On Medium
tbray.org
tbray.org
Just putting that out there. Make of it what you will.
By the way, I once had an article get 10k views after a share on HN, then had that same article get ~120,000 after a republish on Lifehacker. The morale of all this? I don't know. Sure, it feels kind of good knowing that many people are reading your content, but the bigger picture is what are you doing with the viewership. I'm not so gung-ho on views anymore because views don't pay my rent, money does. Money is the ultimate metric.
Sure, viewership is nice, but only because of what it leads to: money and conversations. Medium is an okay place for conversations, and definitely is not a place to make money. I've yet to see an affiliate link or someone telling me to buy their book on the site. If anything, it's a place used to build your reputation -- it's like a nice outfit that makes you temporarily look good. I saw temporarily because it's a new site and has somewhat of a gated community feel to it.
I like reading. I like writing. But in the end, it comes down to making money.
yeah, I'm all over the place with this comment. It's Sunday night and I am a single guy that lives alone -- I got a lot on my mind!
The underlying value proposition by any sort of blogging engine (Posthaven, Medium, Svbtle, et al) is limited to a network, ease of use, and a good design. For most tech people, ease of use is a non-factor (you can extol 'distractions-free design', but you can put vim or Byword in full-screen mode) -- and I think the way people are reading is shifting away from individual sites and towards external services to the extent that design isn't a huge factor (everything looks the same in NewsBlur or Instapaper.)
This leaves the network/audience, which is a much more interesting concept: Svbtle is clearly going for a more curated approach (though the value of that curation is arguable), whereas Medium's trying a bunch of stuff at once (collections, editor's feed, etc.)
I can't help thinking that the winner of this nouveau publishing spectrum isn't going to be a hosting service, but a linking service. You might never get Patrick McKenzie to blog on your platform (because why would he?) but you can always link to his material.
I dislike Medium consciously, but not for the reasons you present. I dislike the site because I don't think its prominence here in HN was progressive, but rather very sudden (one month it was nothing special, and the next one it was always on the main page).
That tells me that either Medium is the website to end all websites, a site so popular that it took news sites by storm and whose news cannot be ignored, or that their marketing team is artificially pushing their content in HN to gain views. The fact that they have a main page article discussing how awesome the site is doesn't help either.
Of course, I have no evidence whatsoever of this, but that's how it feels for me. So as suggested by a fellow HN commenter, I just ignore everything from them.
I have no idea how HN's ranking works, but I wish there was some sort of diminishing return bias against a given top-level URL.
The problem I have with Medium is the posts typically lack depth, they are more "sound bites" than articles.
Some good, some, eh, but propensity of solo-source gets old.
EDIT: I should have said, this is only the last 100 posts!
EDIT: increasing the number gives a bad request error. :-/
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request
File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 527, in http_error_default raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)http://i.imgur.com/WIJ4cT9.png
...wow, 1,000 submissions for a less-than 1 year startup is crazy.
NB: If you want to get more than 100, you need to use the start=0,100,200... parameter which works up to a maximum of 900 with limit=100.
I found it makes things simple and beautiful for me.
I think it's more due to a 3 second loading delay when you are forced to stare at a blank page with no activity indicators.
It's possible you're right, but I would personally guess in the other direction. I think Tumblr is the most successful example of an approach that focuses on the internal ecosystem more (posts can certainly contain links, but linking outward isn't the focus). Tumblr tends to cover smaller things (1/2-paragraph posts, photos), but that model of an internally focused platform seems like it has room to expand. Whereas the link-based model already competes with a million existing ways to organize links, with varying mixes of voting, curation, and algorithms: Reddit, HN, Twitter, Slashdot, Prismatic, BoingBoing, etc.
If you're still looking for simplicity (minus the network) you might give http://postagon.com a shot.
That would be quite the coincidence.
---
I think the next best blogging platform will be one that does what WordPress used to do. I have my eyes on Ghost, which claims to be a minimalistic blogging system that you have full control over.
