We're mostly developers here and Dave (the author) is in fact one of my personal development heroes, and while it pains me I think we're all mostly missing the point.
It's easy to look at a single Medium post and think: I could throw this together with Jekyll and put it on S3 with a custom domain in about 10 minutes.
What that _misses_ is that there is a legit community that has grown up around Medium that honestly enjoys reading articles. It's long form Twitter, the community and following of each author and publication are inextricably linked with greater site. You can't replace Twitter with a static site of posts limited to 140 characters for all the same reasons you can't replace Medium so easily.
I find it maddening. I wish we were all still using RSS + Google Reader, but if a prominent a voice as DHH can get some wild multiplier of people reading his words if he types them into the box on Medium instead of onto their very well established blog, what chance do the rest of us have?
This community thing may be the case, it doen't bring in any dollars. At least not at any signifcant scale to continue developing the platform.
What the world needs is an easy to use web publisher, the Microsoft Word for the Web. Sure, we can type text and publish that. We can't however add in math formula's, pictures, excel sheet (parts), word document links, slideshows anything digital really, with "unexpected simplicity and ease". There's always pain involved, and I know individuals and companies are willing to pay heavily if these problems are solved in an online publishing tool.
The community is now just there to generate critical mass for adoption, and used as highly critical feedback userbase.
It's the W3C's reference browser implementation, with equal emphasis on creation and viewing. To quote:
"Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium."
Last time I tried it (several years ago), it would regularly crash, but it's enough to open your eyes as to what might be.
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Edit: I should add a further quote: "It's development is stopped." Whilst it's not realistic to use Amaya, it would be great if its model inspired others.
totally this. Medium is a community, not blog software.
The blogging software is a nice plus though. It looks better than 90% of what's out there. It's hosting your content too, so no dealing with CDNs. Lots of goodies.
Besides, there's a higher likelihood of Medium being alive longer than most blogs this writing would otherwise have gone onto.
I wonder if Obama is worried about letting Science host his blog post about climate change instead of setting it up himself.
> Besides, there's a higher likelihood of Medium being alive longer than most blogs this writing would otherwise have gone onto.
Beg to differ on this note. I can see Medium closing up shop in 5 years like GeoCities, whereas you'll still Wordpress, if not self-hosted Wordpress blogs, well into the 2020s. The latter will still look ugly, but the content will still be there.
Generalising here, but the people writing content on Medium prioritise exposure over longevity. Whereas the people still using Blogspot/Wordpress probably care more about controlling their own content and don't necessarily care about things like mentions, top highlights, or nice UIs. And if Blogspot/Wordpress do shut down, the latter would put up much more of an uproar over the Medium users, who'd probably just jump to the next platform.
Ideally, Medium would partner with the Internet Archive to preserve its content.
Medium let's you download all your content and they support custom domains. So, if they close shop it shouldn't be a big deal to switch to another platform.
Disclaimer: I've never published on Medium, I only follow a few blogs so my experience is limited, and most importantly, I may be an idiot.
With that being said, I find Medium to be very frustrating to read. For one, the page layouts seem really inefficient to me. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the specific blogs I follow but many posts tend to have enormous screen wide images interspersed between rather thin columns of text. I don't think there is any other website I read that requires so much scrolling to read so few words.
Even more annoying than the above is the completely broken commenting system. Again, perhaps this is due to the blogs I follow and not indicative of the greater platform but Medium's comments system actually make me nostalgic for Disqus, which I never thought I'd say.
As an example, after I scroll through an article to get to the comments, I'm usually only shown 3 comments before I have to press to show more, it usually takes a while to load the additional comments. Then, if someone responds to a comment, I need to press a button to show said response. Rather than expand the comment to show the response, I am taken to a new page, except instead of showing the response it actually just shows the original comment. I then have to scroll to the bottom to view the response. Then once I'm done reading the response, I click the back button on my browser to get to my previous place in the comments, only Medium doesn't remember this and I'm back at the very top of the article once again having to scroll through a large thin column of text and expand the comments section. At this point I usually forgo looking at any further responses.
Again, admittedly I don't use Medium that much so I might just be unfamiliar with better ways of using the website. Am I doing something wrong or do others find it just as frustrating?
There is indeed room for improvement. I wish they would listen more the users or do ergonomic evaluations of the interface. Since the recent reduction of the team I'm afraid they are now more focused into finding money and a viable business model than enhancing the interface.
My attention to Medium was attracted by some of their high value articles that were referenced on hacker news or reddit. I though that it must be a very good journal. This is a successful result.
Now that I installed the app and browse articles on Medium I feel like I can't find the start of the long tail. I wish I could adjust the signal to noise threshold.
