
Ask HN: Why have most tech and startup-related bloggers moved to Medium? - carlesfe
In the last year I saw how many tech and startup-related people moved their blogs to Medium, from wordpress, blogger, Google+ or even self-hosted.<p>I&#x27;m asking this with no agenda and (hopefully) trying to avoid a flame war.<p>I was wondering if there are any substantial gains by moving your content to Medium, or is it mainly because of the fad&#x2F;coolness factor. Maybe it is the community? In any case, I&#x27;d like to investigate further into this.<p>Do you have a first-hand experience you can share? Have you seen an increase in visits or quality of contributions by moving to Medium?
======
anildash
(Disclosure: I'm an advisor.)

Some of this is selection bias, since the most popular blogging platforms
(depending on how one defines it) could be Tumblr or WordPress. But within the
community you mention, Medium has a few traits that earned its place as the
forum for these posts.

First, there is distribution built into the platform. Recommendations can get
a piece in front of a lot more readers, especially when a piece gets promoted
in an email or through notifications in the app.

Next, there's the writing experience. I've used pretty much every major
English language blogging platform and Medium has the simplest, smoothest
writing experience, in part because they remove so many design and formatting
options, while still leaving the ones most people want.

The final key reason is the one that geeks here will probably find most
annoying, and that is what Medium signifies in culture. It's come to represent
a certain kind of writing that, when good, is quite thoughtful, but when self-
serving (as were many early, high-visibility Medium pieces), can be
insufferable. But platforms come to signify meaning; marketers write
thinkpieces on LinkedIn, fanfic writers gravitate to Wattpad, and people with
illicit data dumps find their way to Pastebin. There's no reason any of these
sites couldn't host any piece of writing, but each community is a place that
represents something.

I've been blogging for almost 17 years, and being busy is the only thing
that's really kept me from moving my blog to Medium. I understand others have
legitimate qualms about using hosted services, but given their APIs, I'm not
worried about that. And a tool that's robust enough to host the White House's
transcript of the State of the Union will definitely handle my dinky blog.

~~~
idlewords
My qualm with Medium isn't the idea of a hosted service, or the bloat, or even
the annoying preciousness you allude to, but the degree of reader surveillance
baked into the site. It pings back your exact scroll position in the document
very frequently, and the behavior is neither advertised or (last time I
checked) something you can disable.

I'm kind of surprised you're a Medium advisor given that you are not the
biggest fan of surveillance culture yourself.

~~~
ehnto
It's interesting you pointed out the scroll position in particular.

Of all the things the site likely tracks, the scroll position is probably the
least malicious, however it is the most present. It has a real time 'we are
watching you right now' feel to it which is possibly why it irked you more
than the fact that they probably just logged your country, IP address, screen
resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout.

I imagine they use the scroll data to determine abandonment of the article,
which is very valuable to marketers and writers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the scroll data and other usage metrics are part of
Medium's monetization strategy.

~~~
soared
> logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version,
> language preference and keyboard layout

I've got some bad news for you friend, all of that is tracked by every site
that uses google analytics. Medium post [1] about abandonment: 7 minutes is
optimal. They have plenty of other posts about writing good content based on
their user metrics.

1: [https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-
is-7-minutes-74...](https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-
is-7-minutes-74b9f41509b#.rh8rrxd3h)

------
minimaxir
Fad/coolness factor. As a result, the quality of Medium articles is _highly_
variable, which is a source of personal frustration.

I published my anti-Product Hunt post there to get a sense of Medium's system
nowadays: [https://medium.com/@minimaxir/the-questions-on-
transparency-...](https://medium.com/@minimaxir/the-questions-on-transparency-
that-product-hunt-is-intentionally-ignoring-b579fba14048)

It's nothing special. Yes, it looks pretty, but if _every blog looks the same_
, then no blog is special. Regardless, there is not as much control as my
Jekyll blog, anyways, which I need.

Also, the commenting system is _hilariously_ bad to the point of it being a
dark pattern: you have to click on each comment to reply or see who even liked
each comment. You also have to click a comment to see any replies to the
comment, _and this nests infinitely._ To see a comment 3 levels deep, you need
to visit 4 different, slow-loading pages.

