4 ms·

If 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

by jbob2000 8y ago

If 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.

manigandham 8y ago
Considering that there are hundreds of blog engines from Wordpress to Squarespace that work fine with even more control and advanced layouts, I think this is a solved problem.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Do you have any idea what it takes to run a Wordpress service at scale in a way that doesn’t get the host rooted every ten seconds? You have little idea what you are talking about for somebody so dismissive.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Honestly, yes I do. I've single-handedly built global applications serving billions of requests daily for several startups. I understand hidden complexities but a blogging site like Medium is as simple as it gets. It's $132M to build a blog that's not even as advanced as 15 year old software like Wordpress. If you need another example, look at https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ for a fantastic blog UX, and it's open-source so Medium can just copy it for free and end up with a better product.
    - stone-monkey 8y ago
      Isn't comparing the scale of the two like comparing apples to oranges? I think most wordpress sites are self hosted. There's wordpress.com hosting, but I'd guess that most of their sites are self hosted for the explicit purpose of customization. While WordPress still dominates large areas of the web, they have a decentralized model vs medium. It's like comparing scaling web forums to reddit ("why do they have so many outages? All they do is store text!"), but reddit obviously has a way higher load than any single forum. I'd wager the same is true for medium. To continue on with the metaphor, medium, like reddit, is solving a different problem than the wordpress/squarespace model: you don't have to roll your own. You get a built in audience due to centralization and the cache of the site (For some reason I associate a medium link as being more legit than seeing a WordPress hosting site. Strange, but better branding I guess.)
      - manigandham 8y ago
        The discussion has gotten muddy. The point was that this custom-built expensive site is just a blog and still offers less than Wordpress in terms of features. Scale is differently, but again there are plenty of sites with far more complex usage and data that took much less to create and run. Stackoverflow being that example.
- deleted 8y ago
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manigandham 8y ago

Considering that there are hundreds of blog engines from Wordpress to Squarespace that work fine with even more control and advanced layouts, I think this is a solved problem.

spookthesunset 8y ago
Do you have any idea what it takes to run a Wordpress service at scale in a way that doesn’t get the host rooted every ten seconds? You have little idea what you are talking about for somebody so dismissive.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Honestly, yes I do. I've single-handedly built global applications serving billions of requests daily for several startups. I understand hidden complexities but a blogging site like Medium is as simple as it gets. It's $132M to build a blog that's not even as advanced as 15 year old software like Wordpress. If you need another example, look at https://dev.to/ https://dev.to/ for a fantastic blog UX, and it's open-source so Medium can just copy it for free and end up with a better product.
  - stone-monkey 8y ago
    Isn't comparing the scale of the two like comparing apples to oranges? I think most wordpress sites are self hosted. There's wordpress.com hosting, but I'd guess that most of their sites are self hosted for the explicit purpose of customization. While WordPress still dominates large areas of the web, they have a decentralized model vs medium. It's like comparing scaling web forums to reddit ("why do they have so many outages? All they do is store text!"), but reddit obviously has a way higher load than any single forum. I'd wager the same is true for medium. To continue on with the metaphor, medium, like reddit, is solving a different problem than the wordpress/squarespace model: you don't have to roll your own. You get a built in audience due to centralization and the cache of the site (For some reason I associate a medium link as being more legit than seeing a WordPress hosting site. Strange, but better branding I guess.)
    - manigandham 8y ago
      The discussion has gotten muddy. The point was that this custom-built expensive site is just a blog and still offers less than Wordpress in terms of features. Scale is differently, but again there are plenty of sites with far more complex usage and data that took much less to create and run. Stackoverflow being that example.
deleted 8y ago
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