> I'm usually only shown 3 comments before I have to press to show more
I'm now wondering if this is deliberate. Comments are often bad, and sometimes very bad; long comment threads are even harder to manage. But it can be useful for a quiet article to have one or two comments. So maybe they've soft-limited comments through unusability.
We shipped a REST API in WordPress 4.7, and the API is going to continue to be a focus of the project going forward. The great thing about that is that it allows building entirely new interfaces without touching any backend code in WordPress. As an example, we built a liveblogging app[0] (warning: unoptimised React app not meant for production) entirely using the API that provided a new interface customised just for liveblogging. This connects to any site[1] and any theme.
WordPress has always had an advantage with the degree of customisation that's allowed, and my hope is that we'll see even more work towards better experiences with a shorter build-test-release cycle now. But, plugins aren't the only solution.
In WordPress itself, the big focusses for the next release (4.8) are the REST API, the Customiser (frontend live customisation), and the Editor. I think we'll see plenty of movement in this area.
(I'm one of the leads on the API, a committer to WordPress, and also work for an enterprise WP agency.)
Meh. Back in the early days of Medium, it was a good place to discover new writers. I remember when they had 'collections' and you could create your own collection really easily (say, for a writing group or special interests) and moderate who published what in there.
Very quietly, they removed all that. I found my posts getting less and less visibility on there until all the 'no name' authors like myself simply disappeared as we were pushed aside by the 'big names' in the Internet world.
Nowadays it seems that you need the magical "Recommended by Medium Staff" or "Recommended by Ev Williams" to be even seen by more than 20 people on that platform. I obviously don't know the secret handshake to get those monikers on the top of my posts. I have seen some inane drivel tagged with those magical words, and I have seen some though provoking articles with only 2 or 3 likes in a whole year because they missed the blessing.
Like Twitter et al, unless you know how to game the system, or you are a part of the 'in crowd', then it simply seems to be a waste of time to try and participate.
This may seem like a bitter rant, and it is, in large parts. But I wish there was another independent blogging community out there which works a little like HN. At least here, 80% of my posts go relatively unnoticed, but at least 20% will elicit some interesting discussion and interest.
Another thing I hate about the new Medium is their removal of the old 'sidebar' comments - that was useful to annotate or discuss certain points about the post with the author.
Now, you comment below, and EACH COMMENT is posted as a new Medium article?!? So now my stats are cluttered with my actual posts, and the comments-as-posts. Just more junk.
Additionally, you don't get to see ALL the comments under a post (you only see posts from people you follow) unless you click a link. What is that about. It would seem that some posts I read have NO comments, until I click the link only to see an active discussion happening.
Oh, and long comments under a post are only partially shown. Clicking on them refreshes the entire window to show the comment (and the comments to the comment) in full screen. Going back from here to where you left off on the stream of original post comments is almost impossible.
It is slowly moving from a nice, clean platform, to a really cluttered mess that is increasingly difficult to navigate and consume content on.
I get emails from medium reporting stats about some comment I wrote long ago. I haven't opted out because I find it amusing; they're actually keeping track of how many people look at a one line comment I made a few months ago. I know computing is cheap these days but it's not free. Someone there thought that comment view stats were worth tracking and reporting. Wow.
Medium has a lot of buzz, a great founder and a powerful centralized system. It felt like an upgrade to the web. WordPress on the other hand, is a force of nature. Not only does it have a strong team working to improve it on all levels, but it's open source and has somehow managed to attract both gigantic community of marketers, entrepreneurs and consultants and a hoard of GPL zealots making sure that code flows back into the mothership.
A dozen years ago, there was another company that held every advantage Medium currently does, including a younger version of the exact same fouder—Blogger. WordPress steamrolled Blogger. Even with the support of one of the most powerful companies in the world, Blogger has faded from prominence and WP now powers 25% of all the sites on the web.
https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-used-on-25-percent-of-all...
The way I see it, posting on Medium is like guest posting on someone else's blog or like writing on LinkedIn. It's a great way to get some exposure and it's a tool that should be used, but any serious publisher needs their own site they're using the guest posts to build up.
>The way I see it, posting on Medium is like guest posting on someone else's blog or like writing on LinkedIn. It's a great way to get some exposure and it's a tool that should be used, but any serious publisher needs their own site they're using the guest posts to build up.
Honestly I see this as a very very good thing. It decentralizes control and puts content creators in charge of their own works.
Having their own domain puts content creators in charge of their own works. Medium can pull the plug on any given user, pivot, die or get acquired at any time.
Medium's not supposed to overtake WordPress. Arguably, Blogger wasn't supposed to overtake WordPress. Wordpress is a CMS, and you can hammer any organization of content, from stores to news sites into it. Medium and blogger are blogging platforms -- they're specifically made to display text and images in an attractive manner.
