5 ms·

He never seems to identify anything actually wrong with Medium except that it's popular already. People might be disinclined to write anything critical of Medi

He never seems to identify anything actually wrong with Medium except that it's popular already. People might be disinclined to write anything critical of Medium on Medium itself? Weak sauce. It comes across as a hipster-ish "I was blogging before it was cool" whine, or maybe somebody from Medium stole his girlfriend. What it's not is convincing. I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.

mrkipling 11y ago
I was actually going to say much the same, even > I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.
Analemma_ 11y ago
And another thing: is Medium really that popular? I mean, inside the tech bubble I know it is, but I feel like this might be another case of us having a warped view of the world (like how, outside "tech people" I still have yet to encounter somebody who has heard of Slack). To the general public Medium is just another thing alongside Tumblr and WordPress and Squarespace; I really don't think it's in imminent danger of taking over the web as a monoculture.
- siquick 11y ago
  I don't know anyone apart from myself who has ever heard of it. They may have visited it but its pretty common these days to visit sites from following a Facebook posted link and never take notice of the actual site name.
  - derefr 11y ago
    I would hazard that that's half the point. Medium, to the writer, is a centralized blogging platform, like WordPress or Tumblr—but it's an extremely white-labelled one, where there's not much to indicate to the casual reader that an article is "on Medium" rather than just existing out on a "real" blog somewhere. I think people prefer Medium mostly for that reader experience. With that in mind, there's a much more Hacker-ly way to get the same reader experience—namely, using one of the many services that provide a "blog-post format gateway" for Github Gists: • http://www.roughdraft.io/ http://www.roughdraft.io/ • http://gist.io/3135754 http://gist.io/3135754 • http://bl.ocks.org/ http://bl.ocks.org/ Etc.
    - lelandbatey 11y ago
      I don't find Medium to be particularly white label, it seems very overt in it's branding. Loading an article off their front page on my phone, this is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png What's interesting is that I remember back when I first looked at Medium, it seemed more whitelabel than that screenshot. But I guess that's the point of the original authors post. Medium is a for profit company, and they're going to change the platform over time to try to make money. That may involve changes you don't like, but are unable to act on since Medium has all your content.
      - derefr 11y ago
        You're right, that's a more branded experience than I remember as well. In fact, it's worse on desktop as well: they have a bottom-bar now. I definitely had a cached thought that Medium was something I could sign up for if I wanted a fancy white-labelled pastebin, but I guess that's changed.
jerf 11y ago
I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind? My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years? The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem. [1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?
- tejaswiy 11y ago
  To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam. Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away? As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
  - pluma 11y ago
    > What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away? Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this? You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.
CamperBob2 11y ago
Agreed, I kept waiting for him to come to the point but it never seemed to happen. A good rant should be like a well-optimized piece of code, and not waste a lot of the reader's mental CPU cycles.
shockzzz 11y ago
He's arguing that Medium owns the distribution rights to your content. Which... if I were to be partial to him, I'd say Medium can monopolize the public's attention as to where we read content. Like Amazon and Books, PornHub and Adult Videos, probably others. It's possible that if Medium goes under, it does everything it possibly could to prevent people from downloading their content. Not saying that I agree with him. At the end of the day, Medium says the writers own their content. I feel ok with them, though I can empathize with OP, given the amount of shitty things BigCorp companies have done in the past. https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e0f https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
- pluma 11y ago
  > PornHub and Adult Videos Did all the other ones die or was PornHub just better at maintaining mainstream media attention? If I recall correctly there were at least three other equally sized sites along the time I first heard of it.
savanaly 11y ago
>I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before. Me too. His explanation of why Medium is thought to be good (before he goes on to explain why he thinks it's actually bad) was very convincing! >Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often.
gballard 11y ago
You can definitely take issue with his cantankerous and opinionated views on open access to information; but Dave Winer as "hipster-ish"?! That made me spit-take coffee all over my keyboard...
xlm1717 11y ago
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think a big part of why I don't like Medium either is because it's popular. Yes, it's going to sound hipster-ish to say the posts started out interesting, but now whenever I see a link to a post on Medium I expect it to be someone complaining about someone or something, and most of the time that's what it is.
xlm1717 11y ago
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think a big part of why I don't like Medium either is because it's popular. Yes, it's going to sound hipster-ish to say the posts started out interesting, but now whenever I see a link to a post on Medium I expect it to be someone complaining about someone or something, and most of the time that's what it is.
maus42 11y ago
I think he has at least one point: >See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.
blakesterz 11y ago
>> Medium is a startup, a well-funded one for sure, but they could easily pivot and leave all the stories poorly served, or not served at all. I think his most important point is right there, and that's a pretty good one.

mrkipling 11y ago

I was actually going to say much the same, even > I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.