It's interesting you mention a linking service. I am actually working somewhat of a linking/sharing/status service that will put salience on the conversation instead of the publishing.
I came here to change the world. And I feel like all I see are nerds blowing each other about The next minimalist uber for twitter.
Genuinely interested: what do you mean by "here"? HN, programming, life?
Another problem is that there are not many properly educated people to establish and run labs like this thanks to our education system falling apart. But you won't hear anybody talking about that. Things will just get worse and worse.
Some questions I have:
My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium?
Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ?
Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you?
I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same?
If distraction free writing were the USP, I’d recommend my co-founder’s iaWriter [2]. It does not publish directly and that’s a big negative. Isn’t this good enough?
If you care about that kind of thing and are good at it you probably shouldn't. Medium maintains its own credible brand, which is a godsend for someone who just wants to write, and not worry about design, branding or personality.
>Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ?
Of course they can't ensure anything. But you have xx potential readers (in a more immediate fashion than the way you have 1 million potential readers for anything you put on the web). For some people that helps.
>Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you?
I have my own copies of everything I write. If medium brings in changes a year from now and I have to move somewhere different, it's no big. That it might go away at some time is no reason not to enjoy its benefits now.
>I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same?
Nope. I want to write, and to be read, but I'd be happy to do so anonymously. It's not something I do to build up my personal brand or anything like that.
Is it one of those things that people get wrong to sound more educated, like overusing "whom"?
Some discussion here:
http://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm
including
"I am yet to..." and "I have yet to..." express exactly the same sentiment. The use of "am" in this context is a throwback to the now obsolete use of "to be" as the auxiliary verb in the present perfect conjugation of certain verbs. Eg, I am come. Languages such as German and French continue to use both "to be" and "to have" as auxiliary verbs. "I have come" translates in German to "ich bin gekommen" and in French to "je suis venu".
Now I'm very depressed with Medium. It's filling with trite, immature rants that keep polluting my otherwise quality feed of opinions. I no longer click the links and definitely won't be chancing upon the rare quality material.
The same thing happened to Quora, sadly.
Though it has similarities, the big difference is that our site is not a place where you'd actually type out your article. Instead, if it's housed on your site already, you can choose to cross publish to our audience of tech enthusiasts.
If you haven't heard of it, give it a look.
I'm not sure how you can track links via javascript, but I do know how to make a bit.ly link.
If you want something simpler, just paste this into your page: https://gist.github.com/5899046
I think Medium is great. As is mentioned in the article, the editor is fantastic in its minimalism.
A key difference between myself and the author of this post is that I have no interest in creating or maintaining a blog (proper) of my own; I just want to write. I've wanted to write for a while, too, but the roadblock of setting something up and getting it looking decent prevented me from moving forward. For a while I thought Tumblr had been what I was looking for but text-based posts become utterly lost in the stream of naked ladies and pixel art (or is that just me?).
Stats wise, it's interesting to hear what an "Editor's Choice" pick on Medium can result in. I've got several posts on Medium that have 100 or fewer reads and they were posted to correct "collections". Which shows that Medium is not the place to build up an audience that you don't already have. Lacking the ability to "follow" an author – on-site at least, RSS is a non-advertised option – shows that Medium is more oriented towards "real time" (news cycle) longform than being a platform for authorship (for everyone besides maybe @ev and a handful of SV folks that always get featured).
My most popular article was posted about two weeks ago and has had around 2,000 reads. This isn't due to any Medium feature, though - just good old retweets and viral spreading. It was a satire listicle - prime viral material. Probably not what Medium was made for. Getting all of those reads, though, made me wonder exactly where all the traffic was coming from. I wish Medium had more in-depth analytics for this.
So unless you are a well known blogger/journalist, don't expect a check.
There's no sense of identity. How often do people read articles by the same author on Medium? How often do people remember who wrote an article?