6 ms·

On Medium

65 points by bradly 13y ago

gfosco 13y ago
Each different sharing outlet provides a unique level of anxiety, ease of sharing, ego, and focus. The reason I like the concept of Medium is that it encourages non-attention-seeking people to write publicly about nearly any topic. The categories are a good structure, and the focus is on the content rather than the person posting it. It's not your blog nor your servers to maintain. It's a public feed and you're just a small fish. The barrier to entry is low, and the stats are nice to see.
hackerchic 13y ago
As the author mentions, Medium seems best for the regular casual blogger. Bloggers with large followings are probably better served keeping their following and all the comments on their own turf.
- cmbaus 13y ago
  I am always surprised how quickly individuals will give up control over their own content.
  - presty 13y ago
    and the lack of identity
  - shanselman 13y ago
    Agreed. I prefer all my content at a URL and server that I control. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx
ricardobeat 13y ago
Many articles on Medium have all external links shortened to bit.ly URLs. Is that an option in the publishing interface? I find it extremely annoying, you can track outbound links using javascript without hiding the actual url.
- raymondduke 13y ago
  The last time I checked, that wasn't an option. And now that you mentioned it, I might start to do it, too (sorry). I'm not sure how you can track links via javascript, but I do know how to make a bit.ly link.
  - shuzchen 13y ago
    Bit.ly is also useful in that you can use the same link across the web and have analytics all in one place. Otherwise you'd need to check medium to track links you posted there, and some other site for links from there etc.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    You can theoretically set up Google Analytics to follow outbound links. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en
    - raymondduke 13y ago
      Seems too complicated.
      - ricardobeat 13y ago
        This is something that Medium itself could set up for you. If you want something simpler, just paste this into your page: https://gist.github.com/5899046 https://gist.github.com/5899046
  - toni 13y ago
    Every software I ever programmed follows bit.ly links once and insert the original url into the database. From then on, users can always go to the url directly. Don't hold your breath for the accuracy of bit.ly link tracking.
jmduke 13y ago
I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either consciously or unconsciously. I think part of it is the fact that it separates content from its creators; I think part of it is that it sprung up the same time as Svbtle, and grew conspicuously ubiquitous whereas Svbtle has remained pretty confined to the tech sphere. The underlying value proposition by any sort of blogging engine (Posthaven, Medium, Svbtle, et al) is limited to a network, ease of use, and a good design. For most tech people, ease of use is a non-factor (you can extol 'distractions-free design', but you can put vim or Byword in full-screen mode) -- and I think the way people are reading is shifting away from individual sites and towards external services to the extent that design isn't a huge factor (everything looks the same in NewsBlur or Instapaper.) This leaves the network/audience, which is a much more interesting concept: Svbtle is clearly going for a more curated approach (though the value of that curation is arguable), whereas Medium's trying a bunch of stuff at once (collections, editor's feed, etc.) I can't help thinking that the winner of this nouveau publishing spectrum isn't going to be a hosting service, but a linking service. You might never get Patrick McKenzie to blog on your platform (because why would he?) but you can always link to his material.
- raymondduke 13y ago
  I like your comment, and your last name. I have an Uncle named Jim. This isn't him, is it? That would be quite the coincidence. --- I think the next best blogging platform will be one that does what WordPress used to do. I have my eyes on Ghost, which claims to be a minimalistic blogging system that you have full control over. It's interesting you mention a linking service. I am actually working somewhat of a linking/sharing/status service that will put salience on the conversation instead of the publishing.
  - bpatrianakos 13y ago
    Ghost was a good idea but seems to be dead. Last post I can find is from last year. It's design inspired my own service however which was a nice silver lining.
    - 13y ago
raymondduke 13y ago
I've had two Medium articles get over 1.1k views and a 90%+ readership. I have about 6 subscribers on my WordPress blog that gets ~100 views a day. Just putting that out there. Make of it what you will. By the way, I once had an article get 10k views after a share on HN, then had that same article get ~120,000 after a republish on Lifehacker. The morale of all this? I don't know. Sure, it feels kind of good knowing that many people are reading your content, but the bigger picture is what are you doing with the viewership. I'm not so gung-ho on views anymore because views don't pay my rent, money does. Money is the ultimate metric. Sure, viewership is nice, but only because of what it leads to: money and conversations. Medium is an okay place for conversations, and definitely is not a place to make money. I've yet to see an affiliate link or someone telling me to buy their book on the site. If anything, it's a place used to build your reputation -- it's like a nice outfit that makes you temporarily look good. I saw temporarily because it's a new site and has somewhat of a gated community feel to it. I like reading. I like writing. But in the end, it comes down to making money. yeah, I'm all over the place with this comment. It's Sunday night and I am a single guy that lives alone -- I got a lot on my mind!
- tasuki 13y ago
  Does it come down to making money? Writing is about getting a message accross, be it a "give me money" message or a different one.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
te_chris 13y ago
Whatever publishers think, I've started using (medium.com) on HN as a negative content filter. Was quite impressed when I first saw it, but the last few times I've clicked on something on the front page of HN on medium it's been poorly thought out link bait. This isn't unique to medium of course, but I've gone from having a high-end perception of their content to a low-end one.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  I've noticed that the posts tend to be well composed but on the fluff side in terms of content.
abdophoto 13y ago
I'm the co-founder of The Tech Block http://thetechblock.com http://thetechblock.com and we sort of built something similar to Medium (before Medium existed) except it's focused on Technology and we pick and choose the pieces that go on our site. Though it has similarities, the big difference is that our site is not a place where you'd actually type out your article. Instead, if it's housed on your site already, you can choose to cross publish to our audience of tech enthusiasts. If you haven't heard of it, give it a look.
- rokhayakebe 13y ago
