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Ask HN: What makes Medium a better/worse media outlet?

4 points by chasedehan 9y ago

git-pull 9y ago
This may not be what you're looking for, but Google seems to prefer Medium content. I think it could be natural. A lot of smart interlinking of posts, clustering different niches, and posts being spread across social websites. I can even give a direct example. My book The Tao of tmux is available for free online. It used to be in the google top 10 for tmux. Now, a newer article on HackerNoon is up at the very top: https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c404340 https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c4... I think people just like the Medium posts, heh. They made a publishing platform that attracted talented writers, and the feedback loop with readers seems to be encouraging it to grow. Medium actually hampers my personal efforts since I keep my own static website and wrote a custom blog-like application I post. I feel I may end up having to move writing efforts there since the velocity there is so big. P.S. NYTimes digital team uses Medium: https://open.nytimes.com/ https://open.nytimes.com/ I think that demonstrates to me people just like the product and it's going to self-perpetuate until someone devises something better.
tmaly 9y ago
I think the network effect and discovery are the key things that Medium brings to the table. When I write blog posts on my own site, I tend to use medium as a channel where I publish a teaser post with a link back to my blog.
tombachar 9y ago
My startup uses Medium as its preferred blogging host. We prefer Medium because of the ease of use, the engagement, and the overall UX. We think its gorgeous! Being a Fintech startup that focuses on getting people BTC or USD cashback on any card, we need to push out content quickly and have something that simply works. Otherwise, our dev and attention would be consumed by our blog content. The only downfall with Medium from my understanding is that you lose your site SEO. But the engagement is very high and its possible to double post content if you do have your own blog, so it works out either way. I highly recommend using Medium.
- vfulco 9y ago
  I love it personally. But banned in China so I can't use it to grow my Shanghai based professional services business. Huge bummer.
- rustywicket 9y ago
  I think for post people SEO is the part that they get stuck on, but i'm pretty sure you can import posts like you mention. Does it pull in the post with styling etc.. as well?
dasmoth 9y ago
For a long time, it seemed like Just Another Blogging platform -- maybe slightly nicer page layouts than some. But I'm now rapidly losing patience with the frequency with which it nags me to log in...

4 points by chasedehan 9y ago

This may not be what you're looking for, but Google seems to prefer Medium content. I think it could be natural. A lot of smart interlinking of posts, clustering different niches, and posts being spread across social websites. I can even give a direct example. My book The Tao of tmux is available for free online. It used to be in the google top 10 for tmux. Now, a newer article on HackerNoon is up at the very top: https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c404340 https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c4... I think people just like the Medium posts, heh. They made a publishing platform that attracted talented writers, and the feedback loop with readers seems to be encouraging it to grow. Medium actually hampers my personal efforts since I keep my own static website and wrote a custom blog-like application I post. I feel I may end up having to move writing efforts there since the velocity there is so big. P.S. NYTimes digital team uses Medium: https://open.nytimes.com/ https://open.nytimes.com/ I think that demonstrates to me people just like the product and it's going to self-perpetuate until someone devises something better.

tmaly 9y ago

I think the network effect and discovery are the key things that Medium brings to the table. When I write blog posts on my own site, I tend to use medium as a channel where I publish a teaser post with a link back to my blog.

tombachar 9y ago

My startup uses Medium as its preferred blogging host. We prefer Medium because of the ease of use, the engagement, and the overall UX. We think its gorgeous! Being a Fintech startup that focuses on getting people BTC or USD cashback on any card, we need to push out content quickly and have something that simply works. Otherwise, our dev and attention would be consumed by our blog content. The only downfall with Medium from my understanding is that you lose your site SEO. But the engagement is very high and its possible to double post content if you do have your own blog, so it works out either way. I highly recommend using Medium.

vfulco 9y ago
I love it personally. But banned in China so I can't use it to grow my Shanghai based professional services business. Huge bummer.
rustywicket 9y ago
I think for post people SEO is the part that they get stuck on, but i'm pretty sure you can import posts like you mention. Does it pull in the post with styling etc.. as well?

dasmoth 9y ago

For a long time, it seemed like Just Another Blogging platform -- maybe slightly nicer page layouts than some. But I'm now rapidly losing patience with the frequency with which it nags me to log in...