Ask HN: What do you think about Medium? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think about Medium?

5 pointsrayalez12 comments

Recently I have been very fascinated with medium.com, because I really love the idea of merging a blogging platform and a social network, and nobody has done this right up to this point. And also because I am thinking about working on a competing project, since I have many ideas on how this can be done better.

I would really love to hear your thoughts about medium, and I would be very grateful if you could answer a few questions:

- How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

- What did they do right, and what are it's flaws?

- What would you do better? What needs to be changed?

- What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what twitter is now, or will nobody care about it? Will they be able to maintain the content quality, and if yes then how?

- How do you think they are going to monetize it? How would you do that?

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> I am thinking about working on a competing project, since I have many ideas on how this can be done better.

This, kids, is the biggest problem we face today. Whenever someone needs something out of something that doesn't offer it, a competing product is created.

Even if your product truly is better, a compromise is born. People who use your product will miss the community and content of Medium, and people who use Medium will miss the benefits of your product. Even if 50% of Medium users switch to your new product, you're both losers. The Medium community won't be as good as it used to, and your community won't be as good as Medium's used to be.

Until we move away from the application/website/service paradigm, this problem will remain. Fragmentation will continue to hurt everyone.

What we need is a decentralized and extensible platform that can be improved without introducing competition that leads to fragmentation. Too bad people don't know they want this yet.

I am sure you are somewhat correct that people don't know that they want this. However, there is more to it than that. This is actually a very hard problem to solve. How exactly do you propose we create a decentralized and extensible platform that can be improved without leading to competition. This seems like a pipe dream.

> This is actually a very hard problem to solve.

It's not difficult to solve. It's just that nobody considers it to be a problem that deserves being solved. If the challenge was in solving it, surely people would at least be talking about its existence.

> How exactly do you propose we create a decentralized and extensible platform that can be improved without leading to competition.

- The protagonist: Semantic web

- The antagonist: Privacy

We need more semantics and less privacy. Together, we can create a more efficient communication platform. That's the base of the platform.

Then, all we need is a predicate-orientated UI, intents as contracts, and IoT sensors.

All of this has been known for decades. One would need to live under a rock not to know this. How we got where we are today really is a mystery.

> What we need is a decentralized and extensible platform that can be improved without introducing competition that leads to fragmentation. Too bad people don't know they want this yet.

It exists, and it's called RSS. But it's much easier to make money in a walled garden, so that's what we have.

> - How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

I like a lot of its content.

> - What did they do right, and what are it's flaws?

Good: People talk about things people care about.

Bad: Trends define what people care about.

> - What would you do better? What needs to be changed?

People hate reading. What makes an article popular on Medium is:

1. Its title

2. Its bullet points

The future of communication is:

1. Don't tell me things I already know

2. Show me the stuff I need in ways I can relate to

This requires some kind of intelligence or AI. This also requires a new language that's not English. Something more visual, easier to consume. In the future, we will never write for humans. Machines will read us, customize the message for each individual human being, and then communicate it to that person.

> - What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what twitter is now, or will nobody care about it? Will they be able to maintain the content quality, and if yes then how?

Medium is dead in 5 years. Twitter will be dead in 5 years. People will communicate through a semantic graph. We won't read text, we will read nodes and edges.

> - How do you think they are going to monetize it? How would you do that?

Most posts are actually ads in disguise. People will pay to get their posts professionally improved (with A/B testing) and cheat the recommendation system.

> How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

I've read good content on medium, which makes me feel (a bit) positive about it.

Most medium blogs seem to have huge header images though, which require me to scroll before reading the first sentence, which is very annoying. So slightly less positive.

> What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what twitter is now, or will nobody care about it?

I expect it to be a bit like wordpress.com now: well-known, still around, though not a huge hype.

> How do you think they are going to monetize it?

Like everyone else does: Ads, sponsored posts, sponsored rankings.

Wrote this yesterday: https://ello.co/teanee/post/P2T1UI14Rr3YZYfsIwFPlQ

Ello vs Medium

>Personally, I prefer the business policies and user respect that the Ello platform offers. A no-ad policy (forever) is a huge reason to support Ello for me. Although Medium has the tech crowd, Ello has a community and team with lots of heart. When Ello releases an API, I'm sure that the community will increase.

Are you working for Ello? How do you know the Ello team has lots of hearts etc.? If you do, then I will say then there is some sort of bias to the post/comparison. Naturally, you'd favor Ello more than Medium if the answers to my above questions are Yes & yes.

No, I don't work for Ello - just a user. I've watched from the sidelines and observed how those who do work there respond. From their words and actions, it's clear to me that they are pro-privacy and anti-ad tech. I've seen how they've handle product issues with transparency and quick action. I guess it sounds like I work there, but I don't nor do I personally know anyone who actually does.

The Ello site looks like shit to be completely honest with you.

It does go against the design grain and established UX principles at times, but that's okay for me in the big picture. A lot of design is subjective anyways and I rather enjoy the font and layout. They're marching to a different drummer but still care about the users. There's quite a bit wrong with the Medium UI. There are pros to each, but I personally support the policies of Ello more. The vibe is positive and homey.

LiveJournal did it.

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