Medium raises $25 million
recode.net
recode.net
Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content? I find it so strange that these services which are pitched directly at people who consider themselves to be brilliant also become the archive for your stuff. It just seems like a conflict of interest when, yes, what exactly is their game plan?
Both ways are valuable, of course. Just providing the counter argument.
NYT curates much more and so if you manage to get accepted you are more likely to be read.
The same as far as I understand is not true for Medium. I have an account there and I am no Krugman.
My comment was directed at the question of why someone would share copyright of their written work with an external party. One common answer is the distribution channel and pre-packaged audience. In that respect, NYT and Medium provide similar function.
P(story read by audience|written in Medium) > P(story read by audience|written in self-hosted blog)
Lots of Open Letters. :)
I wouldn't mind if they disrupted away the opinion columns and letters to the editor in newspapers, though. Better to fit it all in one place to ignore.
EDIT: the only time I've ever gone to Medium to read anything was when something surfaced on Hacker News. I don't really see it as anything more than another blogging engine.
Sometimes, it can be good for things. Take parody, for instance. My favorite Medium collection is "CSS Perverts"[1], which is basically really silly, fake articles about programming stuff. Sample article: "How Node.js will replace JavaScript."
Because it's on Medium, people are more willing to believe that Jenn is serious, and so she gets confused readers[2], people who are actually quite upset[3], and serious rebuttals[4].
It's one of my favorite things on the internet right now.
1: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal
2: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/cf72b588b1b#ad4c-7315e80e40...
3: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/424683365980069888/p...
California Style Sheets are a standard, meaning there is a group of people at W3Schools who come up with new properties (like border-radius and box-shadow) every year. For some time, they did not know that the Node group at W3Schools was coming up with ways to update the styling of a page without CSS. Recently, both groups finally met and realized the overlap in functionality and therefore opened a spec to deprecate CSS entirely. That spec became HTML5. The rest of the story is present day. More and more developers are using HTML5, but do not realize the redundancy of using CSS.
You comment here. Isn't that basically the same thing? What are comments if not for mini-blog posts sometimes.
Additionally, Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit. (Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways)
Comments are the price some websites pay to encourage higher levels of engagement, and the high level of engagement here on HackerNews makes it a more valuable resource to its readers (more submissions, more voting, and sometimes informed comments from the community) and thus it has a halo effect on YCombinator. Thus the comments in the grand scheme of things are surely a net positive.
Reddit and YouTube are built in part on comment driven engagement even if a large majority of the comments are poor.
Some people do take the time to write well thought out replies.
> Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit.
I'm going to disagree. HN profits GREATLY from your participation.
> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways
Not likely. Comments from an engaged community (no matter how cynical at times) still drives traffic, and that is a powerful in and of itself.
If I wanted to be pedantic I would point out that even if your impression were correct it still wouldn't be ironic.
Although I think the quality of discussion on HN is interesting, it's not that the HN brand is explicitly about the quality of the comments. The writing interface is pretty dissimilar from what Medium offers. To me there there appears to be an obvious conflict: if you're all about attracting brilliant users wouldn't those users also want to retain complete ownership over their content? Isn't that the smart long-term thing to do in a world of quickly changing services?
What's especially fascinating to me is the role that design plays in these services. Medium has clearly spent an exceptional amount of money to create a particular user experience. Without commenting on its quality, it seems that the aesthetic they have chosen has almost become a red flag. Spent all our money on design? Don't worry, we're going to sell you out anyway!
That should come with the disclaimer that I'm trained as an architect. Design is important, but most important is the tool. In so many cases design is just a way to send messages that distract from the actual workings of the tool.
I've been casting about myself for a suitable platform. I've actually mostly settled on reddit as it's got a community, some of whom are interested in the topics I am, good search tools, and a serviceable posting infrastructure. Markdown, Imgur for image links, semi-embeddable images with the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and a Wiki for more structured content.
I've also got a more traditional blogging platform (Dreamwidth).
Since I prefer to operate pseudonymously, self-hosting is not a good fit, though I could do that if I chose. And finding a good mix of platform and tools is tough.
As for layout, I've got enough CSS chops that I can shove the more annoying bits of a site out of the way, at least to my preferences.
But is ev getting rich again off your content a third time? Yes he is a smart man.
Running your own blog and getting readers tend to be harder.
It's not even a good comparison. The NYT is a daily newspaper. The better-written pieces on medium have aspirations closer to what you'd find in The New Yorker or Vice. You have absolutely no precedent for thinking public curation will yield better results than the professionals who work for those institutions. In fact, most of the evidence so far (reddit, digg, etc...) indicates the contrary.
One only needs to look at the front page of reddit or youtube to see what kind of an intellectual world we live in.
Good. The internet needs more top 10 lists.
My startup idea is that we sell chairs, but the chairs are nicer than some other chairs and they say 'chair' on them. Can I get $25 million too?
Like Facebook, and Twitter, and all those other sites that are clearly and obviously different from each other and come on you're trolling aren't you please tell me you're trolling
...though I imagine most investors will keep their money in play this time :-)
Now he has a bunch of other smart people who have some skin in the game. They have motivation to help him succeed - which should encourage them to help him grow and eventually to find an exit of some sort.
He might be a multi-billionaire but that doesn't mean he's going to throw his money around on 6-packs of rolexes like all the other billionaires.
Williams, in an interview earlier this week, cited a few reasons: As Medium scales, taking money from multiple investors is a signal of long-term thinking and diversification to the company’s employees; and the more parties that have a stake in Medium outside of Williams, the more they have a stake in the company’s success.
But that's not the only value there. I guess a lot of people like to post their blogs on Medium which gives a sort professional taste. But I think blog.com and wordpress.com are also very good sites.
I'm just curious about the evaluation from the investors point of view. A service website may not value that much because they don't have a real product. User base may change over night.