

On Medium - bradly
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/06/30/Medium

======
raymondduke
I've had two Medium articles get over 1.1k views and a 90%+ readership. I have
about 6 subscribers on my WordPress blog that gets ~100 views a day.

Just putting that out there. Make of it what you will.

By the way, I once had an article get 10k views after a share on HN, then had
that same article get ~120,000 after a republish on Lifehacker. The morale of
all this? I don't know. Sure, it feels kind of good knowing that many people
are reading your content, but the bigger picture is what are you doing with
the viewership. I'm not so gung-ho on views anymore because views don't pay my
rent, money does. Money is the ultimate metric.

Sure, viewership is nice, but only because of what it leads to: money and
conversations. Medium is an okay place for conversations, and definitely is
not a place to make money. I've yet to see an affiliate link or someone
telling me to buy their book on the site. If anything, it's a place used to
build your reputation -- it's like a nice outfit that makes you temporarily
look good. I saw temporarily because it's a new site and has somewhat of a
gated community feel to it.

I like reading. I like writing. But in the end, it comes down to making money.

yeah, I'm all over the place with this comment. It's Sunday night and I am a
single guy that lives alone -- I got a lot on my mind!

~~~
tasuki
Does it come down to making money? Writing is about getting a message accross,
be it a "give me money" message or a different one.

------
jmduke
I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either
consciously or unconsciously. I think part of it is the fact that it separates
content from its creators; I think part of it is that it sprung up the same
time as Svbtle, and grew conspicuously ubiquitous whereas Svbtle has remained
pretty confined to the tech sphere.

The underlying value proposition by any sort of blogging engine (Posthaven,
Medium, Svbtle, et al) is limited to a network, ease of use, and a good
design. For most tech people, ease of use is a non-factor (you can extol
'distractions-free design', but you can put vim or Byword in full-screen mode)
-- and I think the way people are reading is shifting away from individual
sites and towards external services to the extent that design isn't a huge
factor (everything looks the same in NewsBlur or Instapaper.)

This leaves the network/audience, which is a much more interesting concept:
Svbtle is clearly going for a more curated approach (though the value of that
curation is arguable), whereas Medium's trying a bunch of stuff at once
(collections, editor's feed, etc.)

I can't help thinking that the winner of this nouveau publishing spectrum
isn't going to be a hosting service, but a linking service. You might never
get Patrick McKenzie to blog on your platform (because why would he?) but you
can always link to his material.

~~~
probably_wrong
> I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either
> consciously or unconsciously.

I dislike Medium consciously, but not for the reasons you present. I dislike
the site because I don't think its prominence here in HN was progressive, but
rather very sudden (one month it was nothing special, and the next one it was
always on the main page).

That tells me that either Medium is the website to end all websites, a site so
popular that it took news sites by storm and whose news cannot be ignored, or
that their marketing team is artificially pushing their content in HN to gain
views. The fact that they have a main page article discussing how awesome the
site is doesn't help either.

Of course, I have no evidence whatsoever of this, but that's how it feels for
me. So as suggested by a fellow HN commenter, I just ignore everything from
them.

~~~
jmduke
I don't disagree with you whatsoever. It definitely felt more organic to me
because I follow a lot of the Obvious Corp. folk on Twitter, but I think it's
naive to think that any major tech-focused publication (and I'm being broad
with the definition of publication here) doesn't specifically submit stuff to
HN.

I have no idea how HN's ranking works, but I wish there was some sort of
diminishing return bias against a given top-level URL.

------
te_chris
Whatever publishers think, I've started using (medium.com) on HN as a negative
content filter. Was quite impressed when I first saw it, but the last few
times I've clicked on something on the front page of HN on medium it's been
poorly thought out link bait. This isn't unique to medium of course, but I've
gone from having a high-end perception of their content to a low-end one.

~~~
hkmurakami
I've noticed that the posts tend to be well composed but on the fluff side in
terms of content.

