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Ev Williams to step down from Medium
- revskill 4y agoMedium or any blogging sites MUST prevent usage of Javascript (think HackerNews for blogging). JS is evil for websites like blogging or news.
- kodah 4y agoThat's not really true. For instance, interactive charts can be very useful on a blog. Diagramming is also quite useful, especially if the diagram and data it acts on are kept in the article itself - for instance, I use MermaidJS for this. What becomes bad is when platforms (or people) think they're entitled to track you with said Javascript.
- revskill 4y agoYes for sure. If a service is free to use, you're the product. You're the product because of JS of course. So let's be concise on "Free", i want "Free of JS", not free of charge.
- dewey 4y agoYou are just repeating phrases. Nobody is the product just because a website uses JS. You should be complaining about data collection, unnecessary tracking, data brokers all of which can be done without JS.
- cercatrova 4y agoI can make a product free of JS where the user is still the product. Server side tracking still exists.
- revskill 4y agoThat idea doesn't work in reality. For example, i go to a website, and just read and browse it. No data should be collected as i never update or call the backend.
- cercatrova 4y agoBut...you went to the website. Now my server can track you. It knows what IP address you're coming from, where you are in the world, and it could theoretically cross reference that data with other databases and determine more about you.
- kodah 4y agoThat's not how that works. Very simplified, but the HTTP workflow is: 1. Client requests document (GET) at /hello_world from xyz.com 2. Server responds with status code and document (or empty) The server absolutely has an opportunity to log any part of the request.
- revskill 4y agoWhen i said tracking, it's not just logging. They know nothing except for all browser information.
- kodah 4y agoI said logging because that's what I usually do with this information, but if your goal is track then you can do it with the same information. Fingerprinting can happen actively (with JS) or passively (without JS). The former is obviously more precise, the latter isn't bad at all. In passive fingerprinting you can combine the IP, which is a connection IP - nothing to do with HTTP, and the User-Agent header. You are now tracked.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoLet me introduce you to the amazing <img> tag!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dewey 4y agoThis is only the opinion of a very small (but loud on HN) group of people. Most people want basic interactivity like bookmarking things they want to keep for later, commenting, interactive charts, image gallery.
- revskill 4y agoIf you can't control something, just forbid it. I built my internal apps with full of JS but when it comes to website, No JS is the highest priority to me.
- hunglee2 4y agoEv Williams is a legend and his contribution to posterity is already assured, however it is hard not to conclude that he dropped the ball with Medium - which had a dominant position for the written word, and yet now looks to be superceded by SubStack and - ironically - Twitter, where threading seems to be the new blogging. It's not only about the writing / reading experience, its also about audience growth. Look forward to his next project
- bspear 4y ago
- wahnfrieden 4y agoWe ought to be glad a rentier failed at consolidating and taking rent on access to content broadly
- skinnymuch 4y agoScrewing Noah Glass over as the Twitter founders did should never make any of them legends
- aliqot 4y agoLegends, like legacies, don't have to be positive.
- skinnymuch 4y agoIn this context, legend is being used with a positive connotation. Otherwise, I agree.
- tonystubblebine 4y agoI was there. Noah wasn’t screwed over.
- skinnymuch 4y agoInteresting. You may have a vested interest in saying this, but not being an anonymous account does give me pause. Obv much more than an anonymous account with your position in your bio.
- indogooner 4y agoBlogger, Twitter and Medium. Thanks Ev. Still long for clutter free Medium interface.
- throwaway1777 4y agoThat’s basically what substack is (trying to be)
- capableweb 4y agoMedium also tried to be a clutter free version of Medi, eh I mean LiveJournal. At one point, Substack, unless radically different than Medium, will go the same way.
- rchaud 4y agountil it can't anymore because the now-generous VCs will start to want to see some stats they can sell up to other investors. History repeats itself. Medium.com was clean and cruft-free too, until it wasn't.
- picardo 4y agoI think Medium showed the world that you can't build a subscription business by commoditizing the content. I've read a lot of great content on Medium, but I don't remember who it was by, and that's why I never considered subscribing to Medium. Their content lacks the personality that platforms like Substack, and even traditional online newspapers like NYTimes, possess.
- blowski 4y agoTo me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?
- paxys 4y agoThe big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.
- bspear 4y agoIndividual writers control their own email lists
- ProAm 4y agoThe UI is better.
- blowski 4y agoBetter how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone fawned over the quality of the UI.
- karpierz 4y agoA focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.
- 4y ago
- EricE 4y ago"That’s why Medium exists. We aim to make it simple to share deep thinking and easy to find the thinking that’s valuable to you." Ha!
- minimaxir 4y agoI'll give credit to Medium for trying to diversify its content/revenue streams with things like memberships and in-house high-quality publications, but media is not an easy business. At this point, if you are still posting on Medium, you many want to consider moving to your own platform since some of the network effects that made posting on Medium a good proposition are dying off as a result.
- nvr219 4y agoI wish Medium would step down from the Internet.
- EddieDante 4y agoIt's called "Medium" because the posts are neither rare nor well-done.
