Ello team has lots of hearts
etc.? If you do, then I will say then there is some sort of bias to the
post/comparison. Naturally, you'd favor Ello more than Medium if the answers
to my above questions are Yes & yes.

~~~
teaneedz
No, I don't work for Ello - just a user. I've watched from the sidelines and
observed how those who do work there respond. From their words and actions,
it's clear to me that they are pro-privacy and anti-ad tech. I've seen how
they've handle product issues with transparency and quick action. I guess it
sounds like I work there, but I don't nor do I personally know anyone who
actually does.

------
logn
LiveJournal did it.

