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All Medium paywalled stories now free, unmetered when you’re coming from Twitter
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoOne of the tweets suggests Twitter is going to buy Medium. That's ... interesting.
- kradroy 8y agoIt's not too farfetched given that Evan Williams founded the company.
- drenvuk 8y agoSo this is just a /sweetheart/friend/i own both/ kind of deal? It's great to have the ability to bail out of a failed unicorn and still make money I guess. Should I short twitter?
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoSerious question: does he also own the Bourbon company in the same name?
- Matticus_Rex 8y agoNo.
- sodosopa 8y agofounded Blogger, Twitter, odeo (vine before vine) and Medium.
- Deimorz 8y agoHe also stepped down from the board 6 days ago, which will take effect today: > On February 22, 2019, Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”) announced that Evan Williams has decided to step down as a member of its board of directors (the “Board”), effective at the end of the month. Mr. Williams said in a statement, “It’s been an incredible 13 years, and I’m proud of what Twitter has accomplished during my time with the company. I will continue rooting for the team as I focus my time on other projects.” (from the SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312519048369/d689678d8k.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312519...)
- DigitalVerse 8y agoThat would make sense. It's a pretty common practice for acquisitions to start out with a business partnership to see how well the two companies work together. This could simply be Twitter and Medium testing the waters.
- petercooper 8y agoOr, more accurately, if you go to the Medium article via a t.co redirect (Twitter's outgoing link redirector). So if you want to share a paywalled article outside of Twitter (on HN, say) then submit the t.co link and there you go. Example (this is usually paywalled): https://t.co/EkfcBtSUdo https://t.co/EkfcBtSUdo
- nyuszika7h 8y agoI don't get a paywall when opening the destination URL of that directly in Chrome's incognito mode.
- petercooper 8y agoYeah, I think you get up to 5 paywalled articles a month anyway if you're not logged in and incognito basically resets that over and over. But if I'm linking people to stuff, they're not usually going to go through that process and it'd be easier for me to make the t.co link for them.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoI don't get it, who looks at Twitter and thinks "Yes, I want more of that type of audience."
- astrodust 8y agoWho looks at Medium and says "Sure, I'd love it if you own my content forever?"
- OscarTheGrinch 8y agoWriters with no established base of readers or method of distribution.
- jonny_eh 8y agoLike Jeff Bezos?
- function_seven 8y agoHa. His use was to avoid tainting the Amazon or WaPo brands with his personal drama. Medium seems like a neutral, "throwaway" place to publish that letter.
- grody 8y agoI wonder what happens if a Medium user copies someone else's original content onto Medium and the post is uncontested by a DMCA request. If Medium or a subsidiary profit from reproducing that content, could the original creator sue, and for how much? Copyright is something I haven't taken the time to fully understand.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- elliekelly 8y agoThis is an important legal question that's currently being debated by many legislators around the world. In the U.S. there's a law frequently called "Section 230"[1] that protects online content publishers from being held legally responsible for user-created content published on their platform. It's the reason why Tinder isn't on the hook for fraud every time someone uses their service to catfish and why Backpage & Craigslist (until recently at least) weren't accessories to prostitution every time someone sold sexual services on their sites. Likewise, Section 230 acts as a "shield" to protect the platforms from copyright liability for content posted by their users. This is good. It allows platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and even Hacker News to exist without needing to constantly police everything being said on their platform. It allows users of those platforms to have free and open discussion. You've probably heard about "Article 13" and the "upload filter" in the European Union. Article 13 takes away the European equivalent of Section 230's "shield" that protects online platforms from copyright liability. And the United States has been slowly chipping away at Section 230's protections as well. Last year Trump signed "FOSTA" (sometimes called "SESTA") which "creates liability for third-party content on websites “that unlawfully promote or facilitate prostitution." I would encourage you to read why this legislation is a problem for anyone who enjoys the open internet as we currently know it.[2][3] [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 [2] https://www.eff.org/cases/woodhull-freedom-foundation-et-al-v-united-states https://www.eff.org/cases/woodhull-freedom-foundation-et-al-... [3] https://stopsesta.org/ https://stopsesta.org/
- gnicholas 8y agoDoes this mean they’re tightening the paywall in general? I have run into annoying meaaafws but never been blocked from reading an article, and I’m always logged in. My understanding is that if you do hit the paywall you can just open the article in an incognito window. Is this not the case, such that a twitter workaround would now be necessary?