Analemma_ 11y ago

And another thing: is Medium really that popular? I mean, inside the tech bubble I know it is, but I feel like this might be another case of us having a warped view of the world (like how, outside "tech people" I still have yet to encounter somebody who has heard of Slack). To the general public Medium is just another thing alongside Tumblr and WordPress and Squarespace; I really don't think it's in imminent danger of taking over the web as a monoculture.

siquick 11y ago
I don't know anyone apart from myself who has ever heard of it. They may have visited it but its pretty common these days to visit sites from following a Facebook posted link and never take notice of the actual site name.
- derefr 11y ago
  I would hazard that that's half the point. Medium, to the writer, is a centralized blogging platform, like WordPress or Tumblr—but it's an extremely white-labelled one, where there's not much to indicate to the casual reader that an article is "on Medium" rather than just existing out on a "real" blog somewhere. I think people prefer Medium mostly for that reader experience. With that in mind, there's a much more Hacker-ly way to get the same reader experience—namely, using one of the many services that provide a "blog-post format gateway" for Github Gists: • http://www.roughdraft.io/ http://www.roughdraft.io/ • http://gist.io/3135754 http://gist.io/3135754 • http://bl.ocks.org/ http://bl.ocks.org/ Etc.
  - lelandbatey 11y ago
    I don't find Medium to be particularly white label, it seems very overt in it's branding. Loading an article off their front page on my phone, this is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png http://i.imgur.com/tJuLn0W.png What's interesting is that I remember back when I first looked at Medium, it seemed more whitelabel than that screenshot. But I guess that's the point of the original authors post. Medium is a for profit company, and they're going to change the platform over time to try to make money. That may involve changes you don't like, but are unable to act on since Medium has all your content.
    - derefr 11y ago
      You're right, that's a more branded experience than I remember as well. In fact, it's worse on desktop as well: they have a bottom-bar now. I definitely had a cached thought that Medium was something I could sign up for if I wanted a fancy white-labelled pastebin, but I guess that's changed.

jerf 11y ago

I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind? My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years? The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem. [1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?

tejaswiy 11y ago
To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam. Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away? As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.
- pluma 11y ago
  > What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away? Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this? You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.

CamperBob2 11y ago

Agreed, I kept waiting for him to come to the point but it never seemed to happen. A good rant should be like a well-optimized piece of code, and not waste a lot of the reader's mental CPU cycles.

shockzzz 11y ago

He's arguing that Medium owns the distribution rights to your content. Which... if I were to be partial to him, I'd say Medium can monopolize the public's attention as to where we read content. Like Amazon and Books, PornHub and Adult Videos, probably others. It's possible that if Medium goes under, it does everything it possibly could to prevent people from downloading their content. Not saying that I agree with him. At the end of the day, Medium says the writers own their content. I feel ok with them, though I can empathize with OP, given the amount of shitty things BigCorp companies have done in the past. https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e0f https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...

pluma 11y ago
> PornHub and Adult Videos Did all the other ones die or was PornHub just better at maintaining mainstream media attention? If I recall correctly there were at least three other equally sized sites along the time I first heard of it.

savanaly 11y ago

>I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before. Me too. His explanation of why Medium is thought to be good (before he goes on to explain why he thinks it's actually bad) was very convincing! >Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often.

gballard 11y ago

You can definitely take issue with his cantankerous and opinionated views on open access to information; but Dave Winer as "hipster-ish"?! That made me spit-take coffee all over my keyboard...

xlm1717 11y ago

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think a big part of why I don't like Medium either is because it's popular. Yes, it's going to sound hipster-ish to say the posts started out interesting, but now whenever I see a link to a post on Medium I expect it to be someone complaining about someone or something, and most of the time that's what it is.

xlm1717 11y ago

maus42 11y ago

I think he has at least one point: >See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.

blakesterz 11y ago

>> Medium is a startup, a well-funded one for sure, but they could easily pivot and leave all the stories poorly served, or not served at all. I think his most important point is right there, and that's a pretty good one.