Ask HN: why medium is everywhere now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: why medium is everywhere now?

3 pointsggm8 comments

Can anyone explain the rapid rise of medium to me? What made this semi social web service explode compared to other mechanisms?

Is it good domain name binding?

Is it markdown?

One clap? Twenty? Penecillin?

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Medium launched in 2012. It's almost 6 years old which is not "rapid rise".

They started with a very good editor and a syndication model that is inherently viral (i.e. every post on medium promotes medium itself and other posts on medium). This is much better than most other blog hosts like WordPress.

Tumblr is similar and also very popular but Medium focused on high-quality content and not short posts like Tumblr. They even were publishing their own content for a while.

They also tried a hundred different things, many of which don't exist anymore.

In short: good product, built-in virality and lots of grit and experimentation with different features.

Medium is focused on medium to longform content. However, it is not focused on high quality content but rather the opposite - clickbait. It is sort of a grassroots buzzfeed platform.

A lot of HN content is there

A lot of Medium content is posted to HN without regard to its actual value to the audience. Much of it is posted multiple times; they customize their URLs to defeat dupe checks.

Well as a net noise contributor, I've met the groucho marx test multiple times. But, whining aside, This feels like it devalues both sides of the deal: HN because too many repeats make it stale, and medium (if they're in on it) because its whoring links.

Look, I like the look-and-feel. The style is minimally not obtrustive. I could beleive I could write in it, had i anything to say of merit. It .. sort of .. works?

Its "rapid rise" is about how ubiquitous it's become in the last three months. I didn't get asked about the clap anything like as often before January.

I think you're just being bitten by the availability heuristic here. It's seemed completely ubiquitous to me since around 2014.

Yes, (my) observer bias is real.

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