- gnicholas 8y agoToo late to edit, but that gibberish word was a crazy autocorrect from “messages”
- danols 8y agoI used to like Medium as a discovery tool for interesting articles & ideas for authors to follow (on Medium or Twitter). But since the introduction of the premium model it is completely broken for this purpose. Now all you see (at least 80% of their recommendations) is premium articles on the Medium website. For the topics that I am interested in (Data science, ML, Cloud, Programming etc) very close to 0% of the quality authors write to make a few pennies of the articles. They do it to enhance their own personal brand or as content marketing for the companies they work for. For this reason the premium article star marker works as a filter for things I am not willing click and invest time in reading since they are rarely written by experts with actual experience in the topics that I am interested in. So when they skew their recommendation algorithm so hard towards the premium content it is just not worth it anymore and I never click around on the Medium.com website anymore. 90%+ of my clicks to articles comes from Twitter. I wish they built their business model to charge for features and not content since the path they are on is not going to work out. It is reducing the incentive for quality authors to publish on Medium since the exposure they will get through the recommendation algorithm is being smaller and smaller. Most people don't publish on Medium because it is difficult or expensive to run a wordpress blog. They do it because of it is a good way to find new readers of your content.
- rchaud 8y agoAre there Medium publications that are consistently of a high quality? I recall Backchannel being one (written and edited by tech journalists) but the issue is it's hard to know which publications are contributor-driven and which aren't. Contributor-driven content is why Forbes.com, Inc.com, etc are unreadable. It's all puff pieces for some startup, unoriginal life-hacking advice and entreporn.
- braythwayt 8y agoAs was once said of a computer magazine, but is really an evergreen observation about all business media: “The publication is packed full of advertisements, some of which are clearly labeled as such.”
- organicdude 8y agoWhat a great insight. Thank you for sharing.
- rob_b 8y agoThe quality of the content is definitely hit and miss, with more seeming to be the latter. The problem with mediums (no pun intended) is that at some point the source becomes popular, which does gain the benefit of reaching a wider audience. The downside is that with that popularity comes noise. The noise is often comprised of a clickbait title with poor quality content. I would say that it suffers from the same issue that StackOverflow has, which is that it loses its effectiveness as the user base grows.
- CM30 8y agoI'd say the problem is more that at some point, every site/service/platform becomes attractive for SEO/marketing purposes, bringing in tons of shysters looking for a quick buck. It's the same reason virtually every tech and webmaster forum on the internet is absolutely terrible; because all the spammers join and post crap en masse to try and build up a few backlinks/getting themselves seen as 'authorities'. Just look at Sitepoint, Digitalpoint, virtually every web development and marketing subreddit, Warrior Forum, etc. That's what killed Medium. Everyone started promoting it as a get rich quick scheme/easy way to market your work, so the spammers, marketers and morons came in. The only way to avoid this issue is to heavily moderate the platform with a zero fluff/spam tolerance rule, and to boot out anyone trying to game the system.
- dangoor 8y agoFrom farther down in the thread[1]: > It doesn't affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program. That's determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted (assuming they're logged in). Ev also said that they'll watch to see if this change negatively impacts paid subscriptions. [1]: https://twitter.com/ev/status/1100905414089031680 https://twitter.com/ev/status/1100905414089031680
- Sephr 8y agoIt looks like it's time for an "Un-paywall Medium" Chrome extension. https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1101176562274037760 https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1101176562274037760 I imagine that most causal desktop users would rather install an extension in seconds than take the time to enter their payment information for an easily-bypassed paywall.
- sodosopa 8y agounfortunately, it's still Medium. If they improved their accessibility it wouldn't be as bad, but they're more pro design than pro accessible design.
- manigandham 8y agoMedium always confuses me on how hundreds of millions are spent on making such a poor product. It's a very basic blog, something that's an "intro to programming" youtube video at this point, yet it's slow and annoying to use and has never made any serious money for anyone. It's starting to get to Juicero levels of absurdity.
- gnicholas 8y agoHave they raised hundreds of millions?
- manigandham 8y ago$132 million so far. About $130 million too much. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium
- chillacy 8y agoSoftware is usually more complex than meets the eye, I’m sure they have unique challenges from scale, SEO, performance, etc
- manigandham 8y agoSure, but you can still compare relative functionality of the end product. This is a blog. And it's slow. Meanwhile Stackoverflow can load pages in milliseconds with far more interactivity and dynamic data.
- jbob2000 8y agoIf your only consumers are developers, then yes, it’s really straightforward. I made a small CMS at work that started to gain steam. 2 years of me using it and no issues, but then I turned it over to the marketing team and they crashed the VM it ran on in 2 days. I have no idea how, it’s just a bunch of text boxes and a SQL DB. That’s what medium is trying to build. A text box that marketing people can’t fuck up. It’s just sad that technical skills are so low in society that it takes $130mil to do that.