A Platform and Blogging Tool, Medium Charms Writers | Hacker News Reader

A Platform and Blogging Tool, Medium Charms Writers

nytimes.com

45 pointsr0h1n15 comments

I have two primary issues with Medium:

1) It's essentially halo-effect-as-a-service. People assume that since it's on Medium, it'll be a high-quality of work, but more often than not, Medium posts lie on the pseudo part of pseudointellectual. Which leads into...

2) Complete lack of any personal branding. Not even a username in the URL. Yes, it keeps things simple, but it dramatically reduces the personal benefit from posting on Medium. Even worse, in line with the previous bullet point, the lack of branding leads writers to spam links to their Twitters with the cliche "if you liked this, follow me on Twitter!" And recently, I've seen people say in bolded text "PLEASE CLICK RECOMMEND." It's jarring.

I agree, especially with #2. In fact, I explain why I think Medium is actually a magazine, not a service (like Svbtle, Blogger, Wordpress.com) in this post: http://thetypist.com/329/medium-magazine/

"One shouldn’t compare Medium with services like WordPress.com because, while successfully touted as such, Medium isn’t a service. It’s a magazine. The only “service” in Medium is the service that (mostly) unpaid writers do in return for the potential exposure. Authors that have their own sub-page with a picture and a list of their articles is something online magazines have implemented back in the nineties."

It's a distinction not enough aspiring writers are paying attention to.

It's a content factory - the term 'playbor' seems appropriate. Just glossy and pretty enough that it distracts people from the fact they're working for this centralized for-profit entity for free.

I blog quite a bit on a bunch of different platforms, but I never understood the utility of medium.

I could understand it as a secondary marketing tool in addition to a personal blog in order to reach a wider audience, but I think anything you post primarily on a service that you don't control yourself, you're making a big assumption that they won't drastically change the working relationship somewhere down the road.

It is certainly true that Medium isn't for all use cases; and I don't think they have claimed otherwise. For more serious bloggers or writers, it is more of a marketing tool. And they place no value in comments, which looks more like a deliberate design decision.

However, I like Medium because they have broken new ground in UI design (for writing especially). It was the app that convinced me that you don't really need boxed HTML form inputs anywhere; it is more natural to edit in place with "contenteditable". This holds true not just for "blog writing" on Medium, but for profile edits and everywhere else. (I am aware of other advantages of using forms, but still.)

Now it might seem like just getting rid of textareas. But that's not it; this is a bigger shift in how we design editing.

That one can get away from the default browser style, and edit in the same style as the site itself, is nothing short of a revelation to me—back in 2004, when I encountered this pattern for the first time on the website of Mediamatic, a small Amsterdam based arts institution.

Ever since I have been wondering why inline-editing is not seen more often. The separation between ‘front’ and ‘back-end’ seems unnecessary. ContentEditable came along to make things easier—yet it wasn’t really picked up.

My hypothesis is that programmers are not really interested in innovating for WYSIWYG interfaces, our culture being steeped in reverence for Unix’ plain text. The age-old WYSIWYG editors like CKEditors are tolerated but not loved.

On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of text-based editing solutions like Markdown-widgets and static-site generators.

The tide does seem to be changing a bit, with such recent announcements as the Guardian’s Scribe project showing more interest in rich text editing.

<plug> I wrote in more detail on this on my blog: http://i.liketightpants.net/and/hackers-culture-and-the-fear... </plug>

Using contenteditable was an important decision for us at populr.me. We've put a lot of work into making the pages you create look the same in the editor as they do when published. Definitely difficult at times, but it is totally worth it.

Only usable for entries in English, as title and subtitle fields uses font with no non-English characters. There are bugs and then there are bugs that render service unusable for most part of world.

I dislike the way comments are handled on Medium. Why can't they just appear at the bottom like every other site out there?

Also, it's tedious to have to open up every little mini comment thread. I just want to use my wheel mouse to scroll through the comments.

Some good articles come from Medium every now and then, and they would benefit from some discussion around them. But I feel like the way the comments are handled stops people from commenting. People just aren't used to it because no other major sites use comments like that, and there's been very little effort on Medium's part to let new people know that comments on the site work like that. And I don't think Medium is big enough to change people's behavior on this.

When I come across an article on a website, after reading it, I'll dig around the bottom to read the comments. When I open a link on HN or Reddit, I also open the comment thread for that article link so I can read comments from people on HN/Reddit about that link. Depending on the site I'm on I can expect varying levels of useless comments, but almost all the time you can find a decent comment or two that provides an informed opinion on the piece you just read.

>> "I dislike the way comments are handled on Medium. Why can't they just appear at the bottom like every other site out there?"

I prefer it. If it don't want to look at them they are hidden. If I read a paragraph and am interested in what other people think I can see the comments directly referencing it. I think it also reduces stupid comments. If it looks like you a referencing something I feel like you'll make a more relevant comment.

I gave Medium a spin the other day, it was buggy, crashed a lot and forgot what I had written after it recovered. I am sure I encountered it on a bad day, but I didn't find the writing experience particularly amazing and the lack of personal branding means that it is something that I won't bother with again.

I also think the lack of mobile editing support is a bad strategy (at time of sign-up this was so). I get that people writing articles on Mobile may have the odd "sprelling" error and typo problem but often blog posts come to me on mobile and if I don't get the meat down while on my mobile I just won't write the thing (even if I publish it on my laptop/desktop... I want to be able to create a draft on mobile).

It's one thing to charm writers. But what about charming readers, too?

As a reader I am not charmed.

I find it all too similar and slick. It is "designed" to within an inch of its life. The text and pictures don't seemed anchored to anything and just seem to float there on the page. This deprives them of any weight. It makes everything feel pompous or grandiose.

I agree with a lot of what is said here:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/...

I also find the "Reading time" a little infantilising.

I find it a great site to read specifically because of the design. No clutter, just the text I want to read. The text is clear and the site works nicely on any screen size.

As for the 'reading time' - that's one of my favourite things on the site. I can quickly look at a post and decide whether I have time to read it now I whether I should bookmark it for later.

While I do like what I can read on Medium, I do not want to login via Twitter or FB to write on my own.

I also would prefer to learn how a platform plans to make money before I use it, does that anyone know here by any chance?

Silvrback is better IMHO. Freedom to brand, highly customizable, and it's very streamlined: http://silvrback.com

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