Does anybody here post regularly on Medium? Can anyone name off the top of their heads their favorite writers on Medium? Would anybody pay for Medium?
I like Medium as a platform but there doesn't seem to be much beyond the occasional interesting essay or startup humblebrag puff piece about why culture is more than free donuts or whatever.
My problem with Medium is there is no way of establishing a reputation for quality. If everyone can post there then you're gonna run into some garbage, no matter what the sorting algorithm says are the "hot" stories. So without site wide quality control all it'll take are a few bad articles to bring down the perceived average quality.
So then what's in it for the writers? Build up an audience on a convenient, erm, Medium, then...leave? How else will they make money?
Look at the front page on HN. At any given time, at least 2-4+ of the top 30 posts are written on Medium. There doesn't have to be a rhyme or reason (why did people gravitate to WhatsApp or Slack, when hundreds of others existed before them).
Medium, in my mind, faces the same problem as YouTube did (still does). Their entire growth potential is subject to them transitioning from a content hosting platform to a content destination. YouTube will not survive if it remains a portal for people to link & host videos or search for specific pieces of content. They must train users to browse YouTube.com (as one does Facebook) and rely on it for consistent content delivery. Amazon has managed to do this. Medium will have to do so as well. Once they have their users captive, they can offer many VAS ranging from sponsored posts to premium pay-per-read content.
I was starting to use YouTube like that until they went and totally hosed all their subscriptions to be based on some sort of algorithm that rarely shows me what I want to see.
I had organized my subscriptions into a series of groups, which was a pretty hidden feature that they subsequently removed.
I have since replicated that by putting everything into a series of folders in the google replacement RSS reader, innoreader, I have been using.
YouTube sort of gets me to stay on the site by autoplaying vaguely similar videos and randomly inserting totally off topic videos that match my previous
viewing history.
I feel like this scatterbrained approach to throwing videos at users does very little to foster go to the site out of the blue habituation, though it does make the site somewhat sticky once you are there.
I don't know if Medium can do anything similar to get the habituation working, maybe and editor's choice curation system, but that seems to fail compared to aggregators like HN or reddit. They could probably promote some stickiness by appending full stories right at the bottom of existing ones via infinite scrolling, if that even works better than just having the typical 'click here to see the top 10 secrets of X' junk at the bottom.
Youtube also faces a big challenge with incentives IMO. Obviously discoverability of videos matter. But depending on how the decision to feature a video is made, Youtube can (and has) incentivized content creators to change their content to fit that box. It's the reason why most videos in my front page are click bait, with really obnoxious thumbnails, and a lot of times with all caps titles.
I believe the idea of moving towards a more AI/ML based recommendation system is interesting because it frees Youtube from the burden of defining what is worthy of being featured (and featuring everything that's relevant to each particular user). In a way it could democratize content discovery. But I don't see it working as well as it could be.
I have a feeling that Youtube may want to be able to promote certain youtube "stars" because, let's be real, they are the ones driving revenue. But I chose to believe a world where content discovery is more fair is possible.
I will say that this has less to do with the shitty way subscription works nowadays. The idea behind that is: if users want to follow certain creators, they should be able to. Moving that towards a AI/ML system seems just inefficient at achieving that goal. I don't know the rationale behind the decision here.
Apparently "YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even” (WSJ Feb 2015). I'm not sure the answer is to get people to go to youtube.com. I use it all the time and I hate that stuff. To make money they probably need to get a little more intrusive with the advertising.
Medium is for people who think they are insightful because they see other people using Medium, but they actually aren't insightful at all.
That isn't sardony. There are many startups/VCs who use Medium solely because they want to be "thought-leaders" unironically. As a result, the quality of Medium posts is highly variable.
Medium is mostly "Rambling", that's my impression. That's what happens when you give distribution channel to bad writers who think they're a kickass writer--they go on and on and on without any essence. Just because they have many followers imported from Twitter doesn't mean they're good writers. A lot of times I run into some 10 page article on Medium that doesn't have any essence, and the more I run into these the more I pass on Medium articles when I come across them.
nobody is asking you to read them though -- the only way you get better at writing is to write. If after writing a couple duds they get better, then the statistics will let them know that more people are reading it.
I think medium is an excellent service. the trending articles definitely needs work though
I am not talking about quality of writing. I'm talking about people who think they're experts at something but actually have no idea what they are talking about. No matter how good you get at writing, an idiot is an idiot. Plus, huge chunk of Medium posts are self promotion disguised as an "insightful post". I am not trying to discount what Medium is trying to achieve, nor saying the platform sucks. I just think the format and structure of the platform encourages a lot of shitty people to try to take advantage of it.
