4 ms·

Ev Williams on Medium’s future, his new venture fund, and listening to his gut

30 points by cryptoz 11y ago

jseliger 11y ago
I find Medium interesting because in most respects it doesn't feel any different from Wordpress to me. I write a blog on Wordpress.com and a couple years ago I got an email from Medium inviting me to write on it. I ignored the email because I figured, "One platform, another platform... it doesn't matter much." Plus, on Wordpress I can still go self-hosted if I want or need to. Yet despite my initial reaction, it seems like Medium is succeeding. I can't entirely figure out why. In the interview Williams notes, "I started Medium with the intention that there’s a better way to support quality ideas, thinking, stories we don’t yet have on the internet." In important ways he's obviously right and I'm obviously wrong, but I still don't get the advantage of Medium over Wordpress or similar alternatives.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Medium lets you make an account, write a post in a slick editor, in publish that post in a visually pleasing format in under 5 minutes Pla writing time. I kinda view Medium like Apple/iPhone. Yes you have less control than on other platforms (Android, WordPress). But you get some that's great for 95% of users and thaw good enough. I never thought Medium would succeed as being a mechanism for content discovery. That appears to have been a mistake. One of their key advantages is putting eyeballs on writings due to their social reach.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Strip a user of choices. What font should I use? What size should it be? How should I format pull quotes? etc. Medium answers all of those questions. You get what they offer - and it's overall pleasing enough to most people. The typography is easy to read, the UX is decent enough for a layman to pick it up, etc. A few articles have popped on HN regarding this paradox of choice, Apple utilizing it, etc. I'd say Medium is popular because people can worry about writing and don't need to fret any other details.
- andyfleming 11y ago
  It really puts the focus on the content, the reading experience, and the writing experience. I can read an article without any distraction or judgement based on your wordpress themes or plugins. That's a great thing for me as a reader (and for writers who want to be judged fairly by their actual content). As a writer, I'm forced into certain constraints that make me to focus on the content, but I'm also given an elegant writing interface. *It doesn't directly let you use it for business, which is something you have to weigh when choosing to write there.
- cenal 11y ago
  The big difference is in how Medium hosts it's content versus how Wordpress.com hosts content. With Wordpress.com users get a subdomain and all the search engines treat that subdomain as a totally new domain. With Medium you post an article and it's hosted on the TLD Medium.com followed by the user and an article name. This is an important distinction between the platforms since sites and users treat Medium.com with an increased level of importance. My startup SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT http://www.joinjune.com http://www.joinjune.com has been using Medium posts with incredible results. We have had about 300k views on the content in the last few weeks. We posted the same content to our blog at first http://blog.joinjune.com http://blog.joinjune.com and barely had any traffic at all. Granted, our blog is really ugly (Thanks to Hubspot's unnecessarily complex template system) but also in part due to the fact that sites like Hacker News treat Medium more fairly and people feel comfortable sharing articles on there. We have even had of our articles reblogged by the New York Observer, MatterMark and translated into foreign languages because it was so successful on Medium: https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-bad-tech-hires-630d539b2e1d https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-bad-t... I'm a fan of Medium. I tell everyone to use it instead of their own blog based on our successes with it.
  - jkarneges 11y ago
    > users treat Medium.com with an increased level of importance. I've heard this before. Where does the importance come from? Is there some kind of quality control in place about who is able to sign up for a Medium account or post content?
    - cenal 11y ago
      I believe they moderate it at some capacity and remove abusive posts/accounts. They authenticate with Facebook and Twitter accounts which are more difficult to generate than a typical account. Especially Facebook. That probably helps them build trust.
  - chambo622 11y ago
    Medium also lets users bring their own custom domains - for example, https://500ish.com https://500ish.com.
- volaski 11y ago
  Medium is a wrapper layer around Twitter social graph, for people who want to rant or self-promote more (because 140 characters isn't enough for a rant or self-promotion disguised as content). When you sign up for Medium, you login with Twitter account. Then you automatically get posts from all the people you follow on Twitter who writes post on Medium. This means if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you instantly have a lot of following on Medium to begin with. All these other comments about how "beautiful" it is, or how "it gets out of the way", etc. are nothing more than just side benefits, they are not the reason why it's getting traction. Same as how Meerkat got immediate traction by implementing twitter login while its previous products with basically the same technology never got any traction.
pcunite 11y ago
Does medium want to be the facebook of text?
- temuze 11y ago
  What does "Facebook of X" even mean? "X for close friends"? In any case, I see Medium as long-form Twitter. Follow who you want to follow (even if you don't know them), respond and have discussions. Make it super clean and put the content first. I think Medium:Tumblr as Facebook:MySpace. Less customization, cleaner, more about content.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
Speaking of Medium and publishing platforms, who wants to see a HN blogging feature?
cagenut 11y ago
There’s tons published every day. From nonprofits, to brands, lots of big brands, small brands, individuals obviously. Whenever I see media execs talking about 'brands' I like to s/brands/companies/ in my head. You could s/brands/corporations/ if that were more your thing.
- volaski 11y ago
  could you put it in a sentence a clueless earthling like myself can understand?
- barkingcat 11y ago
  Whenever I see the s// syntax my brain dies a little bit. Please use regular English, unless you are actually referring to a matter of coding. I know it's a shorthand, but nobody really cares about saving the words "instead of" and it's really hard to read when inlined into an English sentence. If you are coding regexps, go ahead by all means but please do not embed it in English.

