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(Disclosure: I'm an advisor.) Some of this is selection bias, since the most popular blogging platforms (depending on how one defines it) could be Tumblr or Wo
by anildash 11y ago
(Disclosure: I'm an advisor.)
Some of this is selection bias, since the most popular blogging platforms (depending on how one defines it) could be Tumblr or WordPress. But within the community you mention, Medium has a few traits that earned its place as the forum for these posts.
First, there is distribution built into the platform. Recommendations can get a piece in front of a lot more readers, especially when a piece gets promoted in an email or through notifications in the app.
Next, there's the writing experience. I've used pretty much every major English language blogging platform and Medium has the simplest, smoothest writing experience, in part because they remove so many design and formatting options, while still leaving the ones most people want.
The final key reason is the one that geeks here will probably find most annoying, and that is what Medium signifies in culture. It's come to represent a certain kind of writing that, when good, is quite thoughtful, but when self-serving (as were many early, high-visibility Medium pieces), can be insufferable. But platforms come to signify meaning; marketers write thinkpieces on LinkedIn, fanfic writers gravitate to Wattpad, and people with illicit data dumps find their way to Pastebin. There's no reason any of these sites couldn't host any piece of writing, but each community is a place that represents something.
I've been blogging for almost 17 years, and being busy is the only thing that's really kept me from moving my blog to Medium. I understand others have legitimate qualms about using hosted services, but given their APIs, I'm not worried about that. And a tool that's robust enough to host the White House's transcript of the State of the Union will definitely handle my dinky blog.
- idlewords 11y agoMy qualm with Medium isn't the idea of a hosted service, or the bloat, or even the annoying preciousness you allude to, but the degree of reader surveillance baked into the site. It pings back your exact scroll position in the document very frequently, and the behavior is neither advertised or (last time I checked) something you can disable. I'm kind of surprised you're a Medium advisor given that you are not the biggest fan of surveillance culture yourself.
- muglug 11y agoSure, tracking how far down the page you read is a form of surveillance, but it's an incredibly anodyne one. It's possible to be upset about the government reading all your emails, and still find inoffensive a private company tracking (via an SSL-encrypted tunnel) how users interact with content they serve.
- ehnto 11y agoIt's interesting you pointed out the scroll position in particular. Of all the things the site likely tracks, the scroll position is probably the least malicious, however it is the most present. It has a real time 'we are watching you right now' feel to it which is possibly why it irked you more than the fact that they probably just logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout. I imagine they use the scroll data to determine abandonment of the article, which is very valuable to marketers and writers. I wouldn't be surprised if the scroll data and other usage metrics are part of Medium's monetization strategy.
- benologist 11y agoThey tell you how many viewers read your post in the post analytics.
- muglug 11y agoScroll data is also great for gauging how much time the user is actually reading vs just has a webpage open. I imagine they could feed that data into recommendation algorithms with the aim of increasing average time on site.
- soared 11y ago> logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout I've got some bad news for you friend, all of that is tracked by every site that uses google analytics. Medium post [1] about abandonment: 7 minutes is optimal. They have plenty of other posts about writing good content based on their user metrics. 1: https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74b9f41509b#.rh8rrxd3h https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74...
- bootload 11y ago" I've used pretty much every major English language blogging platform and Medium has the simplest, smoothest writing experience, in part because they remove so many design and formatting options, while still leaving the ones most people want." "I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature." [0] But does it have to be so weighty? cf: "The Website Obesity Crisis" discussion of 4 days ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445