~~~
icefox
I would also go with the Fad/Coolness factor. And if that is why you are
posting stuff there you are going to have a really bad time in a few years
when it isn't so cool anymore. Been around long enough to see this happen many
times before. In six months or six years Medium will just be that place where
some people post, but all of the 'cool kids' are posting over on the new
platform 'A' because it is incrementally better. If you are really lucky
Medium will end up like Blogger with a perfectly okay reputation and is
actually still getting improvements, if your unlucky in two years you will
have one months to manually scrape any stuff you want before the site is
shutdown.

The same can be said of so many things. Most brands are not great forever.
Remember when having a [insert email provider] email address was a thing? How
about storing your photos on [insert service here]? And don't forget about
[video upload site] or [source control site]. If you have the time to migrate
from one service to the next go right ahead and play the game every few years.

How many more years do you think it will be before you will feel silly that
you have code still on SourceForge? How about HotMail, GeoCities, MySpace, or
AIM? What about GitHub, Picasa, Gmail, Twitter, or Facebook? Or dare I say
even HackerNews?

~~~
albedoa
_if your unlucky in two years you will have one months to manually scrape any
stuff you want before the site is shutdown._

You can download your Medium content with a single click.

 _Remember when having a [insert email provider] email address was a thing?
... And don 't forget about [video upload site] or [source control site]. If
you have the time to migrate from one service to the next go right ahead and
play the game every few years._

Gmail, YouTube, Github. If they all gave you the same access to your content
as Medium, and one of them were to disappear _tomorrow_ , you will have had to
"play the game" once every nine years on average per service. I doubt your
worst-case definition of "every few years" is a common one.

 _If you are really lucky Medium will end up like Blogger with a perfectly
okay reputation and is actually still getting improvements_

You should disclose that you blog at Blogger. It doesn't help me personally
make sense of the rest of your comment, but it might be relevant to others.

~~~
icefox
Yup I have a blog on Blogger, it isn't the best, it isn't the worst. It is a
_lot_ better than other services that I have used in the past that eventually
died off. I am really there only because I was there yesterday, but like
others I also have been thinking of moving, but haven't done anything yet. I
do want to give thanks to Google for buying them and letting them just get
better over time rather then every few months trying to figure out a growth
monetization strategy that ultimately would kill it.

You might be right, perhaps it isn't every few years, but if a service only
lasts on average 9 years, but you have n services how often will you be forced
to migrate something? I feel like I don't have too much, but once or twice a
year I have to migrate some data (free and what I pay for) and while when I
was younger and had lots of free time it was fun to be forced to migrate to
the shiny new thing, now it is just time I would like to not have to waste for
what will ultimately (usually) be very little improvement to the core
offering.

------
patio11
I think you may underestimate how much of a hassle WordPress is for people who
are in tech the industry but not technologists themselves. I have what should
be, by 2015 standards, a blog with a small level of traffic very predictably
on every blog post. It broke several times a year, catastrophically, due to
out-of-the-box settings of Apache/PHP on a 2 GB VPS. I threw thousands of
dollars of engineer time at that and, more recently, $2k or so a year of
hosting costs to avoid having to play amateur sysadmin at 3 AM because Jimmy
Wales had tweeted a link to me.

"A textarea which you can tweet a link to that doesn't break" is a product
people want to buy, either with money or with the social transaction costs of
adopting Medium as your main writing presence. (I cannot conceive of why a
serious author would do that but then again I write more on Twitter than my
blog these days so...)

~~~
minimaxir
Wordpress.com and Tumblr, the destinations for startup/tech blogging before
Medium ( _especially_ Tumblr), do not crash under pressure either.

...huh, that's the first time I've thought of Tumblr in years. I guess Tumblr
really _is_ dead after Yahoo bought it.

~~~
dennisgorelik
With almost 600M monthly visits, Tumblr does not look like dead. At least yet.

[http://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com](http://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com)

------
w1ntermute
Ev Williams (founder of Medium, Twitter, and Blogger) is well-connected in the
tech and startup communities due to his past companies, so he was probably
able to easily convince a lot of famous tech/startup people to switch. Anyone
can build a slick new blogging platform (and many have) - only Ev (and others
in a similar position of privilege) can actually jumpstart its adoption among
the tech elite.

