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Ending our Medium integration
- kiba 8y agoI think some things are more suited as not-for-profit entities. Blogging is hard to monetize without coming off as evil or desperate, so why bother? But then again, you still need to fund servers and such.
- tchaffee 8y agoReal news might be another. What we have now is 90% "entertainment news" that is pretty heavily biased. And not always biased politically. Sometimes just biased on what will get clicks $$$. We are ironically worse off now than we were 20 years ago when it comes to access to unbiased news. Less was more.
- randomsearch 8y agoSubscription fee seems to be the universal solution to this problem, which works in practice for many news outlets. Free trial or limited number of articles to get people onboard. Hire people directly initially, then later on reward them according to people's feedback to split subscription fees.
- alchemism 8y agoI found it interesting that Amazon offers a 'Kindle blog subscription service'[1] where blogs and newspapers are offered for wireless delivery, formatted for quick consumption. 99 cents a month (of which Amazon no doubt takes a cut) still seems like an unsustainable model for supporting every blogger you want to read. Still its an interesting way to try to solve the larger problem. [1](https://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Kindle-Sports-Internet-Technology/b?ie=UTF8&node=241647011 https://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Kindle-Sports-Internet-Technolo...)
- projectramo 8y agoI think the right question is, what is a fair amount to pay to fund servers etc? $1/mo? $5/mo? $25/mo?
- pferde 8y agoPerhaps this will lead to less blogs-for-profit, and more blogs-out-of-interest. The internet was just fine before money arrived and took most of it hostage, I'm sure it will be just as good when it all goes bust and money leaves.
- shaqbert 8y agoFirst they came for the developer ecosystem, but I did not speak up, as I was just a publisher. Then... Wanna be in control of "your" blog? Run your own software on your own server. Ghost, Gatsby, etc. to the rescue.
- StavrosK 8y agoI run my blog with Lektor on Netlify (no affiliation with either, except I recently became a Lektor co-maintainer) and deploying literally gives me happy feelings. It's amazing to be able to just deploy your blog wherever you want, and Netlify have done a great job at being a deployment target.
- feistypharit 8y agoI used to live lektor, but thought it died. Hope to see it start moving again.
- StavrosK 8y agoI don't think it died, plus it's pretty feature-complete as is, I've never had difficulty doing anything. The upside is that it's much easier to use than Hugo, which I never managed to get running. I haven't played with many other alternatives, if anyone knows of a static site generator that isn't specifically blog-oriented (i.e. something with an agnostic model), please let me know.
- Keats 8y agoHugo is pretty agnostic for the content but is a pain to use imo. I'm working on Zola (https://www.getzola.org/ https://www.getzola.org/) in order to have something simpler. It doesn't have all the features (eg multiple language sites) of Hugo yet but it's getting there. Working for things other than blog was very important, so you can implement something like gitbook in 3 small templates: https://zola-book.netlify.com/chapter1/ https://zola-book.netlify.com/chapter1/ (source at https://github.com/getzola/book https://github.com/getzola/book).
- kuhhk 8y agoPersonally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
- FPGAhacker 8y agoI feel that way about most bloggish sites, until I hit the readability button. If they block that then I give up.
- avian 8y agoFunny how these things go in circles. I remember the time where many webpages were unstyled, letting you freely choose the font, size, colors, etc. in browser preferences. But that was considered ugly and non-user friendly. Now with various readability buttons we're just moving back to that.
- Sharlin 8y agoWithout custom CSS, you couldn't, however, fix the single most important readability issue about unstyled HTML: add reasonable margins and keep body width at the recommended 60–70em or so. Readability modes finally get that right.
- avian 8y agoRight. I forgot to mention that we also used to be able to resize the browser to the width we personally found comfortable for reading. I guess that's something reader modes still have to rediscover.
- Sharlin 8y agoSure. But lines running from window border to window border are still hard to read. The margins have to be clean negative space.
- 8y ago
- messo 8y agoI loved to use Medium in the early days. I just realized that I haven't used their app or logged in to my account for ~1 year – probably because Medium stopped being simple and focused on the writing and reading experience. Applications that integrate with the fediverse seems to be a much better long-term solution, as it is not dependent on VC money to survive.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoI don't have a Medium account so I'm not sure if this is still true, but there was once a button in the settings to export your content as a zipball. If you'd like to migrate to a self-hosted blog, I wrote a tool which will convert this zipball into a Jekyll blog: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify If you want, shoot me an email for free hosting, and I'll rig up builds.sr.ht to automate deployment for you, too: sir@cmpwn.com
- j605 8y agoI exported it last year to move to Hugo. I will check your tool out since I still haven't migrated images from medium.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThey still should have a feature like that due to GDPR compliance, even if the dark patterns / investors would like the feature removed for retention.
