16 ms·

I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of networked

• whyileft 10y ago
  Especially now that video is eating up bigger and bigger chunks of the content market everyday.
  • Endy 10y ago
    The problem is that some of us have faces best for radio and voices for silent movies.
  • CN7R 10y ago
    Eh, that would probably mean I'm an outlier -- considering I spend most of my time reading rather than watching videos on Youtube or Facebook.
• strictnein 10y ago
  I think their main innovation was [HUGE IMAGE AT TOP OF ARTICLE].
  • Ralfp 10y ago
    Their editor was absolutely amazing. I know a plenty of folk who blog on medium because they love the nontechnical editor and minimalism of platform.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      Private notes are also nice if you want an editor to do any cleanup after something has been posted.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • harryf 10y ago
        Another innovation was popularizing the "2 minute read"- those estimates put the reader at the forefront - we value your time
    • pavlov 10y ago
      Agreed, it's a great editor. The downside of the minimalism is that, when they change the design, it's not obvious when old features are just gone. The "huge picture header" is a case in point. A few years ago Medium's default design was to have a large picture at the top, with a headline laid out in white text on top of the picture. That design is not possible anymore (I think they removed it because it wasn't mobile-friendly)... But if you took a break from Medium and came back, you'd just be left wondering how to do it. I remember spending about 30 minutes googling for that option, until I found mention of its deprecation tucked away in a FAQ section at Medium.
      • mjrbrennan 10y ago
        I had the same issue. It's odd too, because it's still possible to do that in old posts i.e. they remain unchanged, but new posts are in the new format.
• minimaxir 10y ago
  The success of Medium back in 2013 was the first thing that drove me to recreational data analysis, because I was confused myself. However, in 2016-2017, Medium is the best answer to the questions "How do I quickly write a pretty blog post?" and "How do I get people to read my thoughts?" Tumblr fading out of public consciousness made room for Medium too.
  • derEitel 10y ago
    Exactly how I feel. I loved Medium when I first discovered it. Good quality content in many different areas. Nowadays it's just a collection of IT students that heard it's a good thing to be blogging to find a job but who aren't good writers and write about non-exciting stuff. On the other hand you find "founders" with (if at all) mediocre startups that recommend you their book list on how to become "successful". Of course some good writers are still there but they are lost in all this really annoying noise that stopped me from reading medium.
    • Mad_Mac 10y ago
      I have noticed the same thing. I have a lot of topics selected there, but my front page is still usually full of 'how to succeed in life' posts even though I even mark those as 'don't show more this kind'.
  • rayalez 10y ago
    I think that one of the reasons for that is a bad discovey system. The algorithm that generates front page is oblique and not controllable. I wish I could decide which people/publications to follow, and be certain that I will not miss their posts. And I would love to discover the content reddit-style, sorting it by number of upvotes and filtering it by tags. Instead, I get recommended a bunch of garbage by some weird machine learning algorithm. It creates problems for writers as well, because I can never be sure that my followers will read my posts, and the amount of views I receive from Medium, compared to HN/subreddits is truly pathetic. I really wish they would fix the discovery system, because I'm a huge fan of everything else they're doing and I would love to use Medium as a platform way more.
• aaron-lebo 10y ago
  I just don't get why people consider X to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Y 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of networked Z, started by a really popular Silicon Valley dude. Not to be too unkind, but that's the reality of lots of stuff coming out of SV.
  • dchuk 10y ago
    Right, but in this instance, Medium was created by the guy who created Blogger. It's the exact same thing, just newer and prettier.
    • beat 10y ago
      He came up with Twitter, too.
    • wvenable 10y ago
      It's sad that we don't value incremental improvement or realize that pretty much everything "revolutionary" were incremental improvements on something else. iPods, iPhones, laptops, Google Search, etc. Whether or not Medium is "remarkable or innovative" is whether it becomes successful. If it's successful than it's remarkable and people will bend over backwards to determine what innovations made that possible.
