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Comment by mijustin | Hacker News Reader

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My first question is: "who is this for?"

The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?

Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I couldn't tell from the blog post.

I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product is for.

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It's for the intersection of people a) who want a blog and b) who want a website with a good design.

Medium beat Svbtle to the punch, though.

Medium wants you to have a Twitter account.

Medium expects you have a Twitter account.

Wouldn't most modern writers have a Twitter account anyway? If you're publishing your piece online wouldn't you want everyone to see it?

If you already have an audience, maybe, but if you don't, then it's just an avoidable restriction.

>an avoidable restriction //

How does having an account restrict you, in the context of being a writer wishing to publicise your work?

It restricts Medium to people with Twitter accounts. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone has one.

You can get them for free, using a throwaway email and fake identity if wanted. Why is it preferable to get a Medium account?

Because you'd have to deal with one less party (trust, security, reliability, support).

If you aren't already a Twitter user, it's simpler to have the option of making a Medium account.

If given the choice between two options, ceteris paribus, I'd choose the one without the Twitter account restriction as well.

What happens when Twitter crashes and burns, and now you can't access your blog?

I would bet a small amount of money that Twitter outlasts Medium. And if Medium outlasts Twitter, do you think Medium will just sit by and say "well that sucks that none of our users can access their blogs"?

In that case, think of a 24 hour datacenter outage then.

Unless Twitter gives Medium more information about usera on authentication than I think they do, I don't know how Medium could possible verify the owners of each blog.

If you are stuck behind the great firewall of china, no actually.

Good design is a fleeting, abstract concept that has more to do with correlation than anything else: Correlate something with good content and the design seems good by association. When it becomes common, though, it is ready for displacement.

This is true of virtually every "good design" over the years. At the beginning people almost always thought it was superior in some way.

Apple became the most valuable company in the world by focusing on good design.

Apple grew because they made products people wanted at opportune times, executing brilliantly. Indeed, though, Apple proves the point I was making: They executed well and made products people wanted, so every decision they made goes backwards into justifying itself as good design. Speaking of Dustin Curtis, that the iPhone was 3.5" was held as some holy number of smartphone size (rather than being the size that Apple cemented themselves into back when building a 3.5" LCD was actually fairly expensive). And then 4.0" became the ultimate in design. And, soon enough, larger sizes will become the pinnacle of design.

Were any other company responsible for making the new Mac Pro, it would have been met with devastating reviews. Correlation, however, and people somehow reach to find a way to make a case for why it is actually a good design.

You forget something...

Ever hear of Frog Design?

Frog Design was the main motivation behind Apple hardware design..look up its history its a great read on the true story of Industrial design at Apple

And now they're dropping skew-morphism, which demonstrates the point.

Skeuomorphic or non-skeuomorphic design doesn't make for a good design.

Good design is so much more than whether the header looks like stitched leather with embossed text. It it about how things behave, and how that aligns with what people want and need.

"Good design" is in the eye of the beholder. For example, personally, I find Apple's designs to be a bit contrived, pretentious, and having the feel of trying too hard to be simple. However, a lot of people don't agree. In particular, people who: a) have a lot of disposable income or b) who want to attach themselves to a "sexy" technology brand probably either don't even think about Apple's designs, or else find them attractive or c) both of those.

In other words, they became the most valuable company in the world, even though they have a tiny share of the market in almost every segment they're in other than the mobile handset space, because enough people are willing to pay the "Apple Tax".

Good design isn't the only thing that's made them so valuable. They've also made a lot of very smart strategic decisions to do with their supply chain and finances, which enables them to execute designs that their competitors can't afford to.

and Ghost which is self service and hosted.

Svbtle has been around longer than Medium although you had to apply to use it (or there is a pretty popular wordpress knockoff theme).

I always felt Medium borrowed heavily from Svbtle, which came first. Now, Svbtle brings something different to the table: like Medium, it's simple to use and focused on writing. Unlike Medium, you get to own your identity, use your CNAME, etc...

The thing about Medium though is that it requires you to have a beautiful large image for every post, otherwise it looks terrible. There are a lot of terrible looking Medium blogs with ugly pictures.

> Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?

I've been using Svbtle for a while now, and for me, the killer is this, in order: On my own domain, looks great, and hosted by someone else.

I care that I'm not putting content I care about into a closed platform. I'd never post to Medium.

I'm a backend kind of developer, so knowing how to design something myself is awkward. I could pay someone to do it, but I'd still have to implement it.

While I am a backend developer, the last thing I want to do is deal with ANOTHER project to yak shave and suck up more of my time. Hosting it myself is a no-go.

Apart from what you said, I miss information about pricing, at least I didn't find any.

I assume that this will be a Freemium product and I also think that the "pro" version will have some features that I would sooner or later need, at least that's my experience with other platforms I tested.

One example being Google's App engine, which turned out to be rather expensive compared to competitors and didn't justify that for me. Investing a lot of hours in a platform that you don't end up using is not that satisfying.

I think it's because they are losing popularity thus want to gain some revenue. Nothing wrong with this.

It feels to me that they did build this for a certain type of person. One who likes writing without distractions. One who likes to brainstorm. One who appreciates simplicity.

I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis.

It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products that start out with a small number of people who love it... this could also be appreciated and used by others.

I am not a serious writer, but I hate writing in square spaces ui because its distracting. I might not have been able to articulate this because I'm not a serious writer - But in hind sight I realize that I usually write in word and then paste into squarespace. Svbtle eliminates this process - it makes writing simpler.

So yes. Built for a specific sub set. But with features that everyone can appreciate.

To me that still feels too general: "seasoned and experienced authors" could be a 45 year-old erotica writer who sells books on Amazon, or it could be a 23 year-old tech news blogger who's been posting since age 15.

For example, imagine if the blog post / homepage looked something like this:

"Blogging built for developers"

-"Having trouble building a technical audience?"

-"Want to properly format your posts with syntax highlighting?"

-"Need support for code snippets?"

"Then this platform is for you"

I'll add that the original "selling" point of Svbtle was its "drafts first" approach (that I really appreciate).

There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach.

Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.

Yes, the identity aspect is interesting. Medium seems to be focused on pleasing readers. The whole site is designed to read one article to the next. Often from different authors. This might make reading easier, but might not be best for writers.

Svbtle does have that aspect (it calls itself "a new kind of magazine"), but seems to put a lot of energy into pleasing the writers.

Wait is there custom domain support? If so I'm in! I can't seem to find info anywhere.

I've taken to using Draft for all my writing and then just export the post or whatever to submit it to my blog that's self-hosted on Wordpress.

Using Wordpress to simply serve up my content and manage comments has been working so far. I'm in between being locked in and lazy so I haven't bothered moving to something like Ghost.

It might be for me. It may not be.

It is _definitely_ for me to try and find out.

I've been wanting a very simple, minimalistic platform to blog. I _thought_ the reason I've abandoned my wordpress blog is because I dislike how complex and advanced it is. I want the simplest thing ever.

Svbtle looked like that thing since it first came out. I'll find out soon enough.

I just tried to test out its technical aspects, here's what I found:

> I like it, but noticing a few problems so far. Can’t tab while writing markdown. No live preview for markdown (may or may not be a problem). No confirmation of saving changes if you close the tab/navigate away. Drag and drop to upload images works okay, but Cmd+V doesn’t.

> Fenced blocks don’t do syntax highlighting (for Go at least).

> Can’t see invisible whitespace.

> The rest is good.

> Also, I don't see a way to export your content, nor a way to delete your account.

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