  Love the look. Two things: 1) The author info gets in the way on the left, making it harder to read (remember we reading in F), 2) Those outgoing links, I would rather have you guys grab the content and reformatted nicely within the site for a unified experience.
minimaxir 13y ago
My big issue with Medium is branding. With Svbtle, you could atleast use your own domain name to link to your articles. With Medium, you always see the same medium.com domain and the same black-on-beige background. There's no sense of identity. How often do people read articles by the same author on Medium? How often do people remember who wrote an article?
- Ultron 13y ago
  Medium is for writers who don't know how to brand. Medium essentially takes all the credit, traffic and recognition. And the writers seem to like that, weirdly enough.
dclowd9901 13y ago
More bullshit SV circle jerking. I wonder if anyone's working on how to make public schools better, or a way to keep politicians more accountable, or a way to help close the wage gap, or... I came here to change the world. And I feel like all I see are nerds blowing each other about The next minimalist uber for twitter.
- probably_wrong 13y ago
  > I came here to change the world. Genuinely interested: what do you mean by "here"? HN, programming, life?
  - dclowd9901 13y ago
    Silicon Valley. I grew up dreaming about Livermore Labs, Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard (in its day), Apple. Now everything is in the city, and each start up as vapid and pointless as the last.
    - raymondduke 13y ago
      If you want to change the world, change yourself. You should never rely on others to change in the ways you'd like them to.
      - msutherl 13y ago
        You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential to change others.
    - msutherl 13y ago
      That kind of innovation (a) is difficult and (b) requires precisely configured conditions. Unfortunately the lesson that corporations learned from the golden age of these labs was that though they produced amazing things, they didn't provide an adequate return on the investment. Now that everybody has learned that lesson, there are not many such labs left and the ones that are thriving operate much like either product incubators (Microsoft) or agencies (PARC). Another problem is that there are not many properly educated people to establish and run labs like this thanks to our education system falling apart. But you won't hear anybody talking about that. Things will just get worse and worse.
ajkjk 13y ago
Initially I was very impressed with Medium: it looked good and had a high rate of good content - enough that I happily assumed that new content Medium was probably going to be good. Now I'm very depressed with Medium. It's filling with trite, immature rants that keep polluting my otherwise quality feed of opinions. I no longer click the links and definitely won't be chancing upon the rare quality material. The same thing happened to Quora, sadly.
Cherian 13y ago
Sometime back someone invited me to Medium and I am yet to try this out. I am still confused by to why I should try it out. Some questions I have: My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium? Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ? Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you? I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same? If distraction free writing were the USP, I’d recommend my co-founder’s iaWriter [2]. It does not publish directly and that’s a big negative. Isn’t this good enough? [1]: http://www.gigpeppers.com/ http://www.gigpeppers.com/ [2]: http://www.iawriter.com/ http://www.iawriter.com/
- lmm 13y ago
  >My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium? If you care about that kind of thing and are good at it you probably shouldn't. Medium maintains its own credible brand, which is a godsend for someone who just wants to write, and not worry about design, branding or personality. >Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ? Of course they can't ensure anything. But you have xx potential readers (in a more immediate fashion than the way you have 1 million potential readers for anything you put on the web). For some people that helps. >Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you? I have my own copies of everything I write. If medium brings in changes a year from now and I have to move somewhere different, it's no big. That it might go away at some time is no reason not to enjoy its benefits now. >I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same? Nope. I want to write, and to be read, but I'd be happy to do so anonymously. It's not something I do to build up my personal brand or anything like that.
kristianp 13y ago
I can't see any mention here, but does Medium pay their authors for the content? Or is the pertinent question, how well does it pay compared to other article sites?
- raymondduke 13y ago
  Medium does not pay a majority of their authors, however, I've heard that they pay some "big names" to help them gain traffic. So unless you are a well known blogger/journalist, don't expect a check.
  - kristianp 13y ago
    So sites like Medium are effectively driving down the pay of most authors (except some stars) by competing with other sites that pay for content. Bad news for authors.
workhere-io 13y ago
One thing I dislike about Medium is the fact that selecting text displays a Twitter/conversation thingy. A lot of people, myself included, have a habit of selecting portions of text when we read. Having that Twitter thing show up constantly while reading is annoying.
grrrando 13y ago
I publish on Medium and parse my author RSS feed for display on my website. See it here, at the bottom: http://grrrando.com/ http://grrrando.com/ I think Medium is great. As is mentioned in the article, the editor is fantastic in its minimalism. A key difference between myself and the author of this post is that I have no interest in creating or maintaining a blog (proper) of my own; I just want to write. I've wanted to write for a while, too, but the roadblock of setting something up and getting it looking decent prevented me from moving forward. For a while I thought Tumblr had been what I was looking for but text-based posts become utterly lost in the stream of naked ladies and pixel art (or is that just me?). Stats wise, it's interesting to hear what an "Editor's Choice" pick on Medium can result in. I've got several posts on Medium that have 100 or fewer reads and they were posted to correct "collections". Which shows that Medium is not the place to build up an audience that you don't already have. Lacking the ability to "follow" an author – on-site at least, RSS is a non-advertised option – shows that Medium is more oriented towards "real time" (news cycle) longform than being a platform for authorship (for everyone besides maybe @ev and a handful of SV folks that always get featured). My most popular article was posted about two weeks ago and has had around 2,000 reads. This isn't due to any Medium feature, though - just good old retweets and viral spreading. It was a satire listicle - prime viral material. Probably not what Medium was made for. Getting all of those reads, though, made me wonder exactly where all the traffic was coming from. I wish Medium had more in-depth analytics for this.

