
Why You Shouldn’t Join Medium - spanishcurls
http://blog.spanishcurls.com/the-reasons-why-you-should-not-join-medium
======
Steko
_" In order to know what channels to focus on or improve, I need to know the
source of my traffic."_

Alternatively, medium lets you focus on post quality instead of analytics
hustling.

 _" Won’t other writers send readers to me? Maybe, but I’ve noticed that the
content recommended at the bottom is usually picked by editors. So if I’m
never chosen, not really."_

Post quality is rewarded by editors. Only hustlers have something to fear.

 _" Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design, but
the functionality can be improved."_

So if we take the advice and don't use Medium what alternative do we have
whose functionality can't be improved?

 _" People blog because they have something to say and want other people to
hear them. They want the limelight and attention. "_

I think people blog for different reasons. A lot of people just blog because
they are interested and enthused about something and as a blogger you're not
subject to some other communities focus and moderation. Some people have a
dozen items a day, others might not write a dozen posts in a year. Medium
seems like it favors less prolific bloggers who aim for quality content.
Instead of having to each build their own brand, they build a shared brand.
This is one of the jobs some periodicals historically fulfilled sans the dead
tree imposed volume limits.

~~~
spanishcurls
I agree with your bottom point, Steko. Thinking of Medium as an online
newspaper as opposed to a blogging platform seems most correct. Perhaps Medium
should further restrict personal customization and branding, like TechCrunch
does with its writer profiles.

I found plenty of articles on the pros of writing on Medium but hardly any on
the cons; hence, I wrote this to argue the other side and save some people
time.

------
minimaxir
Relevant discussion last night on Medium:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968593)

Also last night, I made a quick graph on _medium.com_ submissions to HN,
containing the top 20 posters by number of submissions, for 1000/1315 links
containing the medium.com domain:
[http://i.imgur.com/WIJ4cT9.png](http://i.imgur.com/WIJ4cT9.png)

It's also worth noting that out of those 1000, there were only ~650 unique
submitters, implying that most HNers only submitted one medium.com article. If
anyone is interested in a more thorough statistical analysis, I can write up a
blog post. (hopefully with better graphs)

~~~
spanishcurls
I think that would be an awesome article to read.

~~~
minimaxir
Posted! [http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/medium-
normal/](http://minimaxir.com/2013/07/medium-normal/)

------
marshallhaas
I published my first article on Medium over the weekend
([https://medium.com/what-i-learned-
today/a27e01e84fac](https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/a27e01e84fac)). It
got it's first bump from HN, but 17k+ reads following was from Medium's
readership. It also got featured on LifeHacker. I don't think they would have
found it on my own blog.

Honestly, I didn't see any compelling reasons in that article not to use
Medium. My post got it's initial bump from Hacker News, but then everything
following has been due to Medium already having a built in readership. If I
posted this to my own blog, sure HN would have driven the same amount of
traffic. But I don't have a readership like Medium. There's something to be
said about Medium's writing tools as well. I found myself enjoying writing
again using their system. It's very clean and focused. Maybe I wouldn't have
produced as good of an article without it.

------
cloudwalking
Funny to see an anti-Medium post on a Svbtle blog...

~~~
lgray
To be fair, a lot of his complaints about Medium don't copy over to Svbtle,
even if they seem very similar to readers. The page has Google Analytics
running, and links only to writing by the same author.

It'll be interesting to see which platform does better. They've both got the
beautiful reading pages, so it'll come down to who can get the writers.

------
pavs
Or just self host your blog...

\- If you care about minimalism, its very easy to make your wordpress (or any
other platform) look minimalistic. (zenhabits.com, the theme is also free).

\- You have full control over every aspect of your blog.

\- You are not creating content for others to make money off of your writing.

------
mjackson
This post does not contain a single criticism that indicates a fatal flaw in
the platform. Design flaws and analytics can all be improved.

What he fails to mention is how Medium is actually moving web publishing
forward. It's not supposed to be like your personal blog. Instead, it's a
collection of stuff from all kinds of people on the same/similar topics.

svbtle is the new 9rules. Medium is a different animal.

------
jamesdelaneyie
Poor arguments. While I would agree that Medium's UI/UX is geared towards what
you pointed out [i.e. the the "collaborative and almost stumbleupon nature of
finding articles], the platform can be controlled at an individual level by
the author quite well. It's value lies in it's excellent experience when
you're reading an article you've been linked to. The typography, layout and
experience at the individual article level are fantastic.

You're first point, lack of analytics, reeks of narcissism.

"Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design, but the
functionality can be improved."

Fucking hell. A testament to what people think design is nowadays. Pretty
pictures for all.

~~~
PavlovsCat
"But.. it has webfonts. Webfonts is what readers crave."

 _" Which blogging platform are you referring to?"_

"Yes, blogging has webfonts."

------
intrazoo
I am in same train of thought as article. Perhaps boring or redundant thoughts
from my blog thing ([http://pavlovsfrogs.blogspot.com/2013/05/mission-
statement-c...](http://pavlovsfrogs.blogspot.com/2013/05/mission-statement-
critical.html)), on why blogger, not X:

Why not something like medium.com? Well, it does look pretty nice (though, not
as nice as mine), and it would save having to pick a domain name and such.
Interesting note, same founder as blogger. While their beta/editor and area
specific comments features are pretty cool (it seems easy to communicate to
author), I am not too big on the social element, I do not prefer the lack of
control (an example of this being how your writing will be linked to by or
link to random other articles or not being able to link my soundcloud on my
landing page), I don't think there is rss/email support, and it is also that
it is rather new, and while I am not too proud to follow trends and I doubt it
will die anytime soon (it is not like blogger is the most secure option), it
will probably change and new features will roll out. What if there is ever ads
that you can't control, or they add publicly available revision history, or
you can't turn off public comments? So, while pretty cool, overall I still
like blogger and my control over the html/css. We will see where it goes.

Side note: Why no svtle (or really any decent) theme/template for blogger?

------
aeorgnoieang
I've read a couple of things on Medium, but I didn't realize it was a blogging
platform; I thought it was just a site with writing (i.e. "a collaborative
writing community sort of thingy-mah-bobber").

