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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.