Anywhere but Medium
scripting.com
scripting.com
My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years?
The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem.
[1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?
As a matter of fact, yes. I've been blogging exactly that long too. Some of that content has gone through four or five software platforms, and twice that many physical hosts, and it's just as readable as ever. You do bring up a good point, though. The reason I've been able to make all those transitions has been because I retained complete control over the data even at the lowest level throughout. I wouldn't have that with Medium. I'd be at least somewhat at their mercy to keep my posts accessible and/or exportable. That's the argument Dave should have made. Maybe he considered it too obvious to state, but the fact that he didn't make it explicit is what turns a possibly-good rant into an incoherent mess.
Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?
As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this?
You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.
My first blog post is from 19 years ago. Before the term "blog" hit the scene, I believe.
Just wanted to brag. :-)
But it's also important just as a reminder that your content might last decades. Those old posts will no doubt still be up on my site 19 years from now. At least, if I'm still around and if something catastrophic hasn't happened to our civilization...
What's the over-under on Medium being around in 19 years?
If you're not a historian, I'm not sure that longevity is all that important. It seems like someone who writes a lot and changes platforms every so often without worrying about the past might be better off, even if their old posts might not be around anymore.
You step into the river, but the water has moved on / Welcome to the Internet
It's sad, I agree -- but it's naive to expect anything else even from Google, much less some random startup. If you want your content to last, get an FTP account with your ISP, tie it to a domain name you own, upload a static .htm file, and pay the bill every month. Nothing else is guaranteed to work.
They may have visited it but its pretty common these days to visit sites from following a Facebook posted link and never take notice of the actual site name.
With that in mind, there's a much more Hacker-ly way to get the same reader experience—namely, using one of the many services that provide a "blog-post format gateway" for Github Gists:
Etc.
http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png
What's interesting is that I remember back when I first looked at Medium, it seemed more whitelabel than that screenshot. But I guess that's the point of the original authors post. Medium is a for profit company, and they're going to change the platform over time to try to make money. That may involve changes you don't like, but are unable to act on since Medium has all your content.
Not saying that I agree with him. At the end of the day, Medium says the writers own their content. I feel ok with them, though I can empathize with OP, given the amount of shitty things BigCorp companies have done in the past.
https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
Did all the other ones die or was PornHub just better at maintaining mainstream media attention? If I recall correctly there were at least three other equally sized sites along the time I first heard of it.
>See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.
A good rant should be like a well-optimized piece of code, and not waste a lot of the reader's mental CPU cycles.
I think his most important point is right there, and that's a pretty good one.
Me too. His explanation of why Medium is thought to be good (before he goes on to explain why he thinks it's actually bad) was very convincing!
>Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often.
> I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.
> In the back of my mind I thought that he'll probably put it on Medium. ...
> Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium.
What an ass.
If you feel that strongly about it, say something up front. But don't wait for someone to do the obvious (for better or worse, if you don't have a blog and want to get out two thousand words, Medium is the obvious place to do it) just so that you can lord your self-decreed moral superiority over them.
For what it's worth, I would not for a moment consider that someone might use Medium when publishing something in a blog post. I'd expect some Wordpress install, or perhaps Blogspot or wordpress.com if they're lazy. In fact if I'd have to rank methods of publishing by likelihood among my friends, a text file might be higher up than Medium.
Perhaps in Silicon Valley it's very popular and perhaps this 'friend' (that posted it, to his dismay, on Medium) is indeed from there, but it's not as if it's that obvious that everyone would post to Medium.
But yeah I do agree, if you think of something like that, you might as well say it instead of waiting.
Medium's cool now, but it won't necessarily be in a few years. And it's completely within the realm of possibility that they will disappear entirely at some point. It happens all the time. Big sites that people have contributed mass amounts of content to blink out of existence on a very regular basis. Sometimes without warning or the ability to back-up data. But the best case, like Winer points out, is that any links in become broken, comments get lost, etc.
Your writing is yours. Own it.
What I write isn't interesting per se, but I don't want to depend on the bon vouloir of a VC-backed startup somewhere to keep a whopping 4.3kB online.
If I ever get over that hump, I certainly wouldn't want to make it harder on myself by hosting my own web server. I would want to write, not manage a server, with whatever complications that brings. That's what makes Medium (and others) attractive.
For the second part, I don't write regularly. I don't look for an audience tuning in every Thursday evening. I write when I feel like I have something to write about; when I learned something new and interesting that I want to share, that more people should (or might want to) know about.
This gives me a URL I can share with friends and/or post on sites, instead of telling friends individually or writing a post on a gated community like Facebook. It gives me some of history on what I've been doing over the years, showing a potential employer I've been doing IT stuff out of school as well (very useful as a young professional). It even serves to remind myself now and then, e.g. my IPv6 post[1] I fairly regularly use to check stuff like "what was the maximum address length again".