      • pessimizer 10y ago
        Innovative is different than remarkable though, which just means "worth talking about." Why something became more successful than some other virtually identical thing is almost always remarkable.
        • wvenable 10y ago
          Some other virtually identical remarkable thing will have at least one "innovation" that sets it apart. Often identified only in hind-sight.
• dominotw 10y ago
  I just went to their home page https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/ these were top 6 1. let’s stop coddling white feelings 2. Women in Salt 3. I Have a Maiden Name - An exploration of surnames, beliefs and actions. 4. Warm Takes on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 5. The UBI already exists for the 1% 6. Atheism and Honesty - My atheism will not be about making believers comfortable.
  • BillBatw2 10y ago
    Love the destructive spirit on HN today!
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      He just posted a list of facts. That's only destructive if you think the facts are embarrassing to medium (which in this case I think they are - it's simply not clear what kind of community was supposed to gel around medium, if any, and it shows).
  • umeshunni 10y ago
    So, they've clearly stolen Tumblr's user base
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • sergiotapia 10y ago
    That first article made me CRINGE. I hope to God it isn't real. I'm latino and I would be pissed if I saw an article on the frontpage called Let's Stop Coddling Latino Feelings.
    • hk__2 10y ago
      You’re missing the point. Latinos are a minority. White people aren’t. The article is great; and the fact that you’re pissed about it shows we still have progress to do on these issues.
• zaidf 10y ago
  I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. The same (silly) logic was once applied to facebook. "It's just another friendster/myspace!" people said.
  • halestock 10y ago
    Same with Slack, for that matter.
  • niftich 10y ago
    Well, it was. It bootstrapped its userbase with college students, creating an air of exclusivity and giving highschoolers something to look forward to. The profiles were clean-cut and professional, as opposed to the garishly styled HTML themes and autoplaying music on Myspace. Once they opened up to everyone, they captured an entire generation. And once they introduced Chat, they basically killed every other IM service [1]. At this point, it was game over for everyone else. Meanwhile, Medium is another Tumblr, or another Blogger, or another LiveJournal, but the visual design attracts thought-piece bloggers instead of personal ones. This is a self-selecting but heterogeneous group, so there's no strong network effects. How do they grow beyond this, or adapt to monetize their existing userbase? What makes them think they won't just jump to the next free blog host? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518
  • nawitus 10y ago
    It's not silly logic if it's true. Medium may or may not have better features / quality than alternatives. You need to actually argue why Facebook is better than Friendster or Myspace to invalidate the argument that Facebook is just like Friendster or Myspace.
    • fuzzfactor 10y ago
      Roger. I have seen no indication that facebook is anything other than Myspace with more capital. Many can also make the argument that facebook is worse than Myspace, quite validly for a number of reasons.
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• jforman 10y ago
  Real innovation isn't your company doing something in a new way. It's getting your customers to do something in a new way. Medium has unambiguously, objectively succeeded by that metric. They are by far the premier blogging destination. President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium. If you think that's easy, you should try it yourself. Maybe you'll be the next Ev.
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  • addicted 10y ago
    I think Medium can strongly credit its success to Google. Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform, and then once they became enamored with social and Google Plus they let it languish to the point where it had almost become unusable. Medium's genius was recognizing this empty market that Google had conquered but abandoned, and created what blogger would have been had it continued to be updated for the world of gifs and emojis.
    • ChuckMcM 10y ago
      And then failed to get acquired :-). Only half joking here. I think your analysis is spot on, Google did a great job of consolidating the world into a place you could pull off a single RSS feed and get lots of good content, and then pissed it away. And I think Medium has done an excellent job of stepping into that space. What I find interesting is that Google hasn't done the follow on which is figure out that this team understood the blogging space well and could be a part of a "print" side of Google (much like Youtube is the "video" side of Google). Of course there is that whole Tumblr thing which did poorly under Yahoo!'s care. Sometimes I think it is like playing Milton Bradley's "Battleship" where each effort helps map out a part of the space where there is, and is not, a possible product present.
