
The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium - longdefeat
http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-extremely-frustrating-history-of-medium-2012-present/
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asaph
> Medium made it possible for anyone to blog and be seen.

This was possible long before Medium launched. I recall popular bloggers being
a thing years before Medium showed up.

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taneq
Yeah, what about Wordpress, Blogger, etc.? They've been around forever.

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sontek
LiveJournal!

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konradb
Radio Userland :)

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rchaud
I remember writing for a review site called Epinions back when I was a broke
teen in the mid-2000s. They paid for reviews of products, with the
monetization based on views of my page. I bought a $100 Sandisk MP3 player
when the average price of an iPod was $250, and reviewed it. I made $50, but
over the course of 2.5 years.

I think about that sometimes and still think it's a better ROI than posting
anything on Medium.

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telltruth
Ev Williams is my founder hero. People often sweat about having a cool idea or
atleast great tech before they do startups. Not Ev Williams. He has created
startups after startups that has no real novelty, has no technology challenges
and even doesn't target any real problem that world has. Still, his startups
eats of millions of dollars in investment while having tiny little teams and
finally gets sold or even IPOed for billions of dollars in windfall. I wager
that if anyone else appeared at any of the VC with ideas of his startups, they
would have been laughed off out the building. The amazing part is that he
stays low most of the time, avoids any self-PR and still manages to mobilize
massive public attention to his startups. That one is his single most
important skill that none of the other founders can even come close.

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sytelus
> The amazing part is that he stays low most of the time, avoids any self-PR
> and still manages to mobilize massive public attention to his startups.

So how does he do that? This is obviously a billion dollar skill.

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rchaud
He's the cofounder of Twitter and has a track record of getting traction with
his products. I would imagine VCs care more about that than his public
profile.

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nkozyra
I have absolutely no idea what the value add of medium is supposed to be to
publishers?

Amateur tooling? Half assed distribution? Unreliable relationship? Constant
new ways to annoy readers?

For an incredibly basic blog I get it but even the publishing tools there are
so limited I'm perplexed it hasn't grown up.

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tonystubblebine
FWIW, I make a full time living there on part time work and they've sent my
articles several million readers that never otherwise would have heard of me.
Also I was just approached for a mainstream book deal. Those are all massive
goods.

The bad is that I think Medium hasn't stayed in one place long enough for
people to accurately understand it. But I've been working with them from the
beginning of this strategy shift two years ago and the basic strategy hasn't
changed at all.

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nkozyra
> FWIW, I make a full time living there on part time work and they've sent my
> articles several million readers that never otherwise would have heard of me

I suppose there are publishers and then there are _publishers_. I have no
doubt they're trying to court people like you but it seems like their bigger
ploy is to rope in the big publishers into embracing their platform, to
abandon traditional digital publishing platforms.

If I'm a basic blogger or tiny digital publisher, Medium _can_ work, though
the tools are so archaic and limited I would become frustrated very quickly.
If I'm even at medium-sized, the whole thing is a mess of half-measures that
now seems singularly focused on annoying readers.

Throwing my content into a network or allowing me to pay to promote my content
or whatever really isn't enough of a sell. I can do that anywhere and keep
more of the money.

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wodenokoto
> Throwing my content into a network ... really isn't enough of a sell.

That depends on the network you are thrown into. The company I work for saw a
substantial increase in new leads after moving the corporate blog from self-
hosting to Medium.

As much as I dislike the platform too, it is hard to argue with money

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idlewords
There's a long history in American publishing of wealthy people taking on an
expensive publishing venture as a pet project, which in turn takes on the
idiosyncrasies of the founder. It's easy to get distracted by startup speak
and the fact that Medium lives online, but its trajectory fits squarely in a
tradition that has been around for as long as we've had the printing press and
intellectually vain rich people.

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tonystubblebine
I'm sure I'm biased, but this feels like a severe misreading of Evan Williams'
history. He's abnormally persistent about enduring failure until he finds the
big thing. Blogger and Twitter were both preceded by long periods of failure.
Also, given that he resigned from the Twitter board and has other people
making his investment decisions it seems pretty clear that Medium is not a pet
project for him.