In fact, not writing regularly might be more useful to many potential followers. If you only write now and then, they can follow you without fearing their inbox/feed will be flooded, and posts are much more likely to be of quality. When deciding whether to follow back, irregular or semi-regular Twitter users are much more likely to get one from me because they are usually more interesting and not a day to day burden.
If the loss of control is worth the gain in ease, go nuts. Or if you don't really care if what you write stays online or under your control forever. Not everyone does. Twitter, for me: I really wouldn't care a bit if that service turned off entirely and I lost my archive of tweets. They just aren't that important to me. Or my Hacker News comments. They're interesting, but I won't be particularly upset when Hacker News finally dies off and they disappear. But my longer-form writing is important to me.
But I think people shouldn't be under any illusions about what Medium is. They're not a group of altruists trying to archive the world's writings for posterity. They're trying to figure out how to make bank. And if they don't, be aware of what will probably happen...
OTOH, if something like Medium weren't as bulky as it is and had more awesome CMS features like footnotes, I could totally understand somewhat-technical people sticking with them. It's less the self-hosting and -ownership that should be appealing, just how much easier it genuinely is to publish yourself for your own website compared to managing Medium.
Doing it yourself means it's as simple or complicated as you like it, and you can add whatever feature you want.
For instance, my blog displays a seasonal emoji next to the year: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TazeTSchnitzel/blog/75d789...
It was almost embarrassingly easy (code is on there).
Really should write more content for it though.
Why does it break in Chrome on OS X, yet work in everything else?!
* 25 year old founder wants to explain how the reason his startup failed wasn't his fault.
* 25 year old founder has a list of "10 ways to live a meaningful life"
* 23 year old Javascript programmer proclaims "Node.js is dead, long live Node.js" (3 paragraphs)
* 20something Bay Area resident thinks he's solved the housing crisis in 4 paragraphs.
95% Egotistic tripe. I can't think of any Medium posts I ever shared with someone else.
Assholes use blogspot, or tumblr, or WordPress, or really anywhere on the internet. So my only option would be to host my own or go through some fairly unknown blog hosting service to avoid being included with the assholes of the service?
I've only used Medium once, so I'm not really here to defend my use of it, but from my use it was incredibly easy to type up and piece and have it look decent.
Is there anywhere that you recommend someone writes what they want to write without being included with assholes? Otherwise, They're just going to go with the easiest solution, which happens to be Medium.
The problem only comes if you actually go in on the "game" of the platform—allow your writing to be led around by the incentive system inherent in the structure of the platform's network effects: recommendations, promoted posts, likes and shares, front-page status, etc.
If you "buy into" the platform like that, then the culture of the rest of the community on the platform (i.e. the other people who have "bought into" the platform) will start to matter. If they're mostly assholes, you'll have been tricked into playing a zero-sum game against assholes.
You know what a private Minecraft server with no moderation is like? It's an infinite expanse of dick-shaped monuments, where anything genuinely creative is quickly torn down or blown up. The parent poster is basically saying that Medium is the same way. The dick monuments are figurative, but they're still dick monuments; the tearing-down is social, but it's still tearing-down.
If you don't play the platform's game, none of this matters; you just get your little sandbox within the dickscape and can ignore the community around you. But the platform wants to engage your readers—through links back to a front page, or recommended follow-up posts, or whathaveyou. Building your sandbox in a dickscape leaves open the possibility that your readers might look out the window.
WordPress isn't a destination, it's a background technology, so it doesn't have these issues. Blogspot isn't popular anymore, so it doesn't have these issues.
> "Some Precious Thing a Design Student Came Up With That Wouldn't Work in Real Life"
I decided to treat my content as I do my apps. As individual assets which are just looking for distribution.
That's why I have my personal blog and then use medium as just another distribution channel for the content I write there. I also post it on linkedin and a couple of other places.
If something else comes up I will also put it there if it makes sense.
I normally get a healthy number of visits on my blog and while I wont get the traffic to my personal post I still get my thoughts out there when i use Medium (and some of the readers do cross from one destination to another)
Just my 5 cents.
My thoughts: he's saying Medium is evil because it's like every online platform ever. Now I'm a sucker for principles and host my own email, vpn, ftp, btsync and web server, and I indeed don't use Medium because I want to own and have control over what I publish, but saying Medium is evil because of these properties... maybe if it had been a post about online platforms in general, it might have had a point.
Medium gives the latter without much work, and for aspiring writers, that's the incentive to finally try blogging out and feel like they've done something substantial. If it gets more people into the mindset of being creators instead of passive web consumers, I think Medium has been a good thing overall.
This isn't a criticism. It isn't even a rant. It's not focussed enough to be either. It's somebody worrying about writing on the Internet being largely controlled by a single company. Which, of course, it isn't. Never was and never will be.
Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible.
Run your own blog on your own website. Then you don't have to depend on someone else to fix your bugs.
It's important background info that apparently the other commenters weren't aware of.
They basically have, due to their excellent product, deep pockets, and professional promotion, become the default place to post not just start-up posts, but political ones as well.