------
dclowd9901
More bullshit SV circle jerking. I wonder if anyone's working on how to make
public schools better, or a way to keep politicians more accountable, or a way
to help close the wage gap, or...

I came here to change the world. And I feel like all I see are nerds blowing
each other about The next minimalist uber for twitter.

~~~
probably_wrong
> I came here to change the world.

Genuinely interested: what do you mean by "here"? HN, programming, life?

~~~
dclowd9901
Silicon Valley. I grew up dreaming about Livermore Labs, Xerox PARC, Hewlett
Packard (in its day), Apple. Now everything is in the city, and each start up
as vapid and pointless as the last.

~~~
raymondduke
If you want to change the world, change yourself. You should never rely on
others to change in the ways you'd like them to.

~~~
msutherl
You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a
dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential
to change others.

------
Cherian
Sometime back someone invited me to Medium and I am yet to try this out. I am
still confused by to why I should try it out.

Some questions I have:

My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and
personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium?

Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get
encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours.
But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and
the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous
coverage at this level ?

Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or
sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay
$6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you?

I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the
feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same?

If distraction free writing were the USP, I’d recommend my co-founder’s
iaWriter [2]. It does not publish directly and that’s a big negative. Isn’t
this good enough?

[1]: [http://www.gigpeppers.com/](http://www.gigpeppers.com/)

[2]: [http://www.iawriter.com/](http://www.iawriter.com/)

~~~
StavrosK
This is completely off topic, but where did this "I am yet" nonsense spawn
from? It's completely wrong, since you don't say "I amn't seen it yet", you
say "I haven't seen it yet", therefore "I have yet to see it".

Is it one of those things that people get wrong to sound more educated, like
overusing "whom"?

~~~
brianmcc
Interesting question - having always used the expression "I'm yet to do XXX" I
didn't even realise how odd it might look to those unfamiliar with it. It's
pretty standard English IMO, certain nothing I'd consider affectatious the way
the use of whom absolutely can be.

Some discussion here:

[http://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm](http://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm)

including

"I am yet to..." and "I have yet to..." express exactly the same sentiment.
The use of "am" in this context is a throwback to the now obsolete use of "to
be" as the auxiliary verb in the present perfect conjugation of certain verbs.
Eg, I am come. Languages such as German and French continue to use both "to
be" and "to have" as auxiliary verbs. "I have come" translates in German to
"ich bin gekommen" and in French to "je suis venu".

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, that's interesting, thanks for the link. "I am yet" looks completely
foreign to me, and it doesn't help that I haven't managed to find any
definitive citation on the matter. However, it does appear from a cursory
search that you are right, and the two have slightly different meanings.

------
ajkjk
Initially I was very impressed with Medium: it looked good and had a high rate
of good content - enough that I happily assumed that new content Medium was
probably going to be good.

Now I'm very depressed with Medium. It's filling with trite, immature rants
that keep polluting my otherwise quality feed of opinions. I no longer click
the links and definitely won't be chancing upon the rare quality material.

The same thing happened to Quora, sadly.

------
abdophoto
I'm the co-founder of The Tech Block
[http://thetechblock.com](http://thetechblock.com) and we sort of built
something similar to Medium (before Medium existed) except it's focused on
Technology and we pick and choose the pieces that go on our site.

Though it has similarities, the big difference is that our site is not a place
where you'd actually type out your article. Instead, if it's housed on your
site already, you can choose to cross publish to our audience of tech
enthusiasts.

If you haven't heard of it, give it a look.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Love the look. Two things: 1) The author info gets in the way on the left,
making it harder to read (remember we reading in F), 2) Those outgoing links,
I would rather have you guys grab the content and reformatted nicely within
the site for a unified experience.

------
ricardobeat
Many articles on Medium have all external links shortened to bit.ly URLs. Is
that an option in the publishing interface? I find it extremely annoying, you
can track outbound links using javascript without hiding the actual url.

~~~
raymondduke
The last time I checked, that wasn't an option. And now that you mentioned it,
I might start to do it, too (sorry).

I'm not sure how you can track links via javascript, but I do know how to make
a bit.ly link.

