6 ms·

Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like i

Not everyone has the time to create their own platform and curation network. That's the reason why people will keep using Medium. We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.

Apocryphon 7y ago
WordPress, Blogspot, even Xanga and LiveJournal predate Medium and didn't have to resort to subscription services.
- VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
  better than ads
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    I don't think Blogspot/Blogger had ads.
  - asdff 7y ago
    I'll take ads, I block them anyway.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Pretty sure all of them had subscriptions. Hell, I was a paid user of LJ until they got sold to the Russians and everyone left.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    I think they had subscriptions but they were certainly far less in your face than Medium's paid content ads. I think tiered services are fine if they don't spam you about them.
regnerba 7y ago
The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
- joegahona 7y ago
  Medium has a built-in audience so the number of people who will see a particular post and share it on Reddit, HackerNews, etc., is higher than if you just host it on Wordpress and do all the marketing yourself.
  - xkcd-sucks 7y ago
    Have you ever met someone who navigaed to medium.com to fin articles, or is this a matter of faith?
    - adamisom 7y ago
      I've typed in medium.com I've also clicked on articles while on the website for a different article
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite aggressive with the spam flags.
      - CM30 7y ago
        Of course, the majority of said articles the site recommends seem to be those by someone with an existing audience/fanbase, or which already got a ton of likes and shares. As far as someone without an audience posting an article is concerned, the chances of Medium suggesting your work this way is pretty slim.
      - 7y ago
sdan 7y ago
Use Ghost. It's free, given you have a server set up.
- robjan 7y ago
  And you have just identified the reason that most people won't use it
  - sdan 7y ago
    Use DigitalOcean One-click instances, and it essentially makes it for you with all the necessary steps. It's super simple. I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.
    - HatchedLake721 7y ago
      Right, I’ll also teach my mom some DevOps and Kubernetes along the way since she has to use Digital Ocean and Docker for her knitting blog.
      - kkarakk 7y ago
        if your mum actually wants to own/monetise her knitting blog SOMEONE will have to do this anyways. Stop putting effort into things that only benefit someone else(Medium). I'm not advocating monetising your hobby but instead that no one else should own content you create and do awkward things with it that you don't sanction or condone
    - dickeytk 7y ago
      Which costs money, and medium does not.
      - chrshawkes 7y ago
        It sort of does when they take and or restrict your content which took time and effort to create. Time and effort creating content is certainly money.
robjan 7y ago
I don't buy the curation argument. I see a lot of Medium articles published on Hacker Noon/Free Code Camp and then posted to Hacker News which remind me of the PHP tutorials that we always complain about.
wmf 7y ago
I think the point is to reject the concept of "platforms" and "curation networks" completely, not to recommend that people try to create their own Medium equivalent. Just let your blog be a blog; you weren't going to win the social media lottery anyway.
- jsilence 7y ago
  Yes. Remember that in the earlies a lot of sites had web ring links at the bottom of the page? Wondering why this has not made a comeback yet. Maybe instead of static linking web ring 2.0 could utilize activity pub to highlight relevant fresh content from other sites in the ring.
tonystubblebine 7y ago
I almost always end up posting in the comments when I see Medium on the front page of HN, basically the same thing every time. I've found the Medium experience to be quite good, and even world positive. I'd been running a self-improvement group blog as an ancillary initiative to the rest of my business. The blogging was kind of cool, but not successful enough to think much about. Then Medium asked if we'd be interested in professionalizing what we do. Medium's CEO and I both worked for the tech publisher O'Reilly early in our careers, so I think that's why he thought we could pull it off. And so I've gotten to really experience the before and the after of Medium's paywall. Before professionalizing, publishing seemed barely worthwhile. And it only was worthwhile if I could make the posts viral enough and the call to action catchy enough. That's not really my MO, which is why we struggled. Medium's CEO has made the case that free content has been deeply corrupted by these marketing needs. Maybe some people can opt out, but I wasn't able to. I absolutely was cutting short my effort as a writer and then manipulating the start and end of articles to serve my marketing goals (otherwise, I couldn't justify the time). In the new system, we just write differently. We know the article is the product people pay for and we don't need to corrupt it with any secondary marketing goals. I see this as a world positive, where Medium has been able to create an ecosystem that allows for deeper and more authoritative articles. If you're reading self-improvement articles on Medium, a simple judge is to ask yourself if the author has any 1st hand experience. The vast majority of the free side of that topic on Medium is written by content marketers who are experts in virality but are basically just making up or cargo culting the advice. (Literally, much of it is farmed out to Upwork) Part of what drew in our subject matter experts was enough money to be worth their time. We're going to send more than $100k to authors this year (probably a lot more). I'm trying not to jump in here to market my own stuff. What I'm talking about above is our self-improvement publication. We're also testing two more pubs on different topics, which I think says something about how lucrative we're finding the editing. But it's too early for me to say how those are going. I have a number of other biases here (small amount of Medium stock, Medium's CEO was on my board for a long time and was my boss in 2005), but I'm hoping people see my actions, which are to double down on Medium over and over again, to be an indication that I'm a true fan.
chrshawkes 7y ago
I feel I could make a sufficient replica with free open source tools in a matter of days, maybe hours.

Apocryphon 7y ago

WordPress, Blogspot, even Xanga and LiveJournal predate Medium and didn't have to resort to subscription services.

VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
better than ads
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  I don't think Blogspot/Blogger had ads.
- asdff 7y ago
  I'll take ads, I block them anyway.
egypturnash 7y ago
Pretty sure all of them had subscriptions. Hell, I was a paid user of LJ until they got sold to the Russians and everyone left.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  I think they had subscriptions but they were certainly far less in your face than Medium's paid content ads. I think tiered services are fine if they don't spam you about them.

regnerba 7y ago

The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.

joegahona 7y ago
Medium has a built-in audience so the number of people who will see a particular post and share it on Reddit, HackerNews, etc., is higher than if you just host it on Wordpress and do all the marketing yourself.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  Have you ever met someone who navigaed to medium.com to fin articles, or is this a matter of faith?
  - adamisom 7y ago
    I've typed in medium.com I've also clicked on articles while on the website for a different article
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite aggressive with the spam flags.
    - CM30 7y ago
      Of course, the majority of said articles the site recommends seem to be those by someone with an existing audience/fanbase, or which already got a ton of likes and shares. As far as someone without an audience posting an article is concerned, the chances of Medium suggesting your work this way is pretty slim.
    - 7y ago

sdan 7y ago

Use Ghost. It's free, given you have a server set up.

robjan 7y ago
And you have just identified the reason that most people won't use it
- sdan 7y ago
  Use DigitalOcean One-click instances, and it essentially makes it for you with all the necessary steps. It's super simple. I used that a while back and now run it on Docker on GCP since DO was a bit expensive.
  - HatchedLake721 7y ago
    Right, I’ll also teach my mom some DevOps and Kubernetes along the way since she has to use Digital Ocean and Docker for her knitting blog