- kjaer 8y agoThat's pretty nice. For people looking for an alternative with the same convenience as Medium, converting the archive of Medium posts to a GitHub Pages site could be a decent solution.
- IronCoderXYZ 8y agoMy favorite part: # Remove the stupid footer footer = soup.find("footer").extract()
- kkarakk 8y agoooops
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoJesus christ, dude. Lots of people have praised the design, too. Not everything suits everyone.
- amrrs 8y agoSignal v Noise - recently exited https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/ Previously, a Wired's Publication did similar thing. Despite all, (as someone who writes on medium) - I see it's one easy platform anyone to get started - kind of what blogspot used to do.
- arc_of_descent 8y agoWordpress is great. I've signed up for a yearly plan, I get to use my own domain. And their editor is really great.
- projectramo 8y agoServices exist if you pay for them with: 1. Labor 2. Cash 3. Personal Data/Ads With a few exceptions (I can't think of any, but presumably you might) you have to pay through one of these methods. If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self host (1 + less 2). To put it another way, are we annoyed at Medium or just the inevitable friction in the world. No matter what they promised, they can't sustain giving away a free service without 1,2 or 3. Edit: write.as looks like an interesting one because it lets you toggle between 1 and 2. I assume everyone knows about wordpress.
- dahfizz 8y agoI definitely agree with you, and this is one of the reasons that I don't like it when people complain so much about ads. It feels entitled in a way to demand completely free access to someone else's stuff.
- eitland 8y ago> If you don't like Medium, you can use Blogger (3), Ghost/Svbtle (2) or self host (1 + less 2). FWIW you can also use write.as now. I finally made a paid account the other day after wanting to for a long while. (You can have free ones as well but paid offers a few benefits and as a bonus it also felt great to support open source and pay for hosting at the same time.) As others has mentioned it is part of the fediverse and there's also a lot of other details to like about it (like not having to give away your email address if you don't want to).
- projectramo 8y agoGood point. I added that as an edit.
- nindalf 8y agoSelf-hosting costs me money ($5/month) but not much labour after the initial set up that took 2 hours. My work flow is to write in text files on my local computer, commit to git and `git push`. I can't think of a work flow that requires less labour. It would also cost nothing if I used github pages or a similar service. Caveats - authoring is not mobile friendly, and it's not possible for folks who aren't comfortable with git.
- drcongo 8y agoI just cancelled my Medium membership. This is a step too far and I no longer feel comfortable giving them money.
- criddell 8y agoWas it easy to cancel?
- sergiotapia 8y agoMedium sucks - and they are totally locked down. Did you know they don't even have a search API? It's like they're afraid of letting the content you wrote go outside their walled garden.
- rco8786 8y agoSeems like Medium's slow death may be speeding up a bit. I used to be pretty excited for the platform, but lately I don't even want to click on their links. And it seems like we're seeing reasonably large content creators announcing they're leaving the platform at an increasing rate.
- cabaalis 8y agoThe only integration you can trust is one with a contract in place, and probably one you are paying for access to. I think the days of monetizing a cobbling of free services are limited.
- sizzzzlerz 8y agoDon't worry about it. I stopped clicking on Medium links when they limited me to 5 articles a month, articles written and hosted elsewhere but linked to through Medium.
- xparco 8y agoI hope medium dies soon
- new_here 8y agoQuora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
- PaulHoule 8y agoIt's not just "morals", it is "brand equity." If people believe in your brand, you have something. If they don't believe in your brand, you have nothing.
- richardhod 8y agoCan you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
- joelhaasnoot 8y agoOnce upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.
- 8y ago
- evrydayhustling 8y agoLame move, and especially unusual since I don't see Medium as having anything like the market dominance that "successful" API retractions (looking at you, Twitter) have. Doesn't medium still need its integration landscape to reach more users? Or is this a desperate move to secure a much narrower niche?
- jordigh 8y agoIn case someone needs more context, write.as uses ActivityPub to federate with Mastodon and itself. It is an instance of WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/ So to me, knowing that write.as was getting important enough for Medium to shut them out is more interesting than whatever Medium does.
