
Is Svbtle Dead? - mparramon
https://news.layervault.com/stories/44300-is-svbtle-dead
======
Udo
What I remember about Svbtle may well be completely false, but these are the
impressions I got from it at the time: it's an exclusive club for bloggers who
see themselves as elite, enough so for that perception to get in the way of
perceiving the actual content. I didn't even know you could sign up for it as
a mere mortal without being invited, so the marketing message was quite
strong.

It's not that Medium is great either. Those obnoxious gigantic pictures on
top, serving a page that should be pretty simple but somehow manages to suck
up a lot of CPU/GPU (enough to make my Macbook switch graphics cards), and
annoyingly you can't drag and drop URLs into a Medium page which I do a lot to
recycle tabs.

In the end it comes down to perception. Both services showed up too many times
on HN initially, often for content that didn't seem very worthwhile. It's par
for the course, as far as blogging is concerned though. But only Svbtle
managed to actually convey a strong negative bias upon an article _before_ I
even open it.

~~~
smacktoward
The ridiculous it-acts-like-a-clicked-link-if-you-hover-over-it-because-
reasons "kudos" button didn't help matters, either. It sent a strong message
(to me, at least) that Svbtle bloggers were more interested in looking hip
than in how their blog actually worked, which was a big negative mark for
people writing about tech.

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tptacek
My sense is that the business plan of:

* 1-2 good blogs ->

* Snazzy public interface ->

* Invite only blog network ->

* Status competition for invite ->

* User-generated content magazine

was clever, but didn't pan out, and when the project pivoted to being a Medium
alternative, it got crushed; svbtle : medium :: posterous : tumblr.

(I could be wrong about all this and have no inside insight into Svbtle).

------
bshimmin
Well, one platform has a slightly hard to type URL, and the other has
[https://medium.com/@presidentobama](https://medium.com/@presidentobama) \- I
think the winner is fairly plain to see.

That said, the fact that the US president has fewer than three thousand
followers suggests Medium is quite a few orders of magnitude behind Twitter,
Facebook, etc in terms of popularity, suggesting to me either a writing
platform is never going to have the same sort of mass appeal or that there's
still space for a big winner in that sector.

------
austinl
I'm in the process of migrating from svbtle to Ghost
([https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)), which is free if you can install
it on your own web server.

I stuck with svbtle for a while because of the free early membership and
custom domains. I still think the platform is good for editing – at its core
it was a super simple way to publish posts in markdown (I was using jekyll
before), but I was also turned off by kudos and the network. I would prefer to
not use Medium for similar reasons.

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
There was also the much hated clone, Obtvse.[1]

[1]: [https://github.com/natew/obtvse](https://github.com/natew/obtvse)

------
mattdesl
Medium is pretty awful for code so I still use svbtle. Most of my page views
doesn't come from the Svbtle site, but from direct links, Twitter, etc.

~~~
Navarr
Medium also doesn't have custom domain support, which is a must for me. I
consider personal branding very important and medium just doesn't have it

~~~
dankoss
I highly recommend [https://www.silvrback.com](https://www.silvrback.com) for
all of these things. Great code support, custom domains, and a bio page. Just
a happy customer reporting in.

~~~
Navarr
Really nice software. Would prefer something I could host myself in PHP, but
if I was a more active writer $30/yr for that looks like a really great deal.