TL;DR: success begets success

~~~
bootload
_" Ev Williams (founder of Medium, Twitter, and Blogger) is well-connected in
the tech and startup communities due to his past companies, so he was probably
able to easily convince a lot of famous tech/startup people to switch."_

Good point, also don't underestimate Medium is a progression of Twitter.
Simple sign-in with ready made Twit handle recognition.

------
housecor
My Angular 2 vs React post from Medium is currently on the front page of
Hacker News and Reddit/r/javascript. I give Medium's platform some credit for
that. Their tagging system helps get the ball rolling. It seems to provide
enough eyes that someone is likely to submit it to the big aggregators. For
many smaller bloggers, it's hard to get over that hump. I hit the front page a
couple times on my personal blog, but most the time my posts just didn't get
enough initial attention to create any buzz. I've been very impressed with my
reach on Medium compared to my ~3 year old, post once/month .NET/JavaScript
blog. In just one day today, my post got as many views as my biggest post of
all time on my blog.

That said, there are cracks showing. Medium has begun removing features many
loved. They pulled the full-bleed images that elegantly faded away as your
scrolled down. They removed public inline annotations by the author. And any
comments people make inline now cannot be made public anymore (very
frustrating). All were unique features that drew me there. They're trying to
simplify, but I feel they went too far.

That said, the writing experience is seriously luxurious compared to
Wordpress. So that combined with the increased reach has me hooked...for now.

------
grkvlt
I would challenge your statement 'most tech and startup-related bloggers' and
suggest this is just the availability heuristic in action.

Basically, _some_ high-profile bloggers have moved, and the fact that they are
high-profile means you notice the move more. I would suggest that in fact,
most bloggers are probably just using Wordpress, as has been the case for most
bloggers for a while, although I _would_ really like to see some numbers that
can confirm this either way. Also, of course, how you categorise bloggers as
'tech and startup-related' will skew the figures as well...

~~~
carlesfe
Excuse me, English is not my first language and I said "most" when I should've
said "many".

~~~
grkvlt
No problem, it was well-written enough that I wouldn't have guessed that! But,
in that case, sure, I think you're seeing selective bandwagon-jumping because
medium is trendy. I will be curious to see how many people publish on medium
just once or twice as an experiment, and then revert to their original
platform, versus those who make a permanent change, though.

As I said, I have no hard figures, so this is mostly conjecture on my part,
and I'd be interested in actual data...

------
mesozoic
Self reinforcing startup feedback loop is my guess. Also I suppose with the
rise of social media being more accessible through search there's less
importance on having your own domain to create authority.

At least medium has got past the problem of nearly everything on it being
garbage int he last year. Before the last few months I would actively avoid
reading anything there but now it appears more like a platform and 30% or so
of what I've seen has been at least close to worth reading.

------
arn
Here's an entire article on it. Basically, they get more reach on medium then
self hosted

[https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-
medium-c8...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-
medium-c8083ce19686#.iios092z0)

------
bootload
_" I was wondering if there are any substantial gains by moving your content
to Medium, or is it mainly because of the fad/coolness factor. Maybe it is the
community?"_

Wednesday September 23, 2009, there was a similar questioning by Joe Hewwitt
of sharecropping with the Apple iPhone. [0] This is the bit I wrote on
blogging:

If you don't want to be reliant on commercial services like MT or even the
free ones like Wordpress there is nothing stopping you getting your own
machine with a full stack of software using your own software. Dave Winer does
this at scriping.com

You don't need to be in the system to use it. For each example I've given
above users had the choice to work entirely within the restricted stack and
somehow subvert it.

So is there gains? Well convenience for one. You don't have to own a server,
admin the site or maintain the code nor worry about distribution. The question
to ask is, _" Are you willing to pay the price if/when Medium change the
service or close it?"_ Do you want to emulate the Dave Winer [1] and Joe
Hewitts of the world or be a sheeple?

Of course the original post I made hosted on my own, albeit crappy site: ~
[http://seldomlogical.com/sharecrop.html](http://seldomlogical.com/sharecrop.html)

[0] _" Joe Hewitt: On Middle Men"_ ~
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941085)

[1] Dave Winer, _" Happy 20th anniversary to Dave Winer – inventor of the
blog"_
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/12/happy-20th...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/12/happy-20th-
anniversary-dave-winer-inventor-of-the-blog)

