
Medium Sucks - gringofyx
http://www.codingjohnson.com/medium-sucks
======
derefr
I don't know if Medium _cares_ that much about their own content
discovery/cliquing/etc. Sure, the content has to be accessible from the site
in some fashion so web spiders can reach it--but really, as far as I can tell,
Medium blogs seem built for the generation of standalone post pages that get
shared via their authors self-promoting them on their Twitter feeds and
Facebook pages, and then other people putting them up on social bookmarking
websites like Reddit and HN. (Or at least, anecdotally, that's where _I 've_
found all the Medium articles I've ever read.)

You don't really _visit_ someone's Medium blog. I've never seen anyone say, on
their profile somewhere else, "here's a direct link to my blog; it's on
Medium." It looks the same as every other Medium blog, after all; that's a
strong disincentive to people promoting links their blog root, since they
can't brand it--and I think that's intentional on Medium's part.

Instead, you just find someone's Medium _posts_ shared in your feed on some
sharing service, because someone you know linked to them. Which is really what
the web has needed for a while, I think: a nice, clean, "here is a long
standalone essay" hosting service which is _ancillary_ to your more usual
blogging, which occurs on FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.

A geeky comparison, that might explain their value proposition, as I see it:
FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. are like a VM stack: you want to only hold tiny
little objects on it, because reading those objects (scrolling past them)
takes time and "processing cycles" for the reader. You don't want to pass huge
ones around, because they'll take up a lot of space everywhere they go, and
you have to copy them piece by piece (there have been novels written over
Twitter, but they're a bitch to read or quote or export, etc.)

Medium, then, is a VM heap to stick large objects on, and then pass them by
reference on the stack (FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.) In effect, it's a pastebin
with really nice styling, feed generation, and collaborative editorial
features, not a "blogging service" per se. Make sense?

~~~
mathattack
I agree with you. Medium isn't trying to be the next blogspot. It's not all
things for all people. Medium is a place to read recommended essays. Having a
group of more influential writers emerge who happen to read and recommend each
other more doesn't kill this.

I think the analogy is Time magazine versus Foreign Policy. I may subscribe to
Time and read every issue cover to cover on the subway to get a broad view on
what's going on. I'll only buy Foreign Policy from the newspaper stand if
there's a long article that specifically interests me. In that case I'll look
it over and give it a deeper read.

My recommendation system for what to read in Medium isn't Medium. It's HN.

~~~
derefr
> My recommendation system for what to read in Medium isn't Medium. It's HN.

Exactly. I would suggest Medium run with this idea, actually: detect your
referrer, then wire a single "like this" button to that service's equivalent
of an upvote, and "comment on this" to that service's equivalent of either a
reblog/retweet mechanism, or a comments page. Don't try to keep users on
Medium, in other words; instead, make Medium a seamless part of whatever site
they were already using.

~~~
taude
Yeup, I don't go to Medium, except when articles are posted here, or the
couple other sites I visit where I let either editorial or community selected
content drift up into my consciousness.

I will add that a lot of the stuff on Medium seems pretty 'self aggrandizing'
(not the best word I'm looking for, but the gist is close enough). I'm not
sure why it feels that way compared to people's blogs that they maintain
themselves....maybe it's the whole 'OMG, I got a Medium account, I'm going to
promote the @!#%$ out of myself." Anyway, that's sort of the stigma I give to
content on Medium when I click through to read something there...

------
vinceguidry
Simply looking at the site and its content model, it's obvious, to me at
least, that it's the internet equivalent of a publisher's slush file. People
have a greater appetite for reading, but are not yet willing to pay for it. So
content pieces that wouldn't fit into a more serious publication can be shown
there.

Authors can complain all they want about the platform, how there's little
money in it, how they can't build an audience, and all these complaints do is
highlight the author's naiveté. These things are set by the market's appetite,
not your ego. If you want your writing to be taken seriously, then take
seriously the craft of writing. Medium doesn't suck, you suck. And you're on
Medium because you suck. It's about an efficient a market as you can find,
because there's exactly zero barriers to entry.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Hmm, a bit harsh, ok a lot harsh, but essentially I agree with the premise
that Medium is where you publish if you can't get published elsewhere (yet).

I for one am enjoying seeing how the markets around writing are evolving, in
many ways they are much more effectively evolving than video and music
markets.

For writers we got the great "Internet" where you put download blogging
software put up a server and start posting. Except you were one of a trillion
zillion people so discovery was basically impossible. Then we got blogging
"sites" which collected people who want to write, and among those sites added
some discoverability. Then we got "Blogzines" which are essentially all on the
same topical area by a fixed stable of writers which feels more like a
magazine. And of course e-books which are single topic / single author.

It is interesting to compare the likes of Blogger to Medium to Ars Technica to
HufPo to Salon etc.

