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Medium will never overtake WordPress. Medium has a lot of buzz, a great founder and a powerful centralized system. It felt like an upgrade to the web. WordPres

by xiaoma 10y ago

Medium will never overtake WordPress. Medium has a lot of buzz, a great founder and a powerful centralized system. It felt like an upgrade to the web. WordPress on the other hand, is a force of nature. Not only does it have a strong team working to improve it on all levels, but it's open source and has somehow managed to attract both gigantic community of marketers, entrepreneurs and consultants and a hoard of GPL zealots making sure that code flows back into the mothership. A dozen years ago, there was another company that held every advantage Medium currently does, including a younger version of the exact same fouder—Blogger. WordPress steamrolled Blogger. Even with the support of one of the most powerful companies in the world, Blogger has faded from prominence and WP now powers 25% of all the sites on the web. https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-used-on-25-percent-of-all-websites-report-151115 https://martechtoday.com/wordpress-used-on-25-percent-of-all... The way I see it, posting on Medium is like guest posting on someone else's blog or like writing on LinkedIn. It's a great way to get some exposure and it's a tool that should be used, but any serious publisher needs their own site they're using the guest posts to build up.

MiddleEndian 10y ago
>The way I see it, posting on Medium is like guest posting on someone else's blog or like writing on LinkedIn. It's a great way to get some exposure and it's a tool that should be used, but any serious publisher needs their own site they're using the guest posts to build up. Honestly I see this as a very very good thing. It decentralizes control and puts content creators in charge of their own works.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Having their own domain puts content creators in charge of their own works. Medium can pull the plug on any given user, pivot, die or get acquired at any time.
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Exactly!
douche 10y ago
I would call Blogger yet another example of a decent product that was marginalized and cast into purgatory by the benign neglect of Google. Who knows what could have been if any effort at all was invested in improving and growing Blogger, but like so many Google products and acquisitions, it's just idled along and been overtaken.
kupaka 10y ago
Medium's not supposed to overtake WordPress. Arguably, Blogger wasn't supposed to overtake WordPress. Wordpress is a CMS, and you can hammer any organization of content, from stores to news sites into it. Medium and blogger are blogging platforms -- they're specifically made to display text and images in an attractive manner.
davewiner 10y ago
In my experience in tech, that level of bluster comes just before the platform is undermined and then overtaken by an insurgent. Watch out for over-confidence. Even paranoia won't keep you in your seat of power, but bluster is a sure sign you're overlooking something important.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  What is your experience with predictions, exactly? I feel confident that WordPress will be more widely used than Medium next year, in three years and in nine years (which is an eternity in tech). Would you bet against that? I don't mean money, but if you feel confident taking the other side, we can both set calendar alerts and check back in one, three and nine years to see who was over-confident and who was appropriately confident in their opinion. AFIK, no open source ecosystem with WPs level of usage has ever died (and in a sense OSS is unkillable), but it would be fun if you want to take the other side of my prediction. This kind of dynamic is why I blogged every tech stock I bought (after AAPL in 2001). It keeps you honest in your own thinking.
  - davewiner 10y ago
    It goes back to No One Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM. ;-) When I came out of comp sci school in 1978, everyone thought that DEC and Data General had an insurmountable lead and that PCs were toys. Then they thought Macs were toys. Then they thought the web was a toy. I've been to countless tech conferences where the top guy from some "dominant" company told the tale of how dominant they were and two years later they were slinking around in the back of the room, no one wanting to talk to them. I could name names, but just read my blog. Hubris is a terrible thing and tech is filled with it. And your post was totally a product of hubris ;-)
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      You can call it hubris, but my goal is truth. I don't have any financial or even emotional stake in WP and am just trying to make the best predictions I can. In my experience, you don't hone those skills unless you actually have the nerve to make the predictions and then follow up on them. Your reasoning on DEC and Data General make sense, but were either of them open source? In a sense, betting against WP is like betting against GCC 30 years ago when all the alternatives were proprietary. Either way, I'm happy to check back in a few years and see if the hubris was my prediction or your armchair psychologist reaction to it (・ω<)

by xiaoma 10y ago

MiddleEndian 10y ago

>The way I see it, posting on Medium is like guest posting on someone else's blog or like writing on LinkedIn. It's a great way to get some exposure and it's a tool that should be used, but any serious publisher needs their own site they're using the guest posts to build up. Honestly I see this as a very very good thing. It decentralizes control and puts content creators in charge of their own works.

xiaoma 10y ago
Having their own domain puts content creators in charge of their own works. Medium can pull the plug on any given user, pivot, die or get acquired at any time.
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Exactly!

douche 10y ago

I would call Blogger yet another example of a decent product that was marginalized and cast into purgatory by the benign neglect of Google. Who knows what could have been if any effort at all was invested in improving and growing Blogger, but like so many Google products and acquisitions, it's just idled along and been overtaken.

kupaka 10y ago

Medium's not supposed to overtake WordPress. Arguably, Blogger wasn't supposed to overtake WordPress. Wordpress is a CMS, and you can hammer any organization of content, from stores to news sites into it. Medium and blogger are blogging platforms -- they're specifically made to display text and images in an attractive manner.

davewiner 10y ago

In my experience in tech, that level of bluster comes just before the platform is undermined and then overtaken by an insurgent. Watch out for over-confidence. Even paranoia won't keep you in your seat of power, but bluster is a sure sign you're overlooking something important.

xiaoma 10y ago
What is your experience with predictions, exactly? I feel confident that WordPress will be more widely used than Medium next year, in three years and in nine years (which is an eternity in tech). Would you bet against that? I don't mean money, but if you feel confident taking the other side, we can both set calendar alerts and check back in one, three and nine years to see who was over-confident and who was appropriately confident in their opinion. AFIK, no open source ecosystem with WPs level of usage has ever died (and in a sense OSS is unkillable), but it would be fun if you want to take the other side of my prediction. This kind of dynamic is why I blogged every tech stock I bought (after AAPL in 2001). It keeps you honest in your own thinking.
- davewiner 10y ago
  It goes back to No One Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM. ;-) When I came out of comp sci school in 1978, everyone thought that DEC and Data General had an insurmountable lead and that PCs were toys. Then they thought Macs were toys. Then they thought the web was a toy. I've been to countless tech conferences where the top guy from some "dominant" company told the tale of how dominant they were and two years later they were slinking around in the back of the room, no one wanting to talk to them. I could name names, but just read my blog. Hubris is a terrible thing and tech is filled with it. And your post was totally a product of hubris ;-)
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    You can call it hubris, but my goal is truth. I don't have any financial or even emotional stake in WP and am just trying to make the best predictions I can. In my experience, you don't hone those skills unless you actually have the nerve to make the predictions and then follow up on them. Your reasoning on DEC and Data General make sense, but were either of them open source? In a sense, betting against WP is like betting against GCC 30 years ago when all the alternatives were proprietary. Either way, I'm happy to check back in a few years and see if the hubris was my prediction or your armchair psychologist reaction to it (・ω<)