The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
This was possible long before Medium launched. I recall popular bloggers being a thing years before Medium showed up.
I don't really know why this issue—it's certainly not something I've done consciously. Perhaps it's the continual barrage of popups that makes me unconsciously distasteful of Medium, or the fact that it appears to be monotonous. When I arrive at someone's blog on their personal website, I always click around and explore because the whole site is a personal expression, but reading Medium feels like walking through a faceless, generic office building.
I think about that sometimes and still think it's a better ROI than posting anything on Medium.
So how does he do that? This is obviously a billion dollar skill.
Amateur tooling? Half assed distribution? Unreliable relationship? Constant new ways to annoy readers?
For an incredibly basic blog I get it but even the publishing tools there are so limited I'm perplexed it hasn't grown up.
The bad is that I think Medium hasn't stayed in one place long enough for people to accurately understand it. But I've been working with them from the beginning of this strategy shift two years ago and the basic strategy hasn't changed at all.
I suppose there are publishers and then there are publishers. I have no doubt they're trying to court people like you but it seems like their bigger ploy is to rope in the big publishers into embracing their platform, to abandon traditional digital publishing platforms.
If I'm a basic blogger or tiny digital publisher, Medium can work, though the tools are so archaic and limited I would become frustrated very quickly. If I'm even at medium-sized, the whole thing is a mess of half-measures that now seems singularly focused on annoying readers.
Throwing my content into a network or allowing me to pay to promote my content or whatever really isn't enough of a sell. I can do that anywhere and keep more of the money.
That depends on the network you are thrown into. The company I work for saw a substantial increase in new leads after moving the corporate blog from self-hosting to Medium.
As much as I dislike the platform too, it is hard to argue with money
It's a shame, I found the editing interface pretty convenient (image embedding in particular) and conceptually the Medium-run publications make a ton of sense.
Recently, it's lost a fair amount of that value as they push towards installing their app, etc. It's by no means the worst, but I'm no longer happy to see that a post is punished on medium vs $personal_blog.
If that "failure" still got investor money, then there's not so much "persistence" involved.
Blogger was sold in like 4 years, that's not some incredible tenacity either.
Similar when Twitter started inside of Odeo. Odeo was struggling, Twitter was an interesting Odeo side project with a hundred users including all of the Odeo investors. Ev (with his blogger money), bought back all Odeo assets including Twitter basically out of shame for wasting the investor's time and money. The only pushback at that time was from investors who thought there was no need to make them whole and that they would have been fine if he'd just shut everything down. If Twitter really looked all that promising, then there's no way those investors would have let that happen. But Ev saw some potential and persisted even when other people didn't understand why. I was on the Odeo team so I saw a lot of that first hand.
Medium's a longer case. I shared offices with them a couple times and that's why I push back on this "pet project" or "vanity project" so hard. It's more like his "White Whale" which I suppose does have some vanity in it. But he's as serious about figuring Medium out as he ever was with the previous two successes. I'd actually seen a really convoluted version of Medium that they called Grids and never released. It was so inscrutable, so bad really, that they had to shut it down and work on an unrelated project for a month just to recover some confidence. (That's what it looked like to me at least).
I think because I've been around for so many failures (Odeo, Grids, something called Standy), that I see Ev as someone who's wrong a lot, but consistent in hunting for something that feels big enough. I saw all the Medium pivots in that light: if they are pivoting then he'd finally concluded that that path wasn't big enough.
If you assume Ev wants Medium to be both big and meaningful (that's my assumption), then this looks like a good pivot. It has the potential to be big (the VC hyptothesis would be the Netflix for Content or something like that) and more importantly, it solves the meaningful problem because it changes the incentives for writers so that content marketers get deprecated and quality gets promoted. A lot of Ev's best public statements the last two years are about how corrupted the free content ecosystem is.
That's something I didn't realize until I got inside this partner program. We'd been publishing free articles that now I'm embarrassed by. Maybe those articles had good ideas, but most of them needed a lot more work to really be valuable to the reader (including articles I wrote). But since we weren't getting paid, it didn't make sense to put in any more work than what we had been doing. Now that we have money and a style guide and deep story edits (about three hours of editing per article), I feel like we're much less likely to be wasting a reader's time. (We publish advice, so we can't claim that we succeeded by entertaining the reader).
If we (people on HN) like their 4 comments enough to vote them to the top, then it's up to us.
Same for their "submission history". I could not care less if it's comprised from their own articles on Medium. As long as people liked and voted for the stories to go on the front page, that's enough. If people on HN didn't like and vote for the stories, they'd be lost, like countless other submissions. So there's that.
I would have a problem if antirez, or idlewords, or PG, or whoever posted their own articles either. Why not? There's the upvoting of submissions to tells us whether those are good or not.
I also checked the submissions history of the person you refer to. 30 submissions in 6 years. Hardly clogging the pipes.
Besides, what they share in this post is regarding Medium, so is totally on topic. There's this, too.
What's this putdown for? Jealousy? Moral indignation? I don't really like the tone and the finger pointing.
Your comment seems more like an ad hominem than anything else.
A user is willing to share their first-hand experience with the content-matter of an article.
How is that not both interesting and relevant in a HN context?
https://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/status/11002148450755256...