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If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the

by sytelus 13y ago

If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building. Only Evan Williams can do 3 startups in a row, two of which are blog engines and one of which is... well, again a blog engine (albeit with 140 char limit). Granted he never seems to have any brilliant original ideas, but the dude knows how to spread his stuff like wildfire and pile up yet another billion dollar in the process. Almost overnight, posts on Medium has been appearing on HN like TechCrunch and other well known outlets who have put years on building reputation. To me, most posts doesn't seem to have that much of a substance but headlines are eye catching and they do get lots of upvotes (hopefully, not from faking). Seriously, how does he do it?

sytelus 13y ago
My suspicion that posts from Mediam are being upvoted by buch of their stackholders may not be entirely false. Looks like any anti-medium comments gets promptly downvoted without explanation.
iaskwhy 13y ago
If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building. You really believe this? Blogs are a huge market, I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly.
jonnathanson 13y ago
Medium isn't just a blogging engine, per se. As the author of this article points out, it's also a content farm. The genius of Medium is that it (theoretically) encourages people to post thoughtful, good content -- and the collective efforts of everyone doing this create a high-quality content farm at scale. This is different from the typical take on content-farming, i.e., paying a bunch of people peanuts to crank out endless iterations on aggregated Miley Cyrus headlines. Now, one could certainly make the argument that Medium's game is a little shady. To paraphrase The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick Medium ever played was convincing the world it wasn't a content farm." One could argue, furthermore, that most of the content on Medium isn't all that good. But I think the jury's still out on that charge. I've seen some good stuff on Medium, and I've seen some crap. But it doesn't seem, on average, markedly better or worse than what I'd expect to see on a random walk through any other blogging platform.

by sytelus 13y ago

sytelus 13y ago

My suspicion that posts from Mediam are being upvoted by buch of their stackholders may not be entirely false. Looks like any anti-medium comments gets promptly downvoted without explanation.

iaskwhy 13y ago

If you went to VC and said your bright new unmistakably hot crazy brilliant idea was ...hold your breath... a blog engine, you might have been thrown out of the building. You really believe this? Blogs are a huge market, I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly.

jonnathanson 13y ago

Medium isn't just a blogging engine, per se. As the author of this article points out, it's also a content farm. The genius of Medium is that it (theoretically) encourages people to post thoughtful, good content -- and the collective efforts of everyone doing this create a high-quality content farm at scale. This is different from the typical take on content-farming, i.e., paying a bunch of people peanuts to crank out endless iterations on aggregated Miley Cyrus headlines. Now, one could certainly make the argument that Medium's game is a little shady. To paraphrase The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick Medium ever played was convincing the world it wasn't a content farm." One could argue, furthermore, that most of the content on Medium isn't all that good. But I think the jury's still out on that charge. I've seen some good stuff on Medium, and I've seen some crap. But it doesn't seem, on average, markedly better or worse than what I'd expect to see on a random walk through any other blogging platform.