- athenot 8y agoDoes anyone here use Write.as for blogging? This is the first time I've seen them and the simplicity look appealing to me. For the record I was really excited when Medium came out and loved the simple, open, no-clutter style it had. But fast-forward to today and it's now very different.
- andrey-p 8y agoI've used it for a personal project blog and I'm really happy with it. I wouldn't call myself a heavy user though.
- SwiftyBug 8y agoI'd love to try Write.as, but it seems that their free plan is no longer available? Not to me at least. The cheapest plan I can choose is 12USD/year.
- dylz 8y agoThe default plan selected is $0. Leave it as is. Notice that if you pick $12, a billing section appears, but if you click the $0 such that the $0 button is greyed, it is replaced with captcha This is a great default ... but weird in terms of colour / selection choice being misleading?
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoYes, I just started this month with a paid account ($1 a month) and it's basically what medium was supposed to be - custom urls and rss. See the dead simple layout: https://kemendo.com/ https://kemendo.com/ I do wish they allowed email subscriptions but from what I understand that is coming soon. I also don't love the "published with write.as" text at the bottom of every page for paid accounts but that's no big deal.
- eitland 8y agoSame here. Been lurking around for a while and finally got around to it. The combination of open source, reasonable (actually directly inexpensive IMO) hosting, simplicity (but not dumbness or lack of features), the fact that they are already part of the fediverse and seems generally nice was my reasons for subscribing.
- jonmaim 8y agoWhat a surprise: developers getting screwed by big centralized companies. Nowadays wasting time and money building anything on the shoulder of another company is crazy. It's not if but when are you getting screwed: Twitter, Facebook, Apple, this is history repeating itself plenty fold. I'm just surprised nobody mentioned any decentralised, blockchain-based platform where spending time and money building on it is just worth it for the future. Have a look at the Steem blockchain: social network like publishing and commenting are free and even rewarded with crypto-currency payouts. And as a developer it is very elegant to develop on it.
- phoe-krk 8y ago> I'm just surprised nobody mentioned any decentralised, blockchain-based platform What about decentaralized platforms that are not blockchain-based? The Fediverse (a part of which is write.as) achieves this goal of being decentralized without using any kind of blockchain technology.
- jonmaim 8y agoThanks for mentioning the Fediverse. Who is paying for server costs?
- phoe-krk 8y agoThe owner of each instance pays the costs for hosting a given instance. So, basically, domain + hosting. Note that these costs can be really low; Pleroma[0] can be run on a Raspberry Pi 3 or a $2.50 Vultr instance[1] [0] https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/ [1] https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/ https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kaolti 8y agoAgreed, glad to see Steem get some love on here.
- sfarhat 8y agoSecretly hated Medium for a long time. Didn't know everyone shared the sentiment. I'm reading this and smiling.
- ehsankia 8y agoWhile I dislike Medium too, I think this post as well as the comments are very quick to jump to conclusions and assume the worst possible intent with very little information. The much more likely explanation, which is almost always the cases in these scenarios, is that it was a bug or bad push. It's perfectly fine to dislike Medium, but I dislike how easily everyone throws them under the bus at the slightest issue without even looking to understand what actually happened.
- uptown 8y agoThis is Hacker News. We hate everything.
- TheGRS 8y agoDefinitely some schadenfreude in these comments.
- aggrrrh 8y agoI hope more people will use open source self-hosted platforms like Ghost. We used medium before, but experience, including their api was just awful.
- davedx 8y agoWasn't Medium founded by ex-Twitter people, and didn't Twitter do exactly the same thing to third party developers?
- ngngngng 8y agoI started using ghostjs recently for personal writing. It's probably the most enjoyable writing experience I've ever had. Makes me want to come up with more reasons to write.
- thomasjudge 8y agoMedium == Not Well Done
- tnolet 8y agoI started writing blog posts on Medium around 1,5 years ago. Some got pretty popular with 6k+ claps and many shares. But almost exactly when I started everything went downhill: - viewership dropped - shares dwindled - short, copy & paste non-valuable content flooded everything. In 1,5 years it went from "pretty cool" to "not publishing there ever again".
- pier25 8y agoI have a number of articles on Medium with thousands of claps and 100K+ hits. I'm already working on my Jekyll blog for my next articles. The writing experience is still great, but the reading experience has become bad, specially on mobile. I don't need the social features Medium offers. Most of the interesting discussions happen here on HN, Reddit, or Twitter anyway. I don't care about claps and such stuff either. I mostly write because I need to get something out of my system.