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coldtea
> _He 's abnormally persistent about enduring failure until he finds the big
> thing. Blogger and Twitter were both preceded by long periods of failure._

If that "failure" still got investor money, then there's not so much
"persistence" involved.

Blogger was sold in like 4 years, that's not some incredible tenacity either.

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tonystubblebine
At Blogger, they ran out of money, the entire team left, and Ev ran it alone
for a year or two. For part of that he was relying on donations to eat. That's
what I was calling persistence. If it was such a great idea, why didn't other
people on that team try to keep helping, even if just in the evenings? (I'm
not actually positive that they didn't try--that's a flaw in my narrative
here).

Similar when Twitter started inside of Odeo. Odeo was struggling, Twitter was
an interesting Odeo side project with a hundred users including all of the
Odeo investors. Ev (with his blogger money), bought back all Odeo assets
including Twitter basically out of shame for wasting the investor's time and
money. The only pushback at that time was from investors who thought there was
no need to make them whole and that they would have been fine if he'd just
shut everything down. If Twitter really looked all that promising, then
there's no way those investors would have let that happen. But Ev saw some
potential and persisted even when other people didn't understand why. I was on
the Odeo team so I saw a lot of that first hand.

Medium's a longer case. I shared offices with them a couple times and that's
why I push back on this "pet project" or "vanity project" so hard. It's more
like his "White Whale" which I suppose does have some vanity in it. But he's
as serious about figuring Medium out as he ever was with the previous two
successes. I'd actually seen a really convoluted version of Medium that they
called Grids and never released. It was so inscrutable, so bad really, that
they had to shut it down and work on an unrelated project for a month just to
recover some confidence. (That's what it looked like to me at least).

I think because I've been around for so many failures (Odeo, Grids, something
called Standy), that I see Ev as someone who's wrong a lot, but consistent in
hunting for something that feels big enough. I saw all the Medium pivots in
that light: if they are pivoting then he'd finally concluded that that path
wasn't big enough.

If you assume Ev wants Medium to be both big and meaningful (that's my
assumption), then this looks like a good pivot. It has the potential to be big
(the VC hyptothesis would be the Netflix for Content or something like that)
and more importantly, it solves the meaningful problem because it changes the
incentives for writers so that content marketers get deprecated and quality
gets promoted. A lot of Ev's best public statements the last two years are
about how corrupted the free content ecosystem is.

That's something I didn't realize until I got inside this partner program.
We'd been publishing free articles that now I'm embarrassed by. Maybe those
articles had good ideas, but most of them needed a lot more work to really be
valuable to the reader (including articles I wrote). But since we weren't
getting paid, it didn't make sense to put in any more work than what we had
been doing. Now that we have money and a style guide and deep story edits
(about three hours of editing per article), I feel like we're much less likely
to be wasting a reader's time. (We publish advice, so we can't claim that we
succeeded by entertaining the reader).

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oska
4 of the first 8 comments in this thread are from a relentless self-promoter,
evident in both their self-references in this thread and their submission
history to HN in the last two years being almost solely comprised of their own
articles on Medium.

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coldtea
And we had to know that because? To morally condemn them?

If we (people on HN) like their 4 comments enough to vote them to the top,
then it's up to us.

Same for their "submission history". I could not care less if it's comprised
from their own articles on Medium. As long as people liked and voted for the
stories to go on the front page, that's enough. If people on HN didn't like
and vote for the stories, they'd be lost, like countless other submissions. So
there's that.

I would have a problem if antirez, or idlewords, or PG, or whoever posted
their own articles either. Why not? There's the upvoting of submissions to
tells us whether those are good or not.

I also checked the submissions history of the person you refer to. 30
submissions in 6 years. Hardly clogging the pipes.

Besides, what they share in this post is regarding Medium, so is totally on
topic. There's this, too.

What's this putdown for? Jealousy? Moral indignation? I don't really like the
tone and the finger pointing.

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tonystubblebine
I was the first publication in this program starting two years ago, basically
the test case. We've renewed and expanded it twice since then and are in talks
to expand it again. I feel so fortunate in that the experience has been useful
and profitable.

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wodenokoto
Why is this being downvoted?

A user is willing to share their first-hand experience with the content-matter
of an article.

How is that not both interesting and relevant in a HN context?

