
Ev Williams on Medium’s future, his new venture fund, and listening to his gut - cryptoz
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/22/9598176/ev-williams-on-medium-s-future-his-new-venture-fund-and-listening-to
======
jseliger
I find Medium interesting because in most respects it doesn't feel any
different from Wordpress to me. I write a blog on Wordpress.com and a couple
years ago I got an email from Medium inviting me to write on it. I ignored the
email because I figured, "One platform, another platform... it doesn't matter
much." Plus, on Wordpress I can still go self-hosted if I want or need to.

Yet despite my initial reaction, it seems like Medium is succeeding. I can't
entirely figure out why. In the interview Williams notes, "I started Medium
with the intention that there’s a better way to support quality ideas,
thinking, stories we don’t yet have on the internet." In important ways he's
obviously right and I'm obviously wrong, but I still don't get the advantage
of Medium over Wordpress or similar alternatives.

~~~
cenal
The big difference is in how Medium hosts it's content versus how
Wordpress.com hosts content. With Wordpress.com users get a subdomain and all
the search engines treat that subdomain as a totally new domain.

With Medium you post an article and it's hosted on the TLD Medium.com followed
by the user and an article name. This is an important distinction between the
platforms since sites and users treat Medium.com with an increased level of
importance.

My startup _SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT_
[http://www.joinjune.com](http://www.joinjune.com) has been using Medium posts
with incredible results. We have had about 300k views on the content in the
last few weeks. We posted the same content to our blog at first
[http://blog.joinjune.com](http://blog.joinjune.com) and barely had any
traffic at all.

Granted, our blog is really ugly (Thanks to Hubspot's unnecessarily complex
template system) but also in part due to the fact that sites like Hacker News
treat Medium more fairly and people feel comfortable sharing articles on
there.

We have even had of our articles reblogged by the New York Observer,
MatterMark and translated into foreign languages because it was so successful
on Medium: [https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-
bad-t...](https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-bad-tech-
hires-630d539b2e1d)

I'm a fan of Medium. I tell everyone to use it instead of their own blog based
on our successes with it.

~~~
jkarneges
> users treat Medium.com with an increased level of importance.

I've heard this before. Where does the importance come from? Is there some
kind of quality control in place about who is able to sign up for a Medium
account or post content?

~~~
cenal
I believe they moderate it at some capacity and remove abusive posts/accounts.
They authenticate with Facebook and Twitter accounts which are more difficult
to generate than a typical account. Especially Facebook. That probably helps
them build trust.

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rokhayakebe
Speaking of Medium and publishing platforms, who wants to see a HN blogging
feature?

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pcunite
Does medium want to be the facebook of text?

~~~
temuze
What does "Facebook of X" even mean? "X for close friends"?

In any case, I see Medium as long-form Twitter. Follow who you want to follow
(even if you don't know them), respond and have discussions. Make it super
clean and put the content first.

I think Medium:Tumblr as Facebook:MySpace. Less customization, cleaner, more
about content.

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cagenut

         There’s tons published every day. From nonprofits, to brands, 
         lots of big brands, small brands, individuals obviously.
    

Whenever I see media execs talking about 'brands' I like to
s/brands/companies/ in my head. You could s/brands/corporations/ if that were
more your thing.

~~~
barkingcat
Whenever I see the s// syntax my brain dies a little bit. Please use regular
English, unless you are actually referring to a matter of coding. I know it's
a shorthand, but nobody really cares about saving the words "instead of" and
it's really hard to read when inlined into an English sentence.

If you are coding regexps, go ahead by all means but please do not embed it in
English.

