Is Svbtle Dead?

What I remember about Svbtle may well be completely false, but these are the impressions I got from it at the time: it's an exclusive club for bloggers who see themselves as elite, enough so for that perception to get in the way of perceiving the actual content. I didn't even know you could sign up for it as a mere mortal without being invited, so the marketing message was quite strong.

It's not that Medium is great either. Those obnoxious gigantic pictures on top, serving a page that should be pretty simple but somehow manages to suck up a lot of CPU/GPU (enough to make my Macbook switch graphics cards), and annoyingly you can't drag and drop URLs into a Medium page which I do a lot to recycle tabs.

In the end it comes down to perception. Both services showed up too many times on HN initially, often for content that didn't seem very worthwhile. It's par for the course, as far as blogging is concerned though. But only Svbtle managed to actually convey a strong negative bias upon an article before I even open it.

My sense is that the business plan of:

* 1-2 good blogs ->

* Snazzy public interface ->

* Invite only blog network ->

* Status competition for invite ->

* User-generated content magazine

was clever, but didn't pan out, and when the project pivoted to being a Medium alternative, it got crushed; svbtle : medium :: posterous : tumblr.

(I could be wrong about all this and have no inside insight into Svbtle).

Well, one platform has a slightly hard to type URL, and the other has https://medium.com/@presidentobama - I think the winner is fairly plain to see.

That said, the fact that the US president has fewer than three thousand followers suggests Medium is quite a few orders of magnitude behind Twitter, Facebook, etc in terms of popularity, suggesting to me either a writing platform is never going to have the same sort of mass appeal or that there's still space for a big winner in that sector.

I'm in the process of migrating from svbtle to Ghost (https://ghost.org/), which is free if you can install it on your own web server.

I stuck with svbtle for a while because of the free early membership and custom domains. I still think the platform is good for editing – at its core it was a super simple way to publish posts in markdown (I was using jekyll before), but I was also turned off by kudos and the network. I would prefer to not use Medium for similar reasons.

Medium is pretty awful for code so I still use svbtle. Most of my page views doesn't come from the Svbtle site, but from direct links, Twitter, etc.