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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

Trends like using medium.com as blog replacements are also troublesome. These companies own your content. When they go away, so does your content. When they want to censor you, then can.

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I've noticed that many people abandoned their blogs in favor of Twitter, where they developed a habit to build long threads in form of 1/2-sentence paragraphs. It troubles me, because I think Twitter is not a healthy medium for public discourse.

I believe microblogging is reshaping the way we approach public discussion as a whole. Limited capacity for expression and implicit ability to take everything out of context can lead to frustration and miscommunication.

Similarly Substack. I've been trying out Zotero and notice that even if you take snapshots of Medium or Substack articles and try to later access those snapshots, they'll briefly flash some content on the page and then it disappears. (Bizarrely, the replacement text for Medium pages says 404.)

If you dig through the HTML, the article content is all there, and it could be fixed with changes to Zotero's Medium and Substack translators[1], but that it should even been necessary to do what amounts to a site-specific hack is a problem in itself.

1. https://www.zotero.org/support/translators

try firefix addons singlefile[1]

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

why did medium.com become so popular? I never understood

Is it popular? The only time I ever encounter it is here on HN.

It used to be a very good experience, both for the blogger and the reader. Unfortunately, they took on lots of VC funding (as if building a blogging platform was that difficult) without a clear and ethical path to profit and now have no choice but to be nasty to try and make money.

And, somewhat related, there was period when I think a lot of people assumed, however incorrectly, that content on Medium was somehow differentiated and could be taken more seriously than content on a random individual web site. Anything I ever put on Medium was always mirrored elsewhere, but I did use it for a time--mostly for professional content that my company wanted to link to from newsletters and so forth.

There was a period during which Medium was a signal of quality, probably because it was a niche platform only known in the tech circle and I believe it was invite-only for a while as well.

Now that every marketer, "growth hacker", "entrepreneur" and their dog are on there it's the opposite. Medium is now a signal that some idiot is trying to build credibility in an unrelated field by rehashing basic facts/existing content and peppering it with stock images and "sign up for my newsletter" forms.

I agree that when Medium goes, so does the content.

But so do personal pages and other pages.

I was tasked with dealing with a old webapp based on some old technology. When googling the sheer amount of "here's the answer" with a link that is now dead ... and that same link spread across dozens of sites is very common.

The web is ephemeral by default.

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