~~~
vinceguidry
Yeah, I took a harsh tone because of the egotism displayed in the title. I
don't think everyone on Medium sucks, but if you feel entitled to the same
perks you'd get, say, with a magazine, then you really do need to come down
out of the clouds. It's hard-ass work establishing yourself as a writer. There
aren't any short cuts. Even if you get lucky and get a magic book deal, if
your writing sucks you won't get another one. And no one will really respect
you, either.

In fact, I think Medium is a perfect place to hone your craft. If I were
looking to write professionally, I'd be working on my tone and content
constantly. I wouldn't even think of the sorts of stuff the OP is thinking
about until I was absolutely sure that all that's left to work on is the
outlet. That's when you'd be getting comments like, "Wow, you're the best
writer here!"

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discreteevent
All I know about medium is that it won't render in opera mini which I use on
my phone for speed and battery life. I know I have no excuse if I don't use a
"modern" browser so I can't complain. But still, for a site that just displays
some text with inline pictures, I wonder why they couldn't deliver it with
some simpler tech.

~~~
oftenwrong
Their scrollable container gives me problems with my graphical browsers. There
are ways that I can get it to work (enabling JS, disabling CSS, or plugging in
a mouse and using that), but I usually just load it in a text browser or pipe
wget into some filters instead. For a site that is just text on a page it sure
is complicated.

~~~
jarek
Qz is another new site that's horrible for just reading text out of the box.
Half the time I get redirected to some other article or the front page (!?)
while scrolling down or just having the page open in a background tab and not
doing anything, scroll is something proprietary and doesn't work most of the
time, entire thing is clunky and slow.

Thankfully, disabling Javascript actually helps a lot there.

------
nilkn
Am I the only one who doesn't think Medium is some horrible, evil thing? It's
still a solid, pretty, functional, and easy blogging platform for people who
just want to get something out there. It doesn't do much to allow authors to
distinguish themselves from the pack; I think this is left up for the author
to do, if they want or even care, via other social media, like Twitter. It
seems there's a general trend away from a single, all-inclusive social
platform like Facebook towards a distributed system of smaller pieces which
can fit together.

It wouldn't be my blogging platform of choice, but I'm the sort of person
who'd go to all the trouble of hand-crafting a personal website for something
like this, just for the fun of it. Medium is obviously for people who want the
opposite experience.

None of this is to say that Medium doesn't have its share of problems, but I
think it is at least decent from the blogger's perspective and IMHO pretty
good from the reader's perspective.

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foobarbazqux
The most annoying thing about Medium is that you can't discern who an article
is written by from the URL. They may as well be pastebin links.

~~~
johnward
I think that's probably by design. They appear to be trying to make it more
about the actual content then the author.

~~~
corresation
It seems like they're making it more about the site than the content. There
have been a lot of absolutely vapid medium posts that have ridden to the
front-page of HN, as Medium currently exists in the "it is somehow
illuminating and academic" halo period.

------
arunoda
With medium, you simply make traffic for them. Start your own blog, host on
your domain.

Traffic is all yours. You can do amazing things.

------
RossDM
Since we're complaining about Medium: the font is too big. We may be in the
post Web 2.0 era where huge text is more of a norm, but I feel assaulted every
time I load a Medium article. The text is not readable without physically
changing one's position, or adjusting the browser font size.

And why should I have to fiddle with the font size for one site when I don't
have to think about it elsewhere? Are Medium bloggers so arrogant as to think
that their revelations deserve to be shouted in my face at 22px?

~~~
bjustin
On the contrary, the font size on many sites is too small[1] (in the case of
HN or Daring Fireball, far too small). I need to increase the size, or zoom in
when using Safari on my laptop/iPhone/iPad, to have any hope of reading them
without straining. Medium is one site where I don't have to do anything to
read comfortably on a desktop or laptop.

I have a 23" 1920x1080 monitor and a 13" 1440x900 Macbook Air.

[1] There's a web book on typography that was just released, which details how
to make type legible: [http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-
rules.html](http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html)

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scopendo
I've never thought of Medium as a blogging platform but rather an article
publishing platform with tools to encourage conversation and sharing around
each article.

------
k-mcgrady
>> "Stats are too coarse - There are one or two lovely graphs but it just
doesn't give me the depth of knowledge I'd like to know about my audience -
even Google Analytics only just makes the bar."

To me at least Medium is meant to appeal to the kind of bloggers who want to
post something but don't want to maintain a blog. If you want detailed
analytics and even Google Analytics are just good enough you don't sound like
the sort of person Medium is for.

As for monetizing I could see Medium offering paid plans. Maybe using them to
offer the kind of detailed analytics you want. Or maybe they will charge for
mobile apps the way the NYTimes does with it's subscriptions. Judging by their
focus on nicely laid out content I really doubt they would plaster it with
ads.

------
taude
I'd be interested in hearing some opinions from UX experts on the Medium
interface?

Specifically:

* The rectangular 'M' in the top-left that hides a menu

* The inline hidden/comments that animate in on hover.

* The weird "suggest a link for further reading" functionality at the bottom of the article.

It really seems like a lot of confusing eye-candy to me and my assumption
would be that it's cool/fun for a sophisticated technocrat, but the usability
falls apart quickly after that.

Personally, I hate the inline commenting ideas. I read an article, and then
scan the comments at the bottom. It seems pretty gratuitous to save the effort
of "quoting" snippets to discuss.

I appreciate them thinking differently about things, though.

------
jkaunisv1
Technical and writer's issues aside, it's the "things that matter" that's been
sticking in my craw. I was so excited for it to be a browsable collection of
thoughtful essays from around the world. Instead one of the first things I
read on it was "how to do task X on Windows". Now it's just long-form twitter,
which as I type it seems really obvious but I was hoping for the "Things that
matter" to actually be a guiding point for Medium.

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thehme
"80/20" sounds good, but if what a blogger is writing is this good, then why
not just create your own blog to attract their own audience? As the author
said, it is free. Also, I would think that bloggers usually just want to share
thoughtful articles and other information with the world and are not actually
expecting to make money (I hope). I think a great idea is one that is just
great (period) with or without any revenue.

------
bdz
Every Medium post: "I made this mistake so don't you!" and "this is the way I
do it, so you should!"

~~~
Karunamon
The first one can be quite valuable, especially in the context of startups,
architecture, heck, tech in general. Basically what this site is all about.
Those who don't learn from history, etc.

The other has been helpful for me, personally, especially if you want to do
$thing and have no idea where to start. An article where the author details
their methods and why they worked and what problems they had.. is awesome.

------
leokun
The criticism on the business or social aspects of Medium may be valid, but
the technical team at Medium is very impressive. I hope they end up open
sourcing some of the work they've done. Right now they are mostly
experimenting, but eventually they will create a very awesome product with
great technology.

~~~
r0h1n
>Right now they are mostly experimenting, but eventually they will create a
very awesome product with great technology.

Really? And you _know_ this how?

~~~
leokun
I interviewed at Medium. They told me then

~~~
seunosewa
That's not exactly an unbiased source.

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pearjuice
Every Medium article I have read via HN (all of which were found on the
frontpage) were edgy, self-absorbed and pretentious ramblings. I guess the
platform promotes such behaviour by creating this "cool kid bench" and aiding
others toward it with a feeling of elitism because they blog on Medium. I
wonder when Yahoo (read: Marissa) will buy them!

~~~
dagw
I find that a positive aspect of Medium. As soon as I see medium.com on a HN
story I know I don't have to waste my time reading it.

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stevewillows
With these writing platforms coming up its starting to feel like the glory
days of LiveJournal.

I would like to see something that can step in as a social layer to connect a
wide variety of blogs over a multitude of platforms. Maybe something that
offers standardized categories - - like AllTop with self-discovery.

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gringofyx
I was going to post this on Medium too, but thought it might be in bad taste

~~~
chris_wot
Wrong medium.

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qdpb
There must be a name for a logical construct where you imagine an obscure
explanation for a phenomenon, reject this explanation and then extrapolate
this rejection to phenomenon itself.

~~~
chris_wot
It's called "making shit up".

------
sfard
throwww.com might be a good alternative. No curation by editors. Recommended
articles to come based on algorithms and not circle jerks. Full disclosure: I
built it.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
How do I know your algorithms have any taste, though? Like, I'm a customer,
but I'm not sure how it works.