- kareemm 8y agoSomewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were: 1. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check, and run through tools like Hemingway 2. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe missing some others. 3. Formatting the posts for each service is a PITA. Need images in different sizes and need to place them in the posts. Ideally I'd like to be able to do all three using a single tool, connect my publishing platforms, click publish (maybe schedule them) and would have drafts in LinkedIn, Medium, Drip, etc. This would save me so much time that I'd easily pay $50/m for this (and we're bootstrapped and cheap/"capital efficient"). Looks like write.as is heading somewhat in this direction but sadly doesn't hit the major platforms (yet?) Huge market, painful problem, selling to businesses, can build a great tool around content marketing workflow. Got the hallmarks of a great business.
- dev_dull 8y agoThe post shows the risk in such a move. The 3rd party integrations can be turned off without warning (such as this case). What do you tell your paying customers?
- kareemm 8y agoYour paying customers are still going to have to post their articles to different sites regardless of whether you support it or not. But you could make it easier for them. I would tell them: "Medium cut off access so you have to go there directly to post. We've formatted your post for Medium - cut this and paste it to Medium here: [link_to_create_new_post_on_medium]." Publishing to multiple platforms via a single click is nice, but the most painful part about publishing to multiple platforms is formatting the posts so they look good everywhere you post.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoThis isn't what you're looking for, more an indication that there is a real need for these types of services. Checkout: https://www.wordable.io/ https://www.wordable.io/ - which focuses solely on Google Docs to Wordpress. It's kind of nuts to think that these somewhat "edge" cases are so large as to be able to build a business around.
- thebaer 8y agoAuthor here -- just got a response from Medium, though it's still confusing: > We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature. This doesn't really explain why our 2-year-old integration suddenly stopped working (we didn't need to generate a new application). So I'm asking for more clarification.
- TheGRS 8y ago> We recently experienced an interruption with API It sounds like kind of an amateur deployment/test problem. The lack of explanation would have me worried too. Their platform is pretty large and widely used, so you'd think their API would have tests for such a thing.
- MKais 8y agoHistory repeating itself: Evan Williams did the same thing years ago with Twitter. Dozens of third-party apps saw their access to Twitter API revoked
- stickfigure 8y agoI feel like there's something missing in this article. "The API broke and we assume they did it deliberately." All the other comments here on HN assume they are shutting down the API. Has anyone checked? I can't find any sort of announcement. I get there's a lot to hate about medium now but this seems like a story that deserves a little more investigation.
- fidla 8y agoI tried medium a while back, but when they started blocking posts (without an account), I stopped.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- miguelmota 8y agoMedium seems like people are on there to build their personal brand valuing quantity of posts over quality. Programming articles in particular are most disappointing. For programming there’s better open source platforms like dev.to or even better just host your blog and not be at the mercy of VCs
- alienspaces 8y agoCompletely agree! Quality is poor and content is often entry level, I only ever navigate to medium if it's a post on Hacker News.
- realityking 8y agoMedium has a great low barrier to entry but if you're a developer looking to post your own content or are setting up a site for someone I seriously recommend looking into a static site set up. With services like GitHub and Netlify (for hosting) and Contentful (as a content editing GUI) the day-to-day experience is seamless, you don't have to worry about security issues like you have with a traditional CMS, and you can make use of amazing tools like Gatsby.js (React based static site generator). My colleague Khaled made a great tutorial specifically about Gatsby.js: https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-gatsby-video-tutorials/ https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/02/28/contentful-gatsby... Full disclosure: I work for Contentful
- treis 8y agoTakes some cajones to post a stealth promotional post in a thread of people complaining about just that.
- boycaught 8y agoAnd castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually. You're not really building your business on someone else's API: you're building theirs.
- vietvu 8y agoMedium is like Google+ for me now. Don't go there.
- pawurb 8y agoMedium is poor choice of publishing platform anyway https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo
- consultSKI 8y agoVery telling post. Some may recall that once upon a time Twitter did the same thing. Cut the API for third-party apps and basically said [in my words], "We don't need you." Was Ev at Twitter when that happened?