    • jordanlev 10y ago
• prezjordan 10y ago
  > I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit. Agreed. I feel the same way about Dropbox. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
  • brandnewlow 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
    • minimaxir 10y ago
      Link to exact quote that the OP is attempting to satirize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Satire doesn't work if most people believe it.
  • nawitus 10y ago
    Your analogy is flawed. There were and are plenty of other "create a blog with a few clicks that you don't have to host" services.
    • gabrielizaias 10y ago
      Woosh! He's making a satire comment about when Dropbox was first introduced to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
      • detaro 10y ago
        thus implying that the parent post made the same mistake when judging Medium, which nawitus (IMHO rightfully) thinks is a flawed comparison. No "Whoosh".
        • gabrielizaias 10y ago
• stale2002 10y ago
  But medium has tasteful whitespace!
  • BillBatw2 10y ago
    Slow clap!
• BillBatw2 10y ago
  I can tell you weren't part of the Medium community, otherwise you would come up with better arguments and not such a simplified reality.
• prostoalex 10y ago
  On the consumption side all blog engines seem about the same. On the production side they've added a few nice things that a static blog engine doesn't have - collaborative feedback on a draft before publishing, paragraph-by-paragraph statistics on "read ratio", time spent with an article, etc. https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-use-medium https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-use-medium
• omouse 10y ago
  When you compare Medium to Wordpress (which you mentioned in another comment and which is extremely popular) you can see the value that Medium provides; the reading and curation experience is better and the addition of "# of readers" vs "# of views" is also a great metric. Another win is how easy it is to assemble articles into magazines. Because it's all on one platform, it's really easy to do. Those are all valuable features that give it an edge over Blogger and Wordpress and other platforms. You can also see the difference in quality of comments/discussion on wordpress vs medium. On medium, people are highlighting and sharing and discussing. On wordpress, they aren't doing that often (at least not on my blogs).
• tonystubblebine 10y ago
  Just to call it out: innovation is a tactic, not a goal. I'm pretty sure the goal of people at Medium is to create value and it's not obvious to me how much innovation is required. For 15 years or more the world has demonstrated a huge appetite for personal publishing: Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr. And in this moment, a lot of those options have not aged well. They haven't stayed particularly current and a lot of them seem institutionally incapable of modernizing. So, Medium can provide an enormous value just by being the same thing we already know works but done in a modern way.
• chrisstanchak 10y ago
  Read the 'Vuja De' section of Andrew Chen's 10 yr blog post.
• pedalpete 10y ago
  Did you read the post? Ev is essentially agreeing with you and stating that this was not the goal of Medium, therefore they are reducing staff in areas that are not leading them to reach the goal. As I read it, Ev is aiming medium to be a TedTalks of the blogging world. Somewhere you go to find deep/compelling/interesting content, not just your average blog platform.
• maglavaitss 10y ago
  Exactly. The people that think Medium is innovative are the same people that think Farm From the Box (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610) is innovative. Some people just live in their pretty bubbles.
• ThomPete 10y ago
  The primary innovations of medium was mixing together: 1) Easy publishing with high quality layout (your prettier outfit comment) 2) Easy collaborative publishing. 3) Extremely easy inline editing. 4) Contextual comments It's really just digital publishing done right. To look at a business model that works I believe much more in the Khan Academy, BrainPicking and WikiPedia models.
• melvinmt 10y ago
  1) Innovation is not necessarily a primary goal in itself (at least, not if you're a business). 2) What you're struggling with is the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges [1]. Purely solving technical problems (what you call, "innovation"), will not get you anywhere if you don't pay attention to adaptive challenges. You might simply just be deluding yourself to work hard on "hard problems" that don't really matter for the course of your company and your success. [1] I actually wrote a blog post exactly about this common misconception on Medium just this week: https://medium.com/@melvinmt/so-you-want-to-work-hard-and-change-the-world-9e1f107670b1#.tt40r3gzy https://medium.com/@melvinmt/so-you-want-to-work-hard-and-ch...
