
Inside Medium's Meltdown - andreshb
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of-evan-williams-startup-medium-2017-2
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camus2
> In his post announcing the layoffs, Williams said the business model Medium
> had been pursuing, advertisement-driven media, was to blame for
> "misinformation," and that Medium would no longer sell ads or help the
> publishers it hosted on its site with ad revenue, and therefore it no longer
> needed the people it had hired to work in those areas.

> "The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It's utter crap," he told Bloomberg's
> Brad Stone in 2013. "They create a culture that is superficial and
> fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are
> self-destructive and unsustainable." And he said he was "pessimistic about
> the state of media, and that's why I want to work on this problem."

The irony.

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rm_-rf_slash
I was recently talking with my girlfriend about print media, and she brought
up a point I have been unable to shake from my head: because we get all of our
information digitally, we don't value it as much as a physical medium that we
pay for. Instead, there is just so much free information at the click of a
button (and even paywall stuff can be bypassed if you put in the extra 5
seconds), that consuming information comes to feel like a chore.

It reminds me of the famous scene in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer", when Tom
convinces a group of kids to paint the very fence he was contracted to paint.
Instead of offering money for their services, he pitched the activity as a fun
privilege to enjoy.

There's a lot of good stuff on Medium. There's also a lot of crap. And there
is no way to seamlessly progress from article to article without encountering
any crap at all.

Are the comments going to be informative, or an argumentative flame war? Roll
the dice and see how much time of your life was well-spent or wasted.

I got the daily newsletter from Medium for years. Read it fairly often. Then I
just got sick of it and unsubscribed. With the exception of links from HN, I
haven't gone back since.

~~~
jldugger
> because we get all of our information digitally, we don't value it as much
> as a physical medium that we pay for.

This is not a new phenomenon. "today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip paper"
is a lyric from 1981, and it's much older a sentiment than that.

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Veen
I've never found Medium to be a compelling idea, even less so since Williams
said:

> The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual
> website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of
> people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from
> centralized websites.

The course was easy to predict. Publishers move the platform. The platform
discovers its interests (i.e. it's investor's interests) don't really align
with those of the publishers. The publishers are left in the lurch.

Here's what I don't get: there's absolutely no need to centralise. Hosting a
website isn't especially complex. If you control your own site, you control
your own destiny. Medium is a pretty CMS, but that's not enough of an
incentive to give up control over your publishing platform.

I feel the same about Google AMP: it't not hard to do what AMP does. A
lightweight site and decent CDN will get you 90% of the way there. So what's
the upside?

~~~
Terribledactyl
Exposure, favorable rankings, and content grouping.

There is also something I find nice about the uniformity and minimalism of
Medium. It's not that other sites have regained geocities level of divergence,
but it's easy to just focus on the content with Medium.