- robmerki 4y agoIt's easy to forget that blogging before Medium was mostly ugly & slow WordPress websites. I am grateful that Ev & team were able to push online writing in a better direction. Unfortunately Medium slowly turned into a incredibly frustrating & hostile user experience. I haven't purposely clicked a Medium link in many years because of it. I empathize with how difficult it can be to generate revenue from online writing, but I wish they figured out a better way.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe Medium experience is worse than any ugly & slow Wordpress website I'm aware of.
- rchaud 4y agoI have yet to run into a slow Wordpress blog. The slow WP sites are usually corporate websites running a ton of plugins (appointment scheduler is a popular one) that wouldn't exist on a pure writer's blog site.
- lesstyzing 4y agoHow to your two paragraphs go to together? Wordpress websites can be good if they’re set up right (and that’s why Wordpress powers such a huge portion of web content). Medium developed a nice platform and turned it into something completely user hostile and horrible. We shouldn’t be grateful they started with good intentions when it’s currently so awful. I’d says we should be thanking Wordpress and condemning Medium.
- capableweb 4y agoDid you forget about cool and snappy Blogger (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or cool and snappy tumblr (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or even cool and snappy LiveJournal (before it turned ugly and slow)? It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy. Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoI liked Medium at first, but it worked hard to make me stop liking it. I feel I'm not the only one.
- weeblewobble 4y agoTangential, but I found Ev's recent Tweet about the Twitter/Elon mess totally perplexing: "I'm sure there are legal/fiduciary reasons you have to say that [you are going to sue Elon to force the acquisition], Bret. But if I was still on the board, I'd be asking if we can just let this whole ugly episode blow over. Hopefully that's the plan and this is ceremony." https://twitter.com/ev/status/1545588839363727361?s=20&t=4g7lZEayeWJAMkmGYJX3Og https://twitter.com/ev/status/1545588839363727361?s=20&t=4g7... Why would Twitter want to just let this all blow over? Elon did a ton of damage to the company and they have a good cause of action.
- radiojasper 4y agoTwitter hurt themselves by not being able to hand over crucial details like how big the percentage of bot accounts is on the platform. No matter what is being said, as long as Twitter can't hand over these stats, all they say is worthless. About as worthless as the Twitter platform itself.
- hellomyguys 4y agoElon hurt himself by waiving his right to any due diligence. Any time he tweets he sees a ton of spam accounts replying to him. Why didn't he ask for this information before agreeing to the initial terms?
- cactus2093 4y agoThe stock made a huge jump when he announced he purchased a large stake on April 4, and now it's back to $34 which is ~5% above its mid-March low point. Most other tech stocks are down in that time frame, e.g. FB is down 13%. Doesn't seem like Musk did any obvious damage.
- dodgerdan 4y agoMedium is pretty much on death row now. It’s gone through so many failed business model changes, its not a pleasant reading experience, and it’s brand isn’t great.
- pornel 4y agoI'm soooo disappointed in Medium. They were supposed to be a clean, readable alternative to all the shitty sites that attack you with popups and won't show text without JS. But bit by bit they've joined the sites they were meant to replace.
- swyx 4y agotoo little, too late. Medium sat on its hands while Substack ate its lunch. its not a question of technology, but organizational willpower.
- fleddr 4y agoRather than this community's emphasis on petty issues ("no javascript"), I'd start by saying something positive about Medium. If you can't be bothered to self-host a blog, you can link your domain to your Medium publication (before May of this year this was free, and continues to be free for earlier users). You'd then have a free blog on a proper domain, with zero ads and you can even tweak the design with a few clicks to make it your own. Further, it comes with a comment system, followers, etc. It's easy to blog as the writing experience is quite excellent. I think all of that combined is a lot of value, in particular for a casual blogger. And it doesn't cost a cent. To me, this counters the list of small UI annoyances. We've grown extremely entitled and cynical, I'm just trying to recognize value when I see it. Because certainly the value isn't zero. The negative I have about Medium is that just like many other content services, they failed to solve the discovery problem. There used to be a lot of quality writing on Medium and there might still be a lot, but those writers are not recognized by the ranking/discovery algorithms. Instead, they are completely outclassed by people gaming the system. Check any topic/category and see that most are flooded with low effort no-substance articles with click bait titles. Those people know how to work the algorithms, and they win. So...noise goes to the top instead of quality. And for those quality writers to gain traction, they need to join the engagement hacking or find crickets. It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up. It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jacooper 4y ago> It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up. I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage. Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable. Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more. So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world. > It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point. I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting. HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with. But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.
- rg111 4y agoTo be honest, Medium still provides the easiest of discovery processes. Twitter is still bad for the small guy. The algorithm is too bad. I know at least n people will find a tweet content really interesting, but I se k (<< n) likes. That frustrates me. Blogger, Wordpress, Bear Blog: none of them makes your content visible to others like Medium does. Those are the solutions that I like, because I don't want to do even little maintenance. And I want features like likes, comments, bookmarks, share buttons. I posted to Bear Blog and Medium same content some weeks back. It is on an obscure topic. The Bear Blog one has two toasts, nobody reached out to me regarding it. On the Medium one, there are 13 unique claps, two thoughful comments, people saving my article to several lists. I didn't have this with anything else, tbh. I tried maintaining a site using Jekyll and hosted on GH pages. I don't even like that amount of maintenance. I have research for org, self-research, books, family, physical activity, minor hacking projects. Really cannot find the time to fiddle with another thing.