30 points by cryptoz 11y ago

I find Medium interesting because in most respects it doesn't feel any different from Wordpress to me. I write a blog on Wordpress.com and a couple years ago I got an email from Medium inviting me to write on it. I ignored the email because I figured, "One platform, another platform... it doesn't matter much." Plus, on Wordpress I can still go self-hosted if I want or need to. Yet despite my initial reaction, it seems like Medium is succeeding. I can't entirely figure out why. In the interview Williams notes, "I started Medium with the intention that there’s a better way to support quality ideas, thinking, stories we don’t yet have on the internet." In important ways he's obviously right and I'm obviously wrong, but I still don't get the advantage of Medium over Wordpress or similar alternatives.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
Medium lets you make an account, write a post in a slick editor, in publish that post in a visually pleasing format in under 5 minutes Pla writing time. I kinda view Medium like Apple/iPhone. Yes you have less control than on other platforms (Android, WordPress). But you get some that's great for 95% of users and thaw good enough. I never thought Medium would succeed as being a mechanism for content discovery. That appears to have been a mistake. One of their key advantages is putting eyeballs on writings due to their social reach.
Nadya 11y ago
Strip a user of choices. What font should I use? What size should it be? How should I format pull quotes? etc. Medium answers all of those questions. You get what they offer - and it's overall pleasing enough to most people. The typography is easy to read, the UX is decent enough for a layman to pick it up, etc. A few articles have popped on HN regarding this paradox of choice, Apple utilizing it, etc. I'd say Medium is popular because people can worry about writing and don't need to fret any other details.
andyfleming 11y ago
It really puts the focus on the content, the reading experience, and the writing experience. I can read an article without any distraction or judgement based on your wordpress themes or plugins. That's a great thing for me as a reader (and for writers who want to be judged fairly by their actual content). As a writer, I'm forced into certain constraints that make me to focus on the content, but I'm also given an elegant writing interface. *It doesn't directly let you use it for business, which is something you have to weigh when choosing to write there.
cenal 11y ago
The big difference is in how Medium hosts it's content versus how Wordpress.com hosts content. With Wordpress.com users get a subdomain and all the search engines treat that subdomain as a totally new domain. With Medium you post an article and it's hosted on the TLD Medium.com followed by the user and an article name. This is an important distinction between the platforms since sites and users treat Medium.com with an increased level of importance. My startup SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT http://www.joinjune.com http://www.joinjune.com has been using Medium posts with incredible results. We have had about 300k views on the content in the last few weeks. We posted the same content to our blog at first http://blog.joinjune.com http://blog.joinjune.com and barely had any traffic at all. Granted, our blog is really ugly (Thanks to Hubspot's unnecessarily complex template system) but also in part due to the fact that sites like Hacker News treat Medium more fairly and people feel comfortable sharing articles on there. We have even had of our articles reblogged by the New York Observer, MatterMark and translated into foreign languages because it was so successful on Medium: https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-bad-tech-hires-630d539b2e1d https://medium.com/@ayasin/the-one-method-to-eliminate-bad-t... I'm a fan of Medium. I tell everyone to use it instead of their own blog based on our successes with it.
- jkarneges 11y ago
  > users treat Medium.com with an increased level of importance. I've heard this before. Where does the importance come from? Is there some kind of quality control in place about who is able to sign up for a Medium account or post content?
  - cenal 11y ago
    I believe they moderate it at some capacity and remove abusive posts/accounts. They authenticate with Facebook and Twitter accounts which are more difficult to generate than a typical account. Especially Facebook. That probably helps them build trust.
- chambo622 11y ago
  Medium also lets users bring their own custom domains - for example, https://500ish.com https://500ish.com.
volaski 11y ago
Medium is a wrapper layer around Twitter social graph, for people who want to rant or self-promote more (because 140 characters isn't enough for a rant or self-promotion disguised as content). When you sign up for Medium, you login with Twitter account. Then you automatically get posts from all the people you follow on Twitter who writes post on Medium. This means if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you instantly have a lot of following on Medium to begin with. All these other comments about how "beautiful" it is, or how "it gets out of the way", etc. are nothing more than just side benefits, they are not the reason why it's getting traction. Same as how Meerkat got immediate traction by implementing twitter login while its previous products with basically the same technology never got any traction.

pcunite 11y ago

Does medium want to be the facebook of text?

temuze 11y ago
What does "Facebook of X" even mean? "X for close friends"? In any case, I see Medium as long-form Twitter. Follow who you want to follow (even if you don't know them), respond and have discussions. Make it super clean and put the content first. I think Medium:Tumblr as Facebook:MySpace. Less customization, cleaner, more about content.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

Speaking of Medium and publishing platforms, who wants to see a HN blogging feature?

cagenut 11y ago

There’s tons published every day. From nonprofits, to brands, lots of big brands, small brands, individuals obviously. Whenever I see media execs talking about 'brands' I like to s/brands/companies/ in my head. You could s/brands/corporations/ if that were more your thing.

volaski 11y ago
could you put it in a sentence a clueless earthling like myself can understand?
barkingcat 11y ago
Whenever I see the s// syntax my brain dies a little bit. Please use regular English, unless you are actually referring to a matter of coding. I know it's a shorthand, but nobody really cares about saving the words "instead of" and it's really hard to read when inlined into an English sentence. If you are coding regexps, go ahead by all means but please do not embed it in English.