
Ask HN: why medium is everywhere now? - ggm
Can anyone explain the rapid rise of medium to me? What made this semi social web service explode compared to other mechanisms?<p>Is it good domain name binding?<p>Is it markdown?<p>One clap? Twenty? Penecillin?
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kjksf
Medium launched in 2012. It's almost 6 years old which is not "rapid rise".

They started with a very good editor and a syndication model that is
inherently viral (i.e. every post on medium promotes medium itself and other
posts on medium). This is much better than most other blog hosts like
WordPress.

Tumblr is similar and also very popular but Medium focused on high-quality
content and not short posts like Tumblr. They even were publishing their own
content for a while.

They also tried a hundred different things, many of which don't exist anymore.

In short: good product, built-in virality and lots of grit and experimentation
with different features.

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shanghaiaway
Medium is focused on medium to longform content. However, it is not focused on
high quality content but rather the opposite - clickbait. It is sort of a
grassroots buzzfeed platform.

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ggm
A lot of HN content is there

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masonic
A lot of Medium content is posted to HN without regard to its actual value to
the audience. Much of it is posted multiple times; they customize their URLs
to defeat dupe checks.

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ggm
Well as a net noise contributor, I've met the groucho marx test multiple
times. But, whining aside, This feels like it devalues both sides of the deal:
HN because too many repeats make it stale, and medium (if they're in on it)
because its whoring links.

Look, I like the look-and-feel. The style is minimally not obtrustive. I could
beleive I could write in it, had i anything to say of merit. It .. sort of ..
works?