65 points by bradly 13y ago

Each different sharing outlet provides a unique level of anxiety, ease of sharing, ego, and focus. The reason I like the concept of Medium is that it encourages non-attention-seeking people to write publicly about nearly any topic. The categories are a good structure, and the focus is on the content rather than the person posting it. It's not your blog nor your servers to maintain. It's a public feed and you're just a small fish. The barrier to entry is low, and the stats are nice to see.

hackerchic 13y ago

As the author mentions, Medium seems best for the regular casual blogger. Bloggers with large followings are probably better served keeping their following and all the comments on their own turf.

cmbaus 13y ago
I am always surprised how quickly individuals will give up control over their own content.
- presty 13y ago
  and the lack of identity
- shanselman 13y ago
  Agreed. I prefer all my content at a URL and server that I control. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx

ricardobeat 13y ago

Many articles on Medium have all external links shortened to bit.ly URLs. Is that an option in the publishing interface? I find it extremely annoying, you can track outbound links using javascript without hiding the actual url.

raymondduke 13y ago
The last time I checked, that wasn't an option. And now that you mentioned it, I might start to do it, too (sorry). I'm not sure how you can track links via javascript, but I do know how to make a bit.ly link.
- shuzchen 13y ago
  Bit.ly is also useful in that you can use the same link across the web and have analytics all in one place. Otherwise you'd need to check medium to track links you posted there, and some other site for links from there etc.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  You can theoretically set up Google Analytics to follow outbound links. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en
  - raymondduke 13y ago
    Seems too complicated.
    - ricardobeat 13y ago
      This is something that Medium itself could set up for you. If you want something simpler, just paste this into your page: https://gist.github.com/5899046 https://gist.github.com/5899046
- toni 13y ago
  Every software I ever programmed follows bit.ly links once and insert the original url into the database. From then on, users can always go to the url directly. Don't hold your breath for the accuracy of bit.ly link tracking.