~~~
minimaxir
You can theoretically set up Google Analytics to follow outbound links.

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en)

~~~
raymondduke
Seems too complicated.

~~~
ricardobeat
This is something that Medium itself could set up for you.

If you want something simpler, just paste this into your page:
[https://gist.github.com/5899046](https://gist.github.com/5899046)

------
grrrando
I publish on Medium and parse my author RSS feed for display on my website.
See it here, at the bottom: [http://grrrando.com/](http://grrrando.com/)

I think Medium is great. As is mentioned in the article, the editor is
fantastic in its minimalism.

A key difference between myself and the author of this post is that I have no
interest in creating or maintaining a blog (proper) of my own; I just want to
write. I've wanted to write for a while, too, but the roadblock of setting
something up and getting it looking decent prevented me from moving forward.
For a while I thought Tumblr had been what I was looking for but text-based
posts become utterly lost in the stream of naked ladies and pixel art (or is
that just me?).

Stats wise, it's interesting to hear what an "Editor's Choice" pick on Medium
can result in. I've got several posts on Medium that have 100 or fewer reads
and they were posted to correct "collections". Which shows that Medium is not
the place to build up an audience that you don't already have. Lacking the
ability to "follow" an author – on-site at least, RSS is a non-advertised
option – shows that Medium is more oriented towards "real time" (news cycle)
longform than being a platform for authorship (for everyone besides maybe @ev
and a handful of SV folks that always get featured).

My most popular article was posted about two weeks ago and has had around
2,000 reads. This isn't due to any Medium feature, though - just good old
retweets and viral spreading. It was a satire listicle - prime viral material.
Probably not what Medium was made for. Getting all of those reads, though,
made me wonder exactly where all the traffic was coming from. I wish Medium
had more in-depth analytics for this.

------
hackerchic
As the author mentions, Medium seems best for the regular casual blogger.
Bloggers with large followings are probably better served keeping their
following and all the comments on their own turf.

~~~
cmbaus
I am always surprised how quickly individuals will give up control over their
own content.

~~~
shanselman
Agreed. I prefer all my content at a URL and server that I control.
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx)

------
gfosco
Each different sharing outlet provides a unique level of anxiety, ease of
sharing, ego, and focus. The reason I like the concept of Medium is that it
encourages non-attention-seeking people to write publicly about nearly any
topic. The categories are a good structure, and the focus is on the content
rather than the person posting it. It's not your blog nor your servers to
maintain. It's a public feed and you're just a small fish. The barrier to
entry is low, and the stats are nice to see.

------
kristianp
I can't see any mention here, but does Medium pay their authors for the
content? Or is the pertinent question, how well does it pay compared to other
article sites?

~~~
raymondduke
Medium does not pay a majority of their authors, however, I've heard that they
pay some "big names" to help them gain traffic.

So unless you are a well known blogger/journalist, don't expect a check.

~~~
kristianp
So sites like Medium are effectively driving down the pay of most authors
(except some stars) by competing with other sites that pay for content. Bad
news for authors.

------
minimaxir
My big issue with Medium is branding. With Svbtle, you could atleast use your
own domain name to link to your articles. With Medium, you always see the same
_medium.com_ domain and the same black-on-beige background.

There's no sense of identity. How often do people read articles by the same
author on Medium? How often do people _remember_ who wrote an article?

~~~
Ultron
Medium is for writers who don't know how to brand. Medium essentially takes
all the credit, traffic and recognition. And the writers seem to like that,
weirdly enough.

------
workhere-io
One thing I dislike about Medium is the fact that selecting text displays a
Twitter/conversation thingy. A lot of people, myself included, have a habit of
selecting portions of text when we read. Having that Twitter thing show up
constantly while reading is annoying.

