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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> but unless the distribution problem is solved

Not sure what you mean. The distribution problem is solved by the internet. Discoverability (probably what you meant) is solved redundantly by Medium, since it is already solved by Google, and by social news websites such as HN and Reddit, etc.

Medium = YouTube for textual content. The only way we "need" it is if we want a feed of algorithmically chosen content based on previous/popular preferences, but that obviously comes with a bunch of problems of its own.

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Unfortunate that the Internet community (writers and readers) are sacrificing so much to the false god of “discoverability.” For a few glorious years, self-hosted decentralized blogs, services and games were a thing. Now everyone is off re-implementing everything that sucked about centralized broadcast media.

Because they recognized that there was some value in the centralization, namely that it makes it far easier for users to find content. Putting your own blog out there into the ether is far, far, far more difficult to drive users to it. And then, if you want to have comments, now you have to invest time and effort into moderation and anti-spam, whereas here Medium takes care of most of that.

>Medium = YouTube for textual content. The only way we "need" it is if we want a feed of algorithmically chosen content based on previous/popular preference

Are you saying this is a bad thing in and of itself? Ok, sometimes I binge on videos needlessly, but to say the distribution/discoverability is already solved by the internet and Google is probably not how most people see it. Being recommended new content to consume based on previous preferences is a huge plus imo.

This is exactly my point. Saying google solves the discoverability problem in this manner is obtuse - it's not the same thing as looking for a specific thing. If you want to make discovering new content that you might like in a decentralized manner easy, then great! I'm sure people will be excited about that. Currently though, medium does that to the first approximation.

Also, social news websites require effort to post on, and often the content that gets upvoted is the lowest common denominator of the interests of the people who currently happen to be staring at the site, rather than each person getting their own set of new content.

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