jmduke 13y ago

I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either consciously or unconsciously. I think part of it is the fact that it separates content from its creators; I think part of it is that it sprung up the same time as Svbtle, and grew conspicuously ubiquitous whereas Svbtle has remained pretty confined to the tech sphere. The underlying value proposition by any sort of blogging engine (Posthaven, Medium, Svbtle, et al) is limited to a network, ease of use, and a good design. For most tech people, ease of use is a non-factor (you can extol 'distractions-free design', but you can put vim or Byword in full-screen mode) -- and I think the way people are reading is shifting away from individual sites and towards external services to the extent that design isn't a huge factor (everything looks the same in NewsBlur or Instapaper.) This leaves the network/audience, which is a much more interesting concept: Svbtle is clearly going for a more curated approach (though the value of that curation is arguable), whereas Medium's trying a bunch of stuff at once (collections, editor's feed, etc.) I can't help thinking that the winner of this nouveau publishing spectrum isn't going to be a hosting service, but a linking service. You might never get Patrick McKenzie to blog on your platform (because why would he?) but you can always link to his material.

raymondduke 13y ago
I like your comment, and your last name. I have an Uncle named Jim. This isn't him, is it? That would be quite the coincidence. --- I think the next best blogging platform will be one that does what WordPress used to do. I have my eyes on Ghost, which claims to be a minimalistic blogging system that you have full control over. It's interesting you mention a linking service. I am actually working somewhat of a linking/sharing/status service that will put salience on the conversation instead of the publishing.
- bpatrianakos 13y ago
  Ghost was a good idea but seems to be dead. Last post I can find is from last year. It's design inspired my own service however which was a nice silver lining.
  - 13y ago

raymondduke 13y ago

I've had two Medium articles get over 1.1k views and a 90%+ readership. I have about 6 subscribers on my WordPress blog that gets ~100 views a day. Just putting that out there. Make of it what you will. By the way, I once had an article get 10k views after a share on HN, then had that same article get ~120,000 after a republish on Lifehacker. The morale of all this? I don't know. Sure, it feels kind of good knowing that many people are reading your content, but the bigger picture is what are you doing with the viewership. I'm not so gung-ho on views anymore because views don't pay my rent, money does. Money is the ultimate metric. Sure, viewership is nice, but only because of what it leads to: money and conversations. Medium is an okay place for conversations, and definitely is not a place to make money. I've yet to see an affiliate link or someone telling me to buy their book on the site. If anything, it's a place used to build your reputation -- it's like a nice outfit that makes you temporarily look good. I saw temporarily because it's a new site and has somewhat of a gated community feel to it. I like reading. I like writing. But in the end, it comes down to making money. yeah, I'm all over the place with this comment. It's Sunday night and I am a single guy that lives alone -- I got a lot on my mind!

tasuki 13y ago
Does it come down to making money? Writing is about getting a message accross, be it a "give me money" message or a different one.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

te_chris 13y ago

Whatever publishers think, I've started using (medium.com) on HN as a negative content filter. Was quite impressed when I first saw it, but the last few times I've clicked on something on the front page of HN on medium it's been poorly thought out link bait. This isn't unique to medium of course, but I've gone from having a high-end perception of their content to a low-end one.

hkmurakami 13y ago
I've noticed that the posts tend to be well composed but on the fluff side in terms of content.

abdophoto 13y ago

I'm the co-founder of The Tech Block http://thetechblock.com http://thetechblock.com and we sort of built something similar to Medium (before Medium existed) except it's focused on Technology and we pick and choose the pieces that go on our site. Though it has similarities, the big difference is that our site is not a place where you'd actually type out your article. Instead, if it's housed on your site already, you can choose to cross publish to our audience of tech enthusiasts. If you haven't heard of it, give it a look.

rokhayakebe 13y ago
Love the look. Two things: 1) The author info gets in the way on the left, making it harder to read (remember we reading in F), 2) Those outgoing links, I would rather have you guys grab the content and reformatted nicely within the site for a unified experience.

minimaxir 13y ago

My big issue with Medium is branding. With Svbtle, you could atleast use your own domain name to link to your articles. With Medium, you always see the same medium.com domain and the same black-on-beige background. There's no sense of identity. How often do people read articles by the same author on Medium? How often do people remember who wrote an article?