- orta 8y agoI've been thinking about this problem from the perspective of running an engineering team blog, Medium is a dependency that doesn't really pull its weight: http://artsy.github.io/blog/2019/01/30/why-we-run-our-blog/ http://artsy.github.io/blog/2019/01/30/why-we-run-our-blog/
- colemickens 8y agoIt's one thing for users to give their membership, patronage and data to a centralized for-profit, startup type company. It's another, totally absurd to me, thing to cede control of your company's online presence to some other startup... just for a simple blog. And still no one seemed to care even when Medium started nagging users to signup when just trying to read an article... I just don't get it. It's not a good look when I go to read a technical article from [startup], and wind up staring at a fullscreen popup begging me to signup for a Medium account. Really? I'm adding it to my list of lessons that apparently people have to learn first hand - make personal backups [no, really, it's not that hard], use a password manager [no, really, it's easier than not], don't use GoDaddy [they were just on HN again in the last few weeks]... and don't use thin little SaaS that don't do anything and just want to posses your content and your users and eventually go under or go dark, leaving you holding the bag.
- dymk 8y agoThe response from Medium was that the service interruption was caused by a bug. This website owner went all nuclear and indignant because they couldn't wait back for a response from Medium, indicating the interruption was because of a bug. Then they try to backpedal: "We don't get why a particular bug manifested this specific way so we're waiting for more details, but our heels are still dug into the ground".
- thebaer 8y agoThey didn't explain why the "interruption" has existed at least a week, or why they didn't notify anyone in that time. Our application doesn't seem to exist in their system anymore, even after their most recent email response. Before this, it was working steadily for two years. That's what we're waiting for an explanation on.
- scarface74 8y agoIt looks like everyone is burying the lede: We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature. It was a service outage, they didn’t remove the API.
- notatoad 8y agothe ability to generate new oAuth-based applications being restricted doesn't explain why an existing application would be terminated though.
- scarface74 8y agoIf they were planning to disable the API permanently, why would they reenable it? Maybe their explanation wasn’t thorough but to attribute it to malice is premature. How would it benefit Medium to not allow third party apps to publish to their platform? This isn’t like Twitter where they had an incentive not to allow users to use unofficial apps to force advertising on them.
- callahanrts 8y agoWith all my frustrations with medium, I decided to build a desktop app--for myself, and maybe to monetize later. It's basically the medium WSYWYG editor combined with a static site generator that automatically hosts on S3. Out of curiosity, is that something that anyone else would be interested in? EDIT: Here's a google form for anyone who wants to keep in touch https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23 https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23
- ollerac 8y agoYes! This is something I've wanted for a while. Simple, easy writing experience with a button-push deploy to s3 — that would be out of this world! Also, image uploads baked in would be a huge plus (but totally not necessary out of the gate).
- callahanrts 8y agoAwesome! I have images uploading to s3 at the moment. They get uploaded to /assets. I'm planning on some simple media management as well. It also enables a cloudfront distribution with the bucket.
- kpennell 8y agoI use https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/ for this. Works really well.
- callahanrts 8y agoThat looks pretty sweet. I'll have to try it out.
- dabockster 8y agoSo we're so fed up with the "modern web" that we've resorted to reviving Microsoft FrontPage? Hang on, lemme eat my own foot.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
- andrew_ 8y agoIf you haven't given write.as or WriteFreely a look recently, do make a point to. Great folks working on that project and a great platform. I happily donated in the form of a pro account to help their efforts.
- calimac 8y agoMedium is a parasitic and cancerous content platform
- cooperadymas 8y agoGoing back through Hacker News history to some of the earliest posts on Medium, and the earliest articles about it, it is evident that the community was somewhere between skeptical to downright antagonistic from the beginning. It makes sense, developers / IT people are most qualified to build and host their own websites, and more likely than the average person to understand the implications of allowing someone else to host their content. So it seems that the HN crowd and the general programmer community are not the audience for Medium. Despite this, it seems that a large percentage of development tutorials and articles I come across today are hosted there. Personally, I will be happy to see better alternatives start popping up.
- notatoad 8y agoTo be fair, "skeptical to downright antagonistic" could describe HN's reaction to almost anything.
- RosanaAnaDana 8y agoWell at least we know we're among good company.
- dabockster 8y agoI've found that most of those dev tutorials are either evangelicalism by other companies or high school/college students trying to sound smart. It's ego stroking either way.
- cooperadymas 8y agoI'd venture to say that 95% of quality dev tutorials online are "evangelism" by companies. Medium certainly has its share of muck, but there are also a lot of good tutorials on it.
