6 ms·
Open for everyone My first question is: "who is this for?" The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking
by mijustin 13y ago
Open for everyone
My first question is: "who is this for?"
The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?
Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I couldn't tell from the blog post.
I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product is for.
- minimaxir 13y agoIt's for the intersection of people a) who want a blog and b) who want a website with a good design. Medium beat Svbtle to the punch, though.
- cliveowen 13y agoMedium wants you to have a Twitter account.
- grinich 13y agoMedium expects you have a Twitter account.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoWouldn't most modern writers have a Twitter account anyway? If you're publishing your piece online wouldn't you want everyone to see it?
- cliveowen 13y agoIf you already have an audience, maybe, but if you don't, then it's just an avoidable restriction.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>an avoidable restriction // How does having an account restrict you, in the context of being a writer wishing to publicise your work?
- lucian1900 13y agoIt restricts Medium to people with Twitter accounts. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone has one.
- Touche 13y agoYou can get them for free, using a throwaway email and fake identity if wanted. Why is it preferable to get a Medium account?
- lucian1900 13y agoBecause you'd have to deal with one less party (trust, security, reliability, support). If you aren't already a Twitter user, it's simpler to have the option of making a Medium account.
- BlackDeath3 13y agoIf given the choice between two options, ceteris paribus, I'd choose the one without the Twitter account restriction as well.
- kibibu 13y agoWhat happens when Twitter crashes and burns, and now you can't access your blog?
- baddox 13y agoI would bet a small amount of money that Twitter outlasts Medium. And if Medium outlasts Twitter, do you think Medium will just sit by and say "well that sucks that none of our users can access their blogs"?
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoIf you are stuck behind the great firewall of china, no actually.
- corresation 13y agoGood design is a fleeting, abstract concept that has more to do with correlation than anything else: Correlate something with good content and the design seems good by association. When it becomes common, though, it is ready for displacement. This is true of virtually every "good design" over the years. At the beginning people almost always thought it was superior in some way.
- jimbokun 13y agoApple became the most valuable company in the world by focusing on good design.
- corresation 13y agoApple grew because they made products people wanted at opportune times, executing brilliantly. Indeed, though, Apple proves the point I was making: They executed well and made products people wanted, so every decision they made goes backwards into justifying itself as good design. Speaking of Dustin Curtis, that the iPhone was 3.5" was held as some holy number of smartphone size (rather than being the size that Apple cemented themselves into back when building a 3.5" LCD was actually fairly expensive). And then 4.0" became the ultimate in design. And, soon enough, larger sizes will become the pinnacle of design. Were any other company responsible for making the new Mac Pro, it would have been met with devastating reviews. Correlation, however, and people somehow reach to find a way to make a case for why it is actually a good design.
- fredgrott 13y agoYou forget something... Ever hear of Frog Design? Frog Design was the main motivation behind Apple hardware design..look up its history its a great read on the true story of Industrial design at Apple
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- r0s 13y agoAnd now they're dropping skew-morphism, which demonstrates the point.
- cyanbane 13y agoand Ghost which is self service and hosted.
- gmu3 13y agoSvbtle has been around longer than Medium although you had to apply to use it (or there is a pretty popular wordpress knockoff theme).
- slaven 13y agoI always felt Medium borrowed heavily from Svbtle, which came first. Now, Svbtle brings something different to the table: like Medium, it's simple to use and focused on writing. Unlike Medium, you get to own your identity, use your CNAME, etc...
- leobelle 13y agoThe thing about Medium though is that it requires you to have a beautiful large image for every post, otherwise it looks terrible. There are a lot of terrible looking Medium blogs with ugly pictures.
- yaph 13y agoApart from what you said, I miss information about pricing, at least I didn't find any. I assume that this will be a Freemium product and I also think that the "pro" version will have some features that I would sooner or later need, at least that's my experience with other platforms I tested. One example being Google's App engine, which turned out to be rather expensive compared to competitors and didn't justify that for me. Investing a lot of hours in a platform that you don't end up using is not that satisfying.
- lbr 13y agoIt feels to me that they did build this for a certain type of person. One who likes writing without distractions. One who likes to brainstorm. One who appreciates simplicity. I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis. It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products that start out with a small number of people who love it... this could also be appreciated and used by others. I am not a serious writer, but I hate writing in square spaces ui because its distracting. I might not have been able to articulate this because I'm not a serious writer - But in hind sight I realize that I usually write in word and then paste into squarespace. Svbtle eliminates this process - it makes writing simpler. So yes. Built for a specific sub set. But with features that everyone can appreciate.
- mijustin 13y agoTo me that still feels too general: "seasoned and experienced authors" could be a 45 year-old erotica writer who sells books on Amazon, or it could be a 23 year-old tech news blogger who's been posting since age 15. For example, imagine if the blog post / homepage looked something like this: "Blogging built for developers" -"Having trouble building a technical audience?" -"Want to properly format your posts with syntax highlighting?" -"Need support for code snippets?" "Then this platform is for you"
- oddevan 13y agoI'll add that the original "selling" point of Svbtle was its "drafts first" approach (that I really appreciate). There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach. Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.
- lbr 13y agoYes, the identity aspect is interesting. Medium seems to be focused on pleasing readers. The whole site is designed to read one article to the next. Often from different authors. This might make reading easier, but might not be best for writers. Svbtle does have that aspect (it calls itself "a new kind of magazine"), but seems to put a lot of energy into pleasing the writers.
- romanovcode 13y agoI think it's because they are losing popularity thus want to gain some revenue. Nothing wrong with this.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control? I've been using Svbtle for a while now, and for me, the killer is this, in order: On my own domain, looks great, and hosted by someone else. I care that I'm not putting content I care about into a closed platform. I'd never post to Medium. I'm a backend kind of developer, so knowing how to design something myself is awkward. I could pay someone to do it, but I'd still have to implement it. While I am a backend developer, the last thing I want to do is deal with ANOTHER project to yak shave and suck up more of my time. Hosting it myself is a no-go.
- shurcooL 13y agoIt might be for me. It may not be. It is _definitely_ for me to try and find out. I've been wanting a very simple, minimalistic platform to blog. I _thought_ the reason I've abandoned my wordpress blog is because I dislike how complex and advanced it is. I want the simplest thing ever. Svbtle looked like that thing since it first came out. I'll find out soon enough.
- shurcooL 13y agoI just tried to test out its technical aspects, here's what I found: > I like it, but noticing a few problems so far. Can’t tab while writing markdown. No live preview for markdown (may or may not be a problem). No confirmation of saving changes if you close the tab/navigate away. Drag and drop to upload images works okay, but Cmd+V doesn’t. > Fenced blocks don’t do syntax highlighting (for Go at least). > Can’t see invisible whitespace. > The rest is good. > Also, I don't see a way to export your content, nor a way to delete your account.