I would call Blogger yet another example of a decent product that was marginalized and cast into purgatory by the benign neglect of Google. Who knows what could have been if any effort at all was invested in improving and growing Blogger, but like so many Google products and acquisitions, it's just idled along and been overtaken.
In my experience in tech, that level of bluster comes just before the platform is undermined and then overtaken by an insurgent. Watch out for over-confidence. Even paranoia won't keep you in your seat of power, but bluster is a sure sign you're overlooking something important.
What is your experience with predictions, exactly?
I feel confident that WordPress will be more widely used than Medium next year, in three years and in nine years (which is an eternity in tech). Would you bet against that? I don't mean money, but if you feel confident taking the other side, we can both set calendar alerts and check back in one, three and nine years to see who was over-confident and who was appropriately confident in their opinion.
AFIK, no open source ecosystem with WPs level of usage has ever died (and in a sense OSS is unkillable), but it would be fun if you want to take the other side of my prediction. This kind of dynamic is why I blogged every tech stock I bought (after AAPL in 2001). It keeps you honest in your own thinking.
It goes back to No One Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM. ;-)
When I came out of comp sci school in 1978, everyone thought that DEC and Data General had an insurmountable lead and that PCs were toys. Then they thought Macs were toys. Then they thought the web was a toy. I've been to countless tech conferences where the top guy from some "dominant" company told the tale of how dominant they were and two years later they were slinking around in the back of the room, no one wanting to talk to them. I could name names, but just read my blog. Hubris is a terrible thing and tech is filled with it. And your post was totally a product of hubris ;-)
You can call it hubris, but my goal is truth. I don't have any financial or even emotional stake in WP and am just trying to make the best predictions I can. In my experience, you don't hone those skills unless you actually have the nerve to make the predictions and then follow up on them.
Your reasoning on DEC and Data General make sense, but were either of them open source? In a sense, betting against WP is like betting against GCC 30 years ago when all the alternatives were proprietary. Either way, I'm happy to check back in a few years and see if the hubris was my prediction or your armchair psychologist reaction to it (・ω<)
You're not an idiot, the are plenty of people with that misunderstanding (it comes up quite often for almost any service: dropbox, twitter, Facebook, flickr, etc.).
All these services are obviously reproducing their users' copyrighted works. To do that they need that license. The difference to and ISP is that they change these works (or at least their representation) and a few others. That exemption, as well as those for caches and search engines, are codified in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_....
Your browser renders the page by means of making a copy, which requires a license to you. Usually this is granted by the website. It has been argued in some places that this includes a right to control the "integrity of the presentation", that is that you're not licensed to display the page if you block ads.
For the average reader, there is no difference between medium, google cache, rss reader, archive.is, screenshot, pdf, getpocket.com, copy pasted snippet or printed pages of the same article. In that sense, medium means nothing. Just some meaningless wheel in the whole system, annoying us with their ads. We owe them nothing. Medium is blogger is livejournal is a column in a newspaper is private subreddit is google+ is everything2 is svbtle is obtvse is wordpress is textfiles is github pages is a mailing list is paper.
People ignore it takes some effort to "publish" content. The dissemination of said content is such that we don't really respect, at all, these "publishers".
I don't really have a point, am just slightly annoyed to be reminded such plumbing is, in fact, a business model.
If we want to continue with newspaper stand analogies, Medium would be like a newspaper stand that has one copy of each newspaper and magazine it distributes, and has a photocopier. When a customer wants a copy, that newsstand uses the photocopier to make one for them.
Firefox is a tool you use. People (incl. companies) need licenses, not tools. And yes, you do get a license to download the content for the purpose of viewing it.
If the newspaper stand was taking a copy of a newspaper from the publisher and making it available to millions of people by posting it on the internet then yes, they would need a license.
A newspaper stand doesn't make copies. First sale doctrine roughly means you don't need a license if you're just selling an object with the licensed content in it.
I've been working on a site that is similar to medium. Not to compete with them though. I love medium and the access it and exposure it gives those who want to say something, and the ease of use.
I have not put near the kind of work into it that the good folks at Medium have. It's just been an exercise for me to begin learning to use CouchDB, PouchDB, and other open source tools but I wanted to make something that anyone could use to share interesting stuff, whatever that might be (with the obvious limits).
I think if "Medium" has any problems they stem from being a concept that is still ahead of its time. Investors want to monetize everything, and it's fair to say that it will have to support itself, but it's also fair to assume that the old ways of doing that may not work too well.
To address that they will have to come up with some new ways, or adapt new ways that spring up elsewhere, but there's still work that needs to be done on the "new media" itself that is being developed.
While making ibloc I began to ponder how to "monetize it". That's part of the fun of playing with a new or different (to me) concept. I think there are some new/different ways to do that which might work, but who knows?
I believe we need it thought. Medium has and still is shining a light on a new way to find and share info. It's an important project.
