What I remember about Svbtle may well be completely false, but these are the impressions I got from it at the time: it's an exclusive club for bloggers who see

What I remember about Svbtle may well be completely false, but these are the impressions I got from it at the time: it's an exclusive club for bloggers who see themselves as elite, enough so for that perception to get in the way of perceiving the actual content. I didn't even know you could sign up for it as a mere mortal without being invited, so the marketing message was quite strong. It's not that Medium is great either. Those obnoxious gigantic pictures on top, serving a page that should be pretty simple but somehow manages to suck up a lot of CPU/GPU (enough to make my Macbook switch graphics cards), and annoyingly you can't drag and drop URLs into a Medium page which I do a lot to recycle tabs. In the end it comes down to perception. Both services showed up too many times on HN initially, often for content that didn't seem very worthwhile. It's par for the course, as far as blogging is concerned though. But only Svbtle managed to actually convey a strong negative bias upon an article before I even open it.