- rchaud 4y ago> On the Medium one, there are 13 unique claps, two thoughful comments, people saving my article to several lists. Is a handful of additional comments worth the tradeoff? Because Medium.com can decide at any time to tweak the knobs of their recommendation engine, and your admittedly low traffic could go straight down to Bear Blog levels. That is what happened to many people's Instagram accounts, as IG is now favouring organic posts from users that also pay for promoted posts...aka, servicing their real customers.
- jmathai 4y agoBut that tradeoff is hypothetical and would not retroactively remove value that is created in the meantime. I'm not a medium fan either but my feelings are similar to the parent post. If it's something I want to persist then I will take the effort and add it to my jekyll site but that's few and far between. Medium works great for the 99% of long form content I want to publish.
- rg111 4y agoI do not depend on my writings in any way. I also have a pseudonymous Less Wrong account where I say unconventional, unpopular things. See, I don't earn money OR make a name. I also write notes when I need- to Simplenote and Google Docs, and share the links with the people I see fit. I don't measure anything serious or important to me regarding views or reach. They are just a nice bonus. I wouldn’t even have that if not for Medium. FB is where I can get the best reach. But I don't like the distribution of people there, and post seldomly with extremely curated visibility list of "friends". I am happy with 10 likes. I also have an YT channel that helps people (edit: it's code and math). Very low effort channel with near-zero editing. I earn a penny or two. As I said, don't care. Need low-maintenance stuff.
- simonswords82 4y agoRats fleeing the sinking ship the impression I have of this. Am I wrong and in fact Medium is doing well and Ev decided to get off whilst the going is good?
- skilled 4y agoMedium is an absolute plague since it started to enforce its draconian subscription model. It is literally a waste of space for the 10 results you see on the first page of Google searches.
- __rito__ 4y agoMy quip with them is they never started the Partner Program in India. And were very dishonest regarding it. There once was a time when I wanted to earn from my writings, but not any more. But their dishonesty makes it unlikely for me to reconsider them. They said that they would start Partner Program (MPP) in India once Stripe started serving India. Then Stripe became operational in Beta. They said, once Stripe comes out of Beta, they would start MPP in India. Then Stripe came out of Beta. They just stopped mentioning India. They can serve Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia- and not India. That made me frustrated enough to stop using Medium. I do not plan to go back, and I don't need money from writing anymore. I made some money from Quora (you just have to sign W8-BEN, which is a 10 minute process) running Spaces, but somehow Medium never started MPP. Their dishonesty made me angry. Edit: they put a paywall on my writings by default even when they didn't pay me a dime.
- leroman 4y agoA while back I was sold on a subscription because I wanted to subscribe on some topics and get a nice digest in my mail every day or so.. But in actuality I started getting - some shitcoin promoters - some wfh scams - click baity topics without much substance.. So I cancelled (which unfortunately only happens some months later..)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- caseyross 4y agoThe way I see it from the outside, Medium had a lot of lofty goals that unfortunately turned out to be in conflict with each other in the real world. One one hand, they wanted to create the best writing and reading experience on the web, by investing heavily in product design, and manually curating and promoting quality writing that would be interesting to read. On the other hand, they wanted to democratize publishing by making it easy to write and encouraging just anyone to get their ideas out onto the platform, regardless of how readable those writings were. Subscribers that were willing to pay monthly for access to curated, thoughtful writing increasingly found a site filled with low-quality boilerplate. Established writers who had at first enthusiastically adopted Medium increasingly fled the site in order to protect their personal brands and reputations. In the end, no one was happy, except mediocre clickbait writers. There wasn't enough subscription money to justify focusing entirely on quality, and ad-based models were too much in conflict with the platform goals for them to be able to make up the difference via scale. I definitely don't think Medium has been a failure in its first 10 years. Quite the contrary --- they really did raise the bar for reading experiences across the web, and for a time, they did have the best and brightest writers churning out thoughtful, interesting content. But it was an idea ahead of its time. Without established cultural and technical micropayments infrastructure (a situation which has seen practically no progress in these past 10 years), it was always going to be an uphill battle to fund the kind of experiences they wanted to create. I doubt there will be many changes in this state of affairs during the next CEO's tenure. That said, I hope to be surprised, not just because it would be good for Medium, but because it would provide much-needed hope for the web as a whole. Our need for social platforms that care about empowering and educating people, rather than exploiting them, is even greater than it was 10 years ago. Perhaps Medium's next act can help rekindle that flame.
- erichocean 4y agoI'm surprised he didn't leave five years ago.
- zerocrates 4y agoI'm unavoidably reminded of Maciej Cegłowski's very negative 2019 thread on Medium and its future or lack thereof: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1193234501373005824 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1193234501373005824 I haven't really kept up with Medium or the discourse around it at all since then. Have things changed meaningfully?
- stereoradonc 4y agoGood for Ev; better for Medium.