  • fuzzfactor 10y ago
    Excellent comment & article, but when innovation is your primary unfair advantage, effort needs to be focused on where it can be applied as desired rather than wasted. In this case there may never be a need to refrain from maximum innovation. There is always some waste regardless of the type of resources. And I personally have been a business, single-handedly making a living off my own innovations. I would like to reply to your article, but there is still a sign-in wall on Medium. Maybe that's why there are no other replies yet either. I'm surprised it was even readable on my main rig, where Medium failed completely to provide text for quite some time after they launched, so I gave up a long time ago until now. I'm just a user, not a developer (of software), and I'm not in California so I usually find the most buzz about these type of companies after they are shrinking rather than growing. For me to even be aware of Medium at launch was solely a function of HN. I would have been more impressed if it would have had a user (reader) experience as satisfying (advanced?) as you used to enjoy with well-done HTML from the '90's, but time marches on, and lowered standards are the direction of movement. Everything I ever had was a result of doing without, rather than prosperity, but sacrifice is not necessarily a factor, especially when you are not actually seeking a reward. Frustration & upset are also very common when there is not any sacrifice at all, and after numerous rewards have been received.
• twhb 10y ago
  I disagree with your logic. Small, technically trivial but conceptually polished tweaks can add up to a difference that takes over the market. For example, everybody used to clean their hair with soap, then somebody decided to sell it in liquid form with pretty scents, and now you always buy "shampoo". Medium can have the same key ingredients as Blogger and still replace it.
  • gohrt 10y ago
    That's not true, bar soap gets stuck in hair and doesn't rinse well. Look at the ingredients in soap vs shampoo.
    • twhb 10y ago
      I have. Formulas for both have of course changed over the years, but the way in which they work has not. Both have also become more tailored for their use case. For example, shampoos sell better if they create a pleasant lather, and soaps if they also moisturize your skin. Those additives are why a modern bar of soap might not work well in your hair. But pure soap does, and so do some modern soap bars.
• replicatorblog 10y ago
  The "networked" part is pretty important. Medium makes it easy to post and makes your posts look nice, but it also helps build an audience. If you manage to make it on the leaderboard it can have a pretty massive impact on traffic. Look at this list of publications and their follower counts (https://toppub.xyz/ https://toppub.xyz/). Now the numbers aren't very impressive from the POV of the NYT or even something like Daring Fireball, but there are some good editors who have amassed impressive followings in short order. I'm not convinced that Medium will live up to it's valuation, but saying it's just Blogger 2.0 is like saying Twitter is just a 140 character Blogger.
• ctvo 10y ago
  A CRUD app that limits me to 140 characters. Outside of celebrities and SV dorks who even cares right? Nice innovation morons. Then you realized you got more than 50% of your news from Twitter. Can I ask how many long form publications you've read lately on Medium? For me it's a lot. To be so dismissive of a product that's quietly made its way pretty deeply into your life is strange.
  • nothrabannosir 10y ago
    140 char limit is innovation.
• WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Yes, and after all that investment and engineering you can't edit text on mobile? Wth? They wasted a lot of dev time reinventing the wheel with not enough time left over for essentials.
• WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Yes, and after all that investment and engineering you can't edit text on mobile? Wth? They wasted a lot of dev time reinventing the wheel with not enough time left over for essentials.
• wyoh 10y ago
  > I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. Medium managed to make normal the act of downloading around 1,500 KiB of javascript and 500 KiB of CSS in order to simply read a text blogpost.
  • fuzzfactor 10y ago
    Unfortunately, this is the reason for so many users that websites like this will never actually be worthwhile regardless of how "normal" or unavoidable they become.
• fuzzfactor 10y ago
  A really popular dude, if he is persuasive, can sometimes be the most likely type of salesman to bring in the most money, especially selling to those whom he is most popular with. It seems to be quite common where capital markets are guided by popularity or capitalist connections, that the lowest hanging fruit & largest source of money for many persuasive operators are those particular capitalists themselves rather than potential customers or profitable operations.