All that background is assumed in my post because I've written about it many times before, in different contexts, and posted links to other commentary about Medium.
As often is the case commenters on Hacker News don't always thoroughly research the background for THEIR opinions as they excoriate others for the same. ;-)
https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-medium-5450cb19f2...
I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it.
And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company.
At the same time, I contribute to a self-hosted WP blog at seliger.com/blog. From my perspective neither seems dramatically better or worse. But both have years of traction.
It does not fix the branding problems of every other looking the same and having to shove self-promotion at the end of every damn article.
I agree there should be other publishers, but the doom and gloom over medium is a bit strong. Any publisher, social network, or central repo suffers from the same complaints.
Magazines exercise editorial control, so they provide some some kind of signal of the kind and quality of writing you're going to get. Medium doesn't do that, so in an analogy to print publication, it would be more like... paper? a printing press?
Actually, Medium is just like the internet, except there's only one Medium and there's lots of the rest of the internet. Medium is the next generation of AOL.
As noted in the article, that is exactly the problem as Medium is not an impartial judge.
If you have read enough of Daves posts you'll realise this is the Internet version of what happened with Microsoft and Apple. Something about absolute power and corruption. Dave has been remarkably consistent in this observation over the years.
"Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium. I asked if he'd consider putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet."
One reason not to put things on medium is the poor url design. Try remembering then typing this url into your browser ~ https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-medium-5450cb19f2...
The design is ok. We can understand up to the end of the title, 'anywhere-but-medium' then we get robot vomit '5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h', junk parts of the url no use to anyone except machines.
Until Medium, I hosted my own blogs on my own web servers (for ~17 years). I eventually got tired of dealing with updates, comment spam management (even with Akismet and friends), breakin attempts, and all the rest, so I moved there. I'd still like to see friendly URL and custom domain support, as well as some fixes to the editor (bulleted lists + blockquote indentation bugs are very frustrating), but overall, I've been fairly satisfied with it.
His concerns might be a tad overblown in this instance, even if I agree with many of his concerns about the open web (and I personally still think RSS should be everywhere by default. It's still incredibly useful, even if only used for API consumption.)
BZZZT! Wrong! Maybe for you, but not for me!
I have no ingrained suppositions that the platform, free of charge, which hosts cheap-ass text in a usable format, and seems to be stable, would actually be bothered or compelled to promote my material. Not one bit of assumption on my part. I use it as a writing platform simply because it fits a need, and I didn't have to fork over for a domain and the maintenance that goes along with a self-implemented system. Or, if flow simply refers to it working, yeah, I guess I'm assuming that, but that's like a core competency.
It almost reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, the one where a chef becomes a master chef, and then a person asks, "Well, can you farm?" as though they should be a master of every aspect. I write. Medium hosts my writing, and I like the way the software works. Good deal for now, if it changes, I'll tear down and move on (like I did with Blend.io when they pivoted in a way I did not want to follow).
If we're talking ownership, well, that's a "backup" issue for each writer. For serious, lengthy pieces, I'm working in a software like Word before I'm posting online. It's just habit, and I can save locally/backup and Medium is the finished, public product. Simple.
In my experience - coming from music - the distributor is distinct and separate from the promotions arm. Though they may collaborate (PR working in conjuntion with Distributor to announce big release, etc), they are separate avenues in my opinion.
In this piece the author really undercuts their own point by referencing Facebook...mostly because if I had to write a correlative article about the one website where NOT to host music or artistic endeavors because of the single-platform lock-in risks mentioned...it would be Facebook. Anywhere but Facebook.
Distribution and Publicity are moving targets, faster now than ever. ReverbNation. That's a site that does distribution and promotion, and I don't think it's very good. BandCamp is more about distribution than promotion, and I see a lot of pretty happy customers over that route. Facebook is, for lack of a better concept, a necessary evil but simply one aspect in a fully functional, diversified approach to coming to market. Which also includes YouTube, the radio of the internet generation.
I like supporting OSS business models that allow me to host my own platform or just post my content to their hosted version of said platform.
Ironically when you visit the medium.com version of his post[1], all the links in it were hijacked by ifttt.com and turned into ift.tt shortlinks. So his effort to escape the medium.com content jail landed him right inside the ifttt.com content jail as well. Double jail.
Will those ift.tt shortlinks still load in 5 years? Who knows.
[1] https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but-medium-5450cb19f2...
I did that with a few for archival purposes and such, and the export feature is basically an HTML file with all kinds of stuff going on in it.
The idea of Medium is awesome, but the combination of their weird CMS and the way in which they store blog posts is annoying. Pros and cons and all that.
That said, it's not like other blogging platforms are saints. I'm sure it'd be a mess to export my Tumblr posts too.
Anything but scripting.com.
Edit: I just visited the site for the first time in ages, and noticed it's no longer free to sign up.
I take back any implied endorsement thereof.
What if I'm unintelligent, but funny? Can I get a part-time account?