~~~
narrowrail
This is interesting if for no other reason than Winer has commented[0] that he
is mirroring content on Medium at this point.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839457)

~~~
bootload
_" mirroring content on Medium"_

Cheap CDN and exposure :) though as he noted, lots of x-posting rather than a
straight API call.

------
toufique
Built-in distribution, period. No other platform gets you as many readers w/o
doing any self-marketing.

The design and functionality is nice, but I think it would still be similarly
successful if it looked like Geocities.

Thought experiment: If you kept the design & functionality, but took away the
distribution, would it be in the deadpool? My gut says yes.

------
wh-uws
Besides being trendy it gives you a dead simple way of getting out a pretty
good looking blog without having to design or setup anything yourself.

------
ghaff
Speaking for myself, I haven't _switched_ to Medium but I find that I probably
get readers on Medium when I cross-post there that I wouldn't have gotten
otherwise. I don't cross-post everything there but if I write something that I
think might be interesting to a broad readership I do.

------
randycupertino
I think it's just trendy.

------
jlgaddis
I've been wanting to migrate my (self-hosted) WordPress sites to something
that generates static pages (based off of my own templates). I likely won't
ever do it, though, simply due to the time required to convert the hundreds of
posts/articles I've previously written.

IIRC, Medium has an API which should make moving to a different platform
easier, should one choose to do that in the future. One would certainly feel
less "locked in" and be more willing to try such a platform if the cost of
moving was so low.

~~~
fowkswe
I've made some Rails ActiveRecord models that to talk to the Wordpress
database.

Using them and the page caching gem / feature, you can get the static page
effect you are looking for.

Additionally, you can have all the Rails goodies (Haml, Sass, Coffeescript,
layouts/partials, etc) for use in your Wordpress development needs along with
the Wordpress authoring tools.

I have it working in my project, and took a half assed attempt to turn it into
a gem. This is waaay premature, and missing lots of the stuff I have flushed
out in my project (post_content formatting, short code completion, categories,
tags, etc):

[https://github.com/fowkswe/pressar](https://github.com/fowkswe/pressar)

If anyone is interested, I'd be willing to fold the other functionality in and
get the 'gem install' working.

------
est
Because blogspot sucks, github is too geeky and wordpress bloats

------
pbreit
I think it's probably straightforward: Medium is very focused on providing a
venue that is attractive to them whereas the others you mentioned are not
nearly as focused. And the team behind Medium is top notch.

Having a founding role in Blogger, Twitter & Medium probably makes Even one of
the great entrepreneurs of our time, certainly in media/publishing.

------
encoderer
For Cronitor, we wanted a place to host occasional pieces about the process of
building the service, and medium seemed to be the absolute easiest way to do
it. All I had to do was update our DNS and sign up for an account on Medium.

------
fluxic
As a writer who's made his living (more or less) via Medium over the past
year, hopefully my experience can shed some insight.

The first blog post I wrote on Medium [0] got there by accident: I planned on
publishing it on a popular local blog. While I'd used WordPress before, I
didn't have a personal blog, so I wrote everything in Microsoft Word.

The piece contained a lot of images—so many that Word kept crashing. The
deadline was approaching, so I decided to finish things in Medium and sent the
link to my editor. (I probably could have used Google Docs, too.)

When it came time to publication—keep in mind, the editor and I hadn't signed
any exclusivity agreements—the editor had not only published my piece with
uninvited edits, but the image formating on their website was super
unappealing. I decided that when promoting my piece, I'd link to my Medium
version instead, since it looked better, didn't contain the edits, and the
Medium.com URL carried no less weight than a URL from
RandomMontrealPublication.com.

My hunch was correct. The Medium piece outperformed the piece on the "popular"
Montreal blog I submitted to (it still did pretty well there, despite the
editorial team not doing a great job of pushing it themselves). When local
press began to pickup the story, all of the backlinks were going to the Medium
version, rather than the RandomMTL version. One of the reasons it did so well
on Medium was that it was selected as a Staff Pick (which put it in the
newsfeeds for all users, as well as a newsletter sent to all users). For a
first-time writer, the attention that Medium was able generate for me (a
complete unknown!!) was super, super addicting.