- crooked-v 8y agoI really wish I could find a service like this, with dead simple Markdown-based publishing and a minimalist interface, but that also supported anonymous paragraph-level commenting. It's something that would be perfect for the tabletop gaming community, which right now has a heavy bias towards Google Docs for public drafts almost entirely for the easy commenting on specific sections of text. Medium used to seem like it could fill that role, but then they moved towards being as annoying as possible to logged-out users.
- rdiddly 8y agoSounds like it wasn't a "let's shut this down" decision, but rather an ordinary screwup or attack or whatnot... an "interruption" as Medium's response puts it. Which isn't to invalidate recent criticism of Medium. They're basically trying to be the Netflix of blogs: a platform situated between readers & writers --> profit. But where Netflix gives you something cheaper & better for which you were formerly paying more, Medium is giving you something that used to be free and now I guess trying to do something profitable with that. I dunno...
- munificent 8y agoI should write a blog post about this, but I'm like the last person on Earth who feels like writing articles about tech biz finance stuff, but I feel like somehow in the past twenty years one of the basic principles of transacting with other humans got lost. If you're using a product or service, partnering with a company, using their API, buying their stuff, selling stuff to them, whatever, you should at some level understand their incentives. And, in a capitalist economy, "incentive" is mostly synonymous with "money". If you don't know how the businesses you interact with make money, you're setting yourself up for heartbreak. As far as I can tell, tech companies make money one of four ways: 1. VC funding. 2. Selling your attention to other companies. 3. Selling your data to other companies. 4. You pay them for stuff. 1 has a finite lifespan which means, eventually, they will switch to one of the others. Unless you are certain which of the others they'll switch to and how, committing to use a business at this stage is a crapshoot. In practice, it seems businesses that currently rely on VC funding to stay solvent more often than not pivot to sad shady shit. Much of this has to do with not giving themselves any other options. Once they have a big userbase used to spending zero for their product, it's very hard to change, so they end up having to find money other sketchy ways. 2 is OK if you're OK with it. However, your attention is literally the most priceless commodity you own. Everything else you will ever do with your life begins with you spending attention on things. So if squandering a bit of that looking at dumb ads so that you can read a free article is worth it to you, that's fine, but I think most of us could probably find better things to do with our limited brain juice. 3 is maybe OK, but, man, it's dubious. The more a company knows about you, the more leverage they have to influence you. With machine learning is going, the amount of actionable intelligence companies can squeeze out of a given blob of data keeps going up. Stuff like Cambridge Analytica doesn't keeps me up at night. The long trajectory of this path looks an awful lot like straight up dystopia to me. 4 has served humanity fairly well for thousands of years. Its main point against is that you have to pay for stuff. Personally, I try to do 4 when I can. Whenever I use a business that doesn't do 4, I assume anything at all could happen in the future. They owe me nothing because I've paid them nothing. Anyone who's surprised by formerly-beloved-VC-backed-startup-that-turns-evil today must really be willfully blind.
- danielkay 8y agoShameless plug - I built MyTube.FM few months ago as an attempt to give alternative platform for those who prefer to voice rather than write. I am curating few profiles myself; for example: https://potus.mytube.fm/ https://potus.mytube.fm/
- 16th_hop 8y agoTo add onto this - I have had my entire account shadow-banned when I wrote a popular technical article about blockchain technology (also about my startup). It looked fine to me when I was logged in, but it showed up as a 404 to people who clicked on it. No notice. No explanation. I wrote about this Kafkaesque expereince here. Make sure to post in multiple places. https://honest.cash/chicken/mediumcom-is-engaging-in-ongoing-stealth-censorship-why-all-crypto-discussion-should-migrate-off-of-mediumcom-670 https://honest.cash/chicken/mediumcom-is-engaging-in-ongoing...
- hobgoblin1234 8y agoI'd personally be extremely happy if Medium blinked out of existence.
- owens99 8y agoMedium is blocked in China. So anyone writing on Medium is preventing 1.5B people from being able to access your information. I am not sure about write.as, this is the first time I am hearing about it. But generally the best way for access is to host your own content.
- paulie_a 8y agoSo when medium folds, I wonder what line of work the ux/UI people will transition to. At this point you are better off saying unemployed or I delivered weed.
- bernardlunn 8y ago“We trusted that Medium might not do what many VC-funded platforms have done before: open an API, attract developers and users, grow, then shut it all down. “ That trust was misplaced. Pleased I stuck with Wordpress.