~~~
GBond
And I guess this is the main knock of the OP of Medium. All the features
support _their_ brand and not you the take-my-content-for-free blogger.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Why would any self respecting blogger interested in owning their own content,
brand, identity or control over those ever use any sort of platform like
Medium? For one, we know their short lived. For another, just freaking why? I
guess if I wrote and needed people to read it to eat or get my ego stroked.

------
cocoflunchy
I wonder how Medium are planning to make money?

Advertising, I guess, or sponsored/branded posts? Did they say anything about
it?

------
refrigerator
Very sensationalist title - the post points out a few (fairly minor) flaws in
Medium, some of which are based on personal opinion. Are we really expected
not to sign up to a site because it's not perfect quite yet?

------
philliphaydon
My friend writes on Medium, his two most popular articles for 20k and 50k
hits.

Singapore Isn’t Boring. You Are. [https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/b9ef744a887e](https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b9ef744a887e)

and

Why advertising awards are now for losers. [https://medium.com/i-m-
h-o/cebe63df96e7](https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/cebe63df96e7)

------
jmduke
_People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear
them. They want the limelight and attention._

I would argue this is not universally true; the vast majority of the people
who blog don't do it to build a personal brand (which is what you lose from
writing on Medium.)

~~~
marshallhaas
I don't think that get's 100% lost. Just look at @dunn's posts on Medium. He's
got a following through those.

------
shortformblog
A lot of thoughts on this topic.

First up, my bonafides: I've used Medium four different times. Two of my posts
([http://sfbne.ws/17PPdPL](http://sfbne.ws/17PPdPL)) and
([http://sfbne.ws/17PPhir](http://sfbne.ws/17PPhir)) were editors' picks. And
Medium even picked me as their writer of the week one week. (Which was sort of
awesome, by the way.)

I think this assessment is a little off in a few ways. While I agree that the
analytics leave a LOT to be desired, the thing that Medium excels at is
amplifying an individual idea. Not necessarily a writer, but something that
writer says. This is a big deal—it means that you don't need a platform to
shout from anymore just to get traction. If the idea is good enough, thought
out enough, relevant enough or challenging enough, Medium's staff will help
push that idea out into the wider world.

I have a site with decent traction in the blogosphere, especially on Tumblr,
and I know that if I put the ideas I discussed in those posts on there, they
might have gotten noticed, but putting them on Medium had an amplifying
effect. With my second post, about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's decline as
a newspaper without a print product, I got pickup in the media, including the
Seattle press. The executive editor of the Seattle Times, the publication's
direct competitor, tweeted it. And though I couldn't do it due to time
constraints, a local radio station tried to get me on the air to talk about
the post. And in the end, it succeeded at its goal—it got a lot of people
thinking and talking about what we could do better about newspapers and
advertising online.

My story directly contradicts his entire point about the "leaky faucet." That
is a powerful tool and one that stretches beyond the individual blog. If you
wanted your voice to carry that far previously, you needed to be Andrew
Sullivan or Michael Arrington, or working for someone with a built-in audience
and/or a lot of access. It has this amazing way of cutting through the niche
and surfacing voices into the mainstream.

These days, everyone has a voice. There's more noise than signal out there.
Medium is great at cutting through the noise and giving nearly everyone the
opportunity to be a quote-unquote "thought leader," as cliché as that term is.

The fact that it decentralizes the voices, in a nutshell, is what Javier
Sandoval is complaining about above. But that's exactly the reason why it
works so well.

(Side note: If a lack of directly-trackable ROI is _really_ a deal-breaker for
you, you could always do what Narratively did with their recent post on
Medium—they wrote a long item, gave a good teaser on Medium, and linked to the
full piece: [http://sfbne.ws/14KVNRj](http://sfbne.ws/14KVNRj))

~~~
mathattack
"...the thing that Medium excels at is amplifying an individual idea. Not
necessarily a writer, but something that writer says."

You hit it on the head with this. By and large I like following links to
Medium, but I rarely connect to the author afterwards. It's almost like
reading the Economist. Well thought out, but the magazine is the brand, not
the writer.

------
urza
You shouldn't join medium, because it is just another company trying to own
your data and lock you in their walled garden.

You can own your data and still collaborate with others. Keep web open and
decentralized.

------
icefox
I don't see how you could "join" medium, but you can join twitter and use
medium...

------
unicornporn
I think this simple argument works way better for me: You need to have a
Twitter account.

~~~
workhere-io
I don't understand why you were downvoted for this; it's a valid argument. Not
everyone has a Twitter account.

------
didsomeonesay
medium.com - it's that webpage where you can stare for 5 seconds at a small
picture embedded in a white page while the _font_ to the article is loading
(or whatever it is they messed up in the webdesign).

So much for focusing on written content...

------
spitx
Removed from everything in the post, it has to be said the piece is terribly
composed.

Not as terrible as some of the other recent posts (and related comments) I've
seen on HN; it is sufficiently terrible. Here's an example of a terribly
composed comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968264)

He doesn't sound like a native speaker and I know many who patronize HN
aren't, but the terrible form and composition are inexcusable.

Please put some effort into your posts. Have a friend proof it for you. Don't
hesitate to edit it post-submission if you find it unreadable, yourself.
There's no shame in that.

Stand-alone technical prowess is not an excuse for poor writing skills.

Edit: Proving a point.