Fast forward a month. My popular Medium piece lands me a job at a local
startup as a copywriter, where among other things, I'm tasked with reviving
the company's blog. Big surprise: the team has been swamped building their
app, so the made-in-house blog is a bit dated. I convince them to try Medium,
arguing that it has a native audience that can send us traffic.

While the "content marketing" I write for them never gets a Staff Pick
endorsement (nor the corresponding Medium user traffic surge), it does get
some pickup among the Medium community, including an Economist editor who
emails us and references my piece in a story [1][2] and a Quartz editor who
asks to syndicate it [3].

Eventually I get approached by a second startup (also in Montreal), who've
seen my pieces on Medium. They have three writers on staff who have all
published Medium #1 stories and we all continue to use Medium as a way to
republish stuff from our blog (for traffic), and as an alternative to press
release PDFs when pitching press (because they look good). Moreover, if
there's anything we write that doesn't fit on our blog (like my last post,
"The 50 Best HackerNews posts of all time" [4]), we can skip our blog and
publish on Medium instead.

TL;DR: Writing on Medium gives you access to a big audience, which is great if
you don't have a blog or if nobody reads your blog. Moreover, even if you have
a vibrant blog, posting on Medium can give your pieces a second wind. It
doesn't hurt that writing in Medium is a genuine pleasure. Compared to its
competitors (Google Docs/Tumblr/Word/etc.) writing on Medium is like upgrading
from a quill to a fountain pen.

While I've never managed to get another Medium Staff Pick, I always get a
little traffic from Medium. My HN post from last week got 55k hits (many from
HN) and Medium sent me ~2k of that. My latest post also talks a little about
why readers trust the Medium.com URL, which may be another reason writers
might gravitate to the site. [4]

[0] [https://medium.com/@bagelboy/the-rise-and-fall-of-
fairmountb...](https://medium.com/@bagelboy/the-rise-and-fall-of-
fairmountbagel-43bfcbea8505)

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-
africa/2166421...](http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-
africa/21664214-increasing-affluence-risks-strangling-market-driven-system-
works-praise)

[2] [https://medium.com/@transitapp/hello-nairobi-
cc27bb5a73b7](https://medium.com/@transitapp/hello-nairobi-cc27bb5a73b7)

[3] [http://qz.com/357685/engineering-a-mass-transit-app-for-a-
ci...](http://qz.com/357685/engineering-a-mass-transit-app-for-a-city-without-
mass-transit/)

[4] [https://medium.com/swlh/best-
of-2015-pfffffffft-79d9b014f4de](https://medium.com/swlh/best-
of-2015-pfffffffft-79d9b014f4de)

~~~
Cyberdog
> My latest post also talks a little about why readers trust the Medium.com
> URL, which may be another reason writers might gravitate to the site.

Do you really think so? So many times I've been tempted by a link to Medium,
only to encounter an article that was a bloviating waste of time by a self-
fellating author that took an age to load on mobile. Though I've certainly
found useful articles there, I would by no means say that medium.com is a mark
of quality any more than wordpress.com or blogger.com.

~~~
fluxic
Agreed, it's probably no more trustworthy than WP/Blogger. However, it is more
trustworthy than Buzzfeed or CorporateBlogger.com. Ostensibly, the average
Medium post should be better because writers aren't paid (and hence there's no
structural incentive to churn out 10x linkbait posts a day or to fill a post
with sales copy).

------
gnicholas
an insightful blog post about why not to write on Medium (and suggestions for
what to do instead):

[https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c...](https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-
medium-c7cc156bc5d9#.pv3rt3kpd)

Yes, it is ironically written on Medium.

~~~
soared
Dated and irrelevant post though. On Medium you can link to your own site,
your own social media, upload your logos, and link to your product pages.

------
eva1984
It looks better, especially on mobile

------
NetStrikeForce
For me it's the community and how easy it is to just write.

------
ausjke
before I realized that it seems many tech-related blogs are from Medium
nowadays, what's behind this is a mystery to me.

------
sixQuarks
I'd like to know this as well

------
bobby_9x
It's not very wise. They have the ultimate control over your content and your
readers...and one day, they can take it away from you.