Ultron 13y ago
Medium is for writers who don't know how to brand. Medium essentially takes all the credit, traffic and recognition. And the writers seem to like that, weirdly enough.

dclowd9901 13y ago

More bullshit SV circle jerking. I wonder if anyone's working on how to make public schools better, or a way to keep politicians more accountable, or a way to help close the wage gap, or... I came here to change the world. And I feel like all I see are nerds blowing each other about The next minimalist uber for twitter.

probably_wrong 13y ago
> I came here to change the world. Genuinely interested: what do you mean by "here"? HN, programming, life?
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  Silicon Valley. I grew up dreaming about Livermore Labs, Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard (in its day), Apple. Now everything is in the city, and each start up as vapid and pointless as the last.
  - raymondduke 13y ago
    If you want to change the world, change yourself. You should never rely on others to change in the ways you'd like them to.
    - msutherl 13y ago
      You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential to change others.
  - msutherl 13y ago
    That kind of innovation (a) is difficult and (b) requires precisely configured conditions. Unfortunately the lesson that corporations learned from the golden age of these labs was that though they produced amazing things, they didn't provide an adequate return on the investment. Now that everybody has learned that lesson, there are not many such labs left and the ones that are thriving operate much like either product incubators (Microsoft) or agencies (PARC). Another problem is that there are not many properly educated people to establish and run labs like this thanks to our education system falling apart. But you won't hear anybody talking about that. Things will just get worse and worse.

ajkjk 13y ago

Initially I was very impressed with Medium: it looked good and had a high rate of good content - enough that I happily assumed that new content Medium was probably going to be good. Now I'm very depressed with Medium. It's filling with trite, immature rants that keep polluting my otherwise quality feed of opinions. I no longer click the links and definitely won't be chancing upon the rare quality material. The same thing happened to Quora, sadly.

Cherian 13y ago

Sometime back someone invited me to Medium and I am yet to try this out. I am still confused by to why I should try it out. Some questions I have: My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium? Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ? Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you? I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same? If distraction free writing were the USP, I’d recommend my co-founder’s iaWriter [2]. It does not publish directly and that’s a big negative. Isn’t this good enough? [1]: http://www.gigpeppers.com/ http://www.gigpeppers.com/ [2]: http://www.iawriter.com/ http://www.iawriter.com/

lmm 13y ago
>My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium? If you care about that kind of thing and are good at it you probably shouldn't. Medium maintains its own credible brand, which is a godsend for someone who just wants to write, and not worry about design, branding or personality. >Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of “Editors pick” which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ? Of course they can't ensure anything. But you have xx potential readers (in a more immediate fashion than the way you have 1 million potential readers for anything you put on the web). For some people that helps. >Some time from now they’ll have to make money. They’ll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you? I have my own copies of everything I write. If medium brings in changes a year from now and I have to move somewhere different, it's no big. That it might go away at some time is no reason not to enjoy its benefits now. >I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of “I own it” is incredible. Don’t you feel the same? Nope. I want to write, and to be read, but I'd be happy to do so anonymously. It's not something I do to build up my personal brand or anything like that.

kristianp 13y ago

I can't see any mention here, but does Medium pay their authors for the content? Or is the pertinent question, how well does it pay compared to other article sites?

raymondduke 13y ago
Medium does not pay a majority of their authors, however, I've heard that they pay some "big names" to help them gain traffic. So unless you are a well known blogger/journalist, don't expect a check.
- kristianp 13y ago
  So sites like Medium are effectively driving down the pay of most authors (except some stars) by competing with other sites that pay for content. Bad news for authors.

workhere-io 13y ago

One thing I dislike about Medium is the fact that selecting text displays a Twitter/conversation thingy. A lot of people, myself included, have a habit of selecting portions of text when we read. Having that Twitter thing show up constantly while reading is annoying.

grrrando 13y ago

I publish on Medium and parse my author RSS feed for display on my website. See it here, at the bottom: http://grrrando.com/ http://grrrando.com/ I think Medium is great. As is mentioned in the article, the editor is fantastic in its minimalism. A key difference between myself and the author of this post is that I have no interest in creating or maintaining a blog (proper) of my own; I just want to write. I've wanted to write for a while, too, but the roadblock of setting something up and getting it looking decent prevented me from moving forward. For a while I thought Tumblr had been what I was looking for but text-based posts become utterly lost in the stream of naked ladies and pixel art (or is that just me?). Stats wise, it's interesting to hear what an "Editor's Choice" pick on Medium can result in. I've got several posts on Medium that have 100 or fewer reads and they were posted to correct "collections". Which shows that Medium is not the place to build up an audience that you don't already have. Lacking the ability to "follow" an author – on-site at least, RSS is a non-advertised option – shows that Medium is more oriented towards "real time" (news cycle) longform than being a platform for authorship (for everyone besides maybe @ev and a handful of SV folks that always get featured). My most popular article was posted about two weeks ago and has had around 2,000 reads. This isn't due to any Medium feature, though - just good old retweets and viral spreading. It was a satire listicle - prime viral material. Probably not what Medium was made for. Getting all of those reads, though, made me wonder exactly where all the traffic was coming from. I wish Medium had more in-depth analytics for this.