A couple of comments on things not mentioned in this article:
- Medium's design is one of the big reasons it succeeded. Things written in Medium look authoritative. They're also easy and pleasant to read. And that means people are more likely to read them. If you're cloning Medium as Open-Source, you need to clone the design. Yes, probably including the slow-ass Javascript (or at least, split-test with and without and see which gets more engagement).
- Medium's discoverability is the other reason it works. If I write a post on my own blog, as I have done for 20 years, no new readers find it unless I promote it myself. I happen to be good at that, but most people aren't. On Medium, there are built-in mechanisms to bubble content up, and that's tremendously valuable if you don't already have a large audience and care about people reading what you write.
- The domain. I've observed over the years that which domain your content's hosted on has an increasingly large effect on whether people are willing to click through to it. (Why? It's shown next to the link on Reddit, Hacker News, and other places. It's an obvious signal.). A "medium.com" domain link still seems to carry more trustability than a "randomsite.com". They did a good job building their brand.
Isn't medium going to add some ads any day now? Why are people worried about sustainability. Once the ads are there people will either put up with them or move on. I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie a few times now.
How easy is it to export content from Medium? Say, importing it into a WordPress instance.
edit: of course, the loved one has a Medium site. Apparently it exports your posts as just plain HTML. Doesn't appear to have metadata (post time, etc, though that's in the filename). No idea about comments and annotations.
Although there are plenty of carbon copies that have arisen to mimic the platform, it definitely would be a great idea for Medium to become open source.
Ghost's editor is the best one I know of (there's a plugin for Wordpress that does basically the same thing - Gust), but it's still not as good as the Medium editor by a long shot.
From a reader perspective: It does have a unified and competent optical design (font + color choices) that's not being messed up by the sometimes strange tastes of individual bloggers. I've seen too many blogs that literally hurt my eyes when I try to read them. Also, supports commenting on specific parts of the text.
The font + color choices are indeed nice. But don't get me started on the UI mess.
Medium articles tend to make my browser laggy. Comments need sometimes two clicks to open and upon hitting the back button, Medium loses the reading position so that I have to scroll all the way through the comments again.
It's beyond me how Medium's UX team can mess up basic navigation behavior like that.
Medium has a bit of a community: People who click around on medium reading new articles and discussing them. It's not a huge number, but can be very useful as an early audience who then share a post on other social media.
Medium also has a good reputation for layout and generally quality content. People on HN or Twitter are more likely to click on a link to medium.com than blogger.com, wordpress.com or randomsite.foo
There was some pretty good long-form writing on medium when they started, and to this day I'm more likely to click on a medium link than, say, blogspot. The latter still has this completely insane "Next Blog" banner on top which does, actually, send you around randomly. It's as if they bought "50 million cheap blog" at auction and asked Willy Loman to sell it on commission.
A better-looking design. A well-known URL that readers know will only ever contain well-designed pages. A nicer web-based editor (I like prose.io but honestly it isn't quite as good). Zero configuration.
Comments are the 'social' part that seems easiest to replicate. Or plug in with a 3rd party tool like Disqus (which gives you more social features).
But the coolest thing about Medium comments is that they can be inserted mid-article, with highlighted text, as annotations.
Medium also lets you follow users, and gives you recommendations based on what they recommend. But filtered through an algorithm. Sadly there's no simple reverse-chronological list of recommendations.
I think a $7/month subscription to access anything over ~5 articles/month on Medium would get a lot of people to pay, and I don't think it would chase off publishers at this point. The value Medium has created is easily worth as much as Netflix, and without a doubt more valuable than the paywalls other publishers (NYT, WSJ) ask for.
I don't know. Most Medium articles are not really worth paying for, in my opinion, and so paywalling the site would just add it to that collection of sites that I ignore and filter out, like the WSJ, NYT, Wired, etc, etc.
While Wordpress may have become slow on the server side, I've found Medium increasingly slow on the client side.
It sorta looks clean, but once you start scrolling, it turns out the page is actually full of cruft and rather slow. I turn on Reader Mode for Medium pages when possible now.
It's easy to look at a single Medium post and think: I could throw this together with Jekyll and put it on S3 with a custom domain in about 10 minutes.
What that _misses_ is that there is a legit community that has grown up around Medium that honestly enjoys reading articles. It's long form Twitter, the community and following of each author and publication are inextricably linked with greater site. You can't replace Twitter with a static site of posts limited to 140 characters for all the same reasons you can't replace Medium so easily.
I find it maddening. I wish we were all still using RSS + Google Reader, but if a prominent a voice as DHH can get some wild multiplier of people reading his words if he types them into the box on Medium instead of onto their very well established blog, what chance do the rest of us have?
https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-moves-to-medium-c8...