I started writing on medium and I really have to say its quite good. My original post is on my own domain using wordpress but
I have been thinking about having my domain forwarded to my medium publication instead as I really like the live writing tool. It really makes it so much easier to write and have people help you out proof reading and so on. Very easy not complicated setup and easy commenting etc.
I also like that you can easily have your essay included in other peoples publications [1] or ask if you can include someone elses in yours.
I would pay for access to good publications but I am not really your average user.
I think Medium makes incremental improvement(s) over some alternatives. I'm not sure if the sum of those improvements will mean Medium will turn a profit, grow or survive, but here are a couple of thoughts:
Medium is content-first. All blogs should arguably be content-first, very few are. Most wordpress blogs a) look like crap, b) obscures content, and c) renders slow, in order to accommodate the design that contributes to a) and b).
I'm not a writer, but from what I understand, the back-end is also content-first, writing first -- simple, elegant, no clutter.
The lack of theming is a bonus. Just as design/layout of an essay in New York Magazine is largely out of your hands, and taken care of by the publisher, so it is with Medium. Evidence suggests that the vast majority of writers are better off that way (see point above).
Ghost and many of the static site generators offer similar benefits, but with some caveats: they all need theming, and I'm not sure if any of them really come with something that in sum is as good as/better than Medium. Personally I think even Medium is a bit heavy -- but it is way better than then current mess that is Blogspot.
If your goal is to write/publish and not worry too much about design/layout you could do a lot worse than Medium. Many do.
I wouldn't be surprised if Medium differentiated/launched curated sub-sites/"magazines" that featured content from Medium. They could have some premium stuff that is authored by only paid authors, mix and match, and have a X articles/month-for-free model a la New York Times etc.
If the can get a large number of writers, and a large sub-section of good/great writers -- monetizing shouldn't be that hard. I hope. And I'm guessing that's what the investors hope too. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Medium turns out to be one of the first "native digital" publishers -- embracing the strengths of digital distribution, rather than fighting it. Eg: maybe people are willing to pay for content, and one can simply rid oneself of the dependency on advertising.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd pay for access to anything on Medium, but the writing tools, commenting, cross-publication management, etc are good enough that I'd easily consider paying some nominal amount to run a site on it, presuming it came with site-specific branding, some ability to make static pages separate from articles, etc.
From the writer's perspective:
1) interface is clean and easy to write on - easy to format things, embedd video, embedd pictures, etc
2) easy to share drafts and get edits from others
3) 5%-10% of traffic comes internally from medium.com, so helps with distribution
4) SEO's well and works out of the box without me having to set anything up.
PS - I work at Greylock Partners which invested in Medium but I didn't have any say with the investment decision nor do I have to use Medium. I just like writing on there.
Whoa, there's a new CS183? Awesome! I completely missed this until now.
Just read the notes from the first two classes. I think you are doing a great job of carrying on the Blake Masters tradition of accurate, well-organized, easy-to-read notes. Please keep it up, and thank you!
Hah, I'm glad you mentioned War-is-boring because they're literally the only section I remembered by name and, same, once they were off doing their own thing, I didn't follow. I imagine we're not the only ones.
I can't think of anyone I religiously read on Medium, but I find interesting and insightful stuff that happens to have been written on Medium all the time.
I've noticed this same pattern with other founders, notably Dennis Crowley with Dodgeball (location-based social network founded in 2000, sold to Google in 2005) and Foursquare (location based social network with different branding).
The absolutely worst two things which happened to Blogger during the last few years are, IMO:
1. What I percieve to be excessive use of JS. You can't even load a blog post there (well, at least, couldn't last time I visited a dot-blogspot site) without an on-page spinner and a bunch of stuff apparently happening in the background.
2. The tld-redirect crap. Admitedly, I had actually thought a similar mechanism to be benefitial prior to seeing an actual implementation of it but I mean, come on, does this not annoy others? What's the advantage of that anyway? Google is capable of geographical load balancing with IP addresses alone just fine, what's the deal?
Disclaimer: These are my end-user reactions. I have never operated at the scale Blogger does so there may be reasons I am not aware of.
Exactly. Blogs are mostly text sites and one would expect such to open at rapid speeds. That's one of the things I like about Svbtle, they load the blog as one single request/response with all the text, styles, JS(barely noticeable) inline making for very rapid load times
I wouldn't say excessive use of JS was the problem. JS provides the foundations to tons of extremely fast websites and should (in most cases) assist with improving performance. I'd blame the overall implementation / design which led to scaling and performance issues.
What I hated about blogger was that for a "group" blog (say, the reddit blog, where different admins might post), any images added to the post get shown from the poster's google account (somehow). Which means if someone leaves the group, the images get hosed.
Am I the only one that likes the swam/foursquare split?
For me at least, I think it's much easier to keep track of places you've gone with your own reviews with swarm. And foursquare for finding new places you would want to go. I'm sure they could have built it in such a way that would only need one app, though I can't complain too much about the split.
Happens with Cisco all the time too. Cisco acquires startup Y, founders vest for 4 years, founders leave Cisco and create Y+1, Cisco acquires Y+1, ....
It helps to get re-acquired once you have all the existing connections and the acquiring company knows you're not snake oil and aren't screwing them over.
There have been multiple Google->Startup->Google loops as well, but many of those are an acquihire-as-safety-net when the too hyped startup by too eager employees falls flat on its face.
Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential. Also, those founders tend to be the people who understand the space the best because they're the ones with the most experience.
Speaking of Blogger...what's hapened to it? Wordpress, Tumblr and Medium are perhaps the three most popular blog platforms. Blogger, however, seems to have completely fallen off the radar. If you go to blogger.com, you don't even get a landing page for the service, just a Google sign-in. This gives me the impression that Google doesn't want to promote it or encourage new sign-ups. Perhaps they don't know what to do with it? Or perhaps they'd like to retire the service but can't because of all the sites and users that currently exist?
While those are all "text posting on the internet", they're VERY distinct forms of text. He certainly has a deep understanding for writing and how writing can work on the internet. More power to him !
yeah i guess, to you, nonfiction (text writing on paper), fiction (text writing on paper), poetry (text writing on paper), short story (text writing on paper), biography (text writing on paper), diary (text writing on paper), they're all the same old same old.
> Understanding Blogger as we did at the time — as a software tool for creating and publishing web sites — we found ourselves in the race many software makers know well: Add features, get more users. Competitor adds more features, lose users. (Marketing and others factors have some effect, depending on the market. In blogging, that was minimal.)
(skipping a few paragraphs)
> Chris Dixon had a great post a while back — Come for the tool, stay for the network — describing how, unlike Twitter, some platforms started out with tool value and transitioned into network value (which, ultimately, became a much bigger part of the equation, such is the case with Instagram). We had an inkling of this and were just getting started on the network piece of Blogger when I left 10+ years ago. It’s not that Blogger immediately suffered. Its ease-of-use continued to attract users in the tens of millions for many years. (According to Compete, blogspot.com had 63M visitors just this March.) But it was a pretty big missed opportunity for Google. (Don’t worry, they’ve done fine.)
> It will not surprise you that these observations reveal a lot about what we’re trying to do with Medium. We started out by building a great tool for writing. And it’s not even the editor itself that created the main value. It was the fact that you could easily write and share a story without the setup, overhead, or commitment level of starting a blog. It’s clear that there are many more people who occasionally have valuable perspectives to share than there are people who want to be “bloggers.” These people love writing on Medium, even if they see it as just a tool to create a nice page to point people to from Twitter.
> However, that’s not the point. Or, at least, that’s not the end. In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value. What does this mean? Obviously, one form of that value is distribution. And there’s no doubt that something published on Medium has a higher likelihood to find an audience than the same thing published on an untrafficked island on the web.
I think that makes sense. You can use Blogger or Wordpress or whatever to create a blog, but the difficult part is getting traction. Similarly to how Github is not only a place to host your .git repo, but also a "network" for finding/distributing those repos, Medium is not only a place to host your content, but a place to find and distribute that content.
Oh, I totally buy it. I'm just joking around :). I said in another comment:
> Some companies end too early because the technology or capital wasn't there to let it get to its full potential.
Blogger is a clear case for that. If it was founded 5 years later, it could have had sharing features and been Tumblr.
Similarly, if Tumblr was founded now, it'd probably have a better comment system, cleaner design and collections. The real question is - is that enough to move the network effect over to Medium. I see Tumblr v. Medium as very similar to MySpace v. Facebook in that regard...
I think they might've made a mistake trying to tie Medium to Twitter then. They should've tried to tie it to Facebook first and foremost, as people who want 140 characters are not gonna spend 10min on a piece of writing, while people on Facebook are always looking for something more interesting than 2nd cousin's baby pictures.
It's ridiculous how much of a bubble the web is in right now. Do you really think they well EVER earn $57 million back? In the age of ad blockers, ad networks are dying. How else will they monetize? Only time will tell.
Also, why is Medium so popular? It really doesn't have anything new or different than any blogging platform before it...almost any of the readers of HN could probably create a similar service if we wanted to, so why is Medium so popular? Maybe I'm just really out of touch but I just don't see the value in these websites. Sure they're popular now but for how long? Honestly, how much of their popularity is just because it's the "cool" "new" place to post on, and because everyone else is doing it so I should too?
I think a big part of it's popularity is the polish of the design and the UX.
It's kind of useless, but also, you have to admit, nicer to read there than most other places... And since VCs have TONS of money because bubble etc... It gets traction
I am also convinced that the founders being so connected allows them to raise about 10x what they really deserve
It's popular in the Twitterverse as the go-to longform blog platform for people without a personally hosted blog who also want to avoid Tumblr. A big reason for that is probably because a Twitter co-founder created it. ;)
I heard about it before I even browsed HN or new what YC was. Mostly I read the "War is Boring" articles, specifically by David Axe.
One strange thing about the Medium-Twitter link is that most Medium stories I come across can't actually be posted on Twitter via the Twitter client for OSX because the @ symbol in the URL breaks. And the OSX client is how I mostly interact with Twitter.
Yahoo spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr, so in theory you could see a similar deal. And of course it depends on what they do with the $57 million, but yes it feels very dot.com bubble.
I don't think you can quite compare Medium to Tumblr. Different market, different users, different product, different end result. That is like doing a linear comparison of Water to Ice Cubes.
Just because Apple let some people use ad block last week? A bit fickle!
Stay a little level headed about it, Medium's becoming one of the big guys, they're getting a lot of page views, there's a good chance they'll find a way to monetize and make that money back.
This is actually one where I'm not surprised at the cash.
I still fucking hate Medium. Why? It's bad for content creators. Why? Because url previews on HN/Reddit/etc say medium.com. Every damn medium.com link looks the same as others. No way to build your brand or identity. For the longest time the author's name wasn't even visible until the very teeny bottom.
I'm pro-author and pro-content creator. I don't believe that Medium is. They're just pro-Medium. Our interests are not aligned. Which is a shame.
"On what it will do with the money? Doyle says it will go to making Medium “the dominant pipeline for connecting quality content and conversation,” which is pretty broad."
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The content is decent, but the conversation aspect of Medium has a long, long way to go before it comes close to many other platforms.
I agree. The ability to discuss paragraphs individually is fun but it seems the unwritten rule is to keep discussion there to a minimum or else it clutters your work.
You own the rights to the content you post on Medium. We don’t claim ownership over any of it. However, by posting or transferring content to Medium, you give us permission to use your content solely to do the things we need to do to provide Medium Services, including, without limitation, storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing your content. This may include promoting your content with partner companies or services for broader broadcast, distribution, or publication.
This is identical to the ToS for any hosted blogging service such as Blogger or Wordpress - you have to give them a license to your words for the site to do their job.
True, and practically speaking it's pretty standard from what I've seen in writing fields. Very similar to music such as on Soundcloud.
I think the only 'hangup' that might be in the conditions would be "without limitation" insofar as when does "the things we need to do to provide Medium Services" conflict with the content producer being compensated. As in, if "partner companies" and Medium are engaged in some compensation / revenue undertaking, at what point does an author on the platform have some "say" in the way the content gets used...e.g. a person posts a beautiful poem, Medium can print that poem in an ad in the New York Times to self-promote, and the author seemingly gets nothing, which doesn't seem appropriate.
Not saying that's the intent or anything, but I think healthy suspicion is helpful to all parties for clarity.
I'm looking at that and thinking the way they've phrased it means that 'without limitation' is required to avoid exposing themselves to lawsuits over details, and 'solely' is meant as their promise to the users.
So ... healthy suspicion good, but I feel like they've tried to set it up so that they can only be sued for violating the letter of the agreement, but can (and expect to) be publically excoriated for violating the spirit.
Whether they'll continue to live up to these ideals over time is (aaand we're back to healthy suspicion :) inevitably an open question, but I think the intent is to make it clear that those ideals do exist now in a way that allows us to hold them to it later.
Excellent point, and thanks for elaborating on the "spirit" component as it relates to the phrasing. I'm on board with you in that it's a functional way of doing business, legally speaking, but could benefit from public oversight (e.g. reputation).
Essentially, authors give up a lot of control to put their work on Medium. It's not that they no longer own their words but that they've given up specific notions of value to publish on Medium. And Medium has specific ideas about the value of the writing published on it reflected in its advertising, etc.
This is unrelated to the conversation at hand... but for a site that calls itself "Practical Typography", something about the font and typesetting there makes me almost squint when I try to read that page.
I know what you mean! I feel like I'm squinting at a typewritten page of text, or something fresh from the printer with maybe a little too much ink on it. It's beautiful, but such a departure from what I normally read it's always a little startling. Maybe my monitor isn't high enough DPI or something.
You know when you see one of those Twitter embeds where a tweet or a conversation is pulled into a different page? That's "broader distribution" right there, and if Medium made that kind of feature I'd certainly count that as "doing their job".
Twitter is starting to look something like Reuters real-time reporting network and event notifications. It basically replaces the headlines of the newspaper people used to see while walking down the street. It is a notification service which makes it a great platform.
Medium is trying to be the actual body paragraph of the newspaper[0]. They seek to provide content curation, search and monetization. They provide the analysis of the interesting topics you see on twitter. Twitter is diverse with people like Kim Kardashian to Noam Chomsky. Medium will let these people explain themselves in long form and introduce you to similar thinkers. For Noam Chomsky that might be other linguists or libertarians and for Kim Kardashian it might be a piece of cardboard, or goldfish. I don't know what the strategy is, but I would say 20/80 odds they crack the code. Long odds, but better than most start ups face. They need to:
* Find a way to pay users for content, or create a great incentive for them to continue delivering high quality content to them for free.
* Find a way to organize and display the content.
* Get people to pay for it.
Obviously a tall order. They are trying to be the people who figure out how to monetize without advertising traffic. I have no idea what they told investors, and frankly Ev Williams could say he was remaking Pets.com and he would get funded, but I suspect they have an idea for monetization.
[0] A newspaper was sort of link an internet website. It was made of something called paper and was delivered by actual people to your door. People used to use their hands to scroll through it. Push notifications and updates took ~24 hours to reach newspapers. Not much else is known about these ancient artifacts.
Could they be prepping for the war against ads and trackers? There's been a bit of talk about having a central paywall of sorts. One where I put money into a service and that service is responsible for distributing the money to the sites that I visit (that have signed up with said paywall service). Kind of like what Google has as an alternative to seeing its ads (can't recall the name). Medium would be an ideal platform for this. Put a monthly fee into medium (maybe you choose how much), or just give your credit card and set a cap on how much you can spend per month, and then when you visit posts on medium, the authors get paid out based on visits and percentage read (or something similar). That could have the potential to upend the indie blogger market right now. They'd have distribution, managed systems, and would get paid for their work.
I miss international support on Medium. Or maybe recognition? But also in terms of features, like national "communities" or filters. I've thought about posting there but recognize that brand as one aimed for quality long form posts, but can't be assed to write all that in English. :( I want to be able to visit a medium.com/ger, medium.com/swe, etc.
It's seemingly not even a topic brought up there in a FAQ or so. Funny, since I think it would open up many new markets.
I was actually thinking about this. With facebook upping their UI/UX game for notes, it can strike as a good competition, if it catches on. Lets see how it works out.
The new Facebook Notes rocks. It's not as feature rich as Medium but the user connections are, of course with over a billion users, incredible and unmatched.
Sometimes I get the feeling there is a business model in there somewhere trying to get out. Something that replaces magazines. I don't know if medium is it, certainly Blogger and Tumblr weren't, or the collection of things that is AOL these days.
Somehow a go-to-market strategy involving authors, editors, advertisers, and readers which gives everyone a really great experience. It is a tough nut to crack though.
Doesn't the arrow of progress actually point the other way? If the site gets big enough, they can charge writers for the privilege of being published there.
Anyone have any ideas how long this will keep them going without having the start really monetizing? IMO, I think it's _insane_ that in 2015 companies can be given so much cash with a hope that they can become profitable.
The hope is probably that they can be bought up for profit, as opposed to being a profitable company in the long term. That's what comprises a business model in startup land.
And let's be honest - it works enough of the time that people keep doing it.
honest question: why does medium need to raise so much money?
Given that ev is behind it, I would imagine he has the financial resources to fund it himself AND more importantly, he has the connections within the silicon valley Illuminati (i.e. VCs, Tech Journalist, CEOs of various tech companies).
I like Medium as a platform but there doesn't seem to be much beyond the occasional interesting essay or startup humblebrag puff piece about why culture is more than free donuts or whatever.
My problem with Medium is there is no way of establishing a reputation for quality. If everyone can post there then you're gonna run into some garbage, no matter what the sorting algorithm says are the "hot" stories. So without site wide quality control all it'll take are a few bad articles to bring down the perceived average quality.
So then what's in it for the writers? Build up an audience on a convenient, erm, Medium, then...leave? How else will they make money?