Venture capital is going to murder Medium | Hacker News Reader

Venture capital is going to murder Medium

m.signalvnoise.com

22 pointsshlema12 comments

Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328549

Medium is a site I've wondered about a lot.

I'm a total outsider to that side of things, so maybe someone can explain it to me.

I see a lot of blogs and interesting articles that are on Medium. What I don't get is why they are there. It doesn't seem to be any different than any other blog site, except maybe it look a bit nicer. But that doesn't seem to be enough to explain how so many things I read are on Medium.

Is it discovery? Because I've never browsed medium. I just look on HN, and yet again there's some article hosted on Medium. Or I land on it through some other aggregation site.

I'm not sure how I'd be interested in better discovery, either. There's enough stuff on the web to read, so unless their discovery is amazing (ie fits my interests without me having to spend time searching/configuring) I don't see what the point is.

To me, the uninitiated, it just looks like yet another place to put articles. And that's why it is kinda surprising to read that hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested.

Discovery. If you cross post and get more traffic to your medium post than the version on an official company blog then it makes sense to keep doing it.

This. I posed identical posts on Tumblr and Medium for a few months, and the Medium traffic was always higher. The more people read it, the more traffic it got. If you put quality content on Medium, it's far more likely to be read.

Sorry for what might be a stupid question but I haven't used Medium and last used Tumblr a few years ago: how do you know how many readers you have? Do these platforms offer stats or is it based on Google Analytics or user comments?

It's not hard to believe Medium having more traffic than Tumblr, just wanted to understand how people measure this.

I'm not an insider or anything, but I just searched, 'medium blog stats' and came up with this:

https://medium.com/@Medium/statistics-2971adaa615

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215108608-Stats

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/215793317-Publicat...

> so unless their discovery is amazing

As a recent convert I have to admit that this was one of the reason I switched. It is really nice to open up the app on my phone and just start reading (for me) interesting stuff. Getting started only takes a few minutes to pick a few core interests and thats it.

> Is it discovery? Because I've never browsed medium.

I've used it for some short notes that I want to share with people on Twitter. It's mostly when my reaction to something is too long for Twitter's character limit.

This is a terrible use of medium. In 2017 I'm going to move away to a minimal blog on something like NeoCities, or maybe even something mashed together on Nearly Free Speech.

Reading Medium is not great for me. I'm really interested in stuff around mental illness - treatment, tackling stigma, suicide prevention. But most of Medium is American, and the information is just a bit too foreign to be interesting or useful to me.

Medium is very easy to use. It's ridiculously easy. And it removes the need to think about styling. So it has a little bit in common with "distraction free editors". So that's one reason why people write there.

What bothers me about Medium is that they originally wanted funding to be able to create long-form, well-researched journalism.That is what they asked for on kickstarter, years back.

They got their support, reached their goal, delivered a few stories and then switched to being a blog-software company!?

That is not what I backed and paid for.

Are you sure it's Medium you're talking about, and not Matter[1]? I couldn't find anything about Medium on kickstarter.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/readmatter/matter

Hm, according to wikipedia: "In April 2013, Johnson and Giles announced that Matter had been acquired by Medium, a new publishing platform established by Twitter founder Ev Williams"

From the updates and emails back then I got the impression that medium was built FOR matter, and then becoming it's main product.

Apparently matter still exists too! :)

Kickstarter is like voting. Once you cast the vote, all bets are off on what actually happens. And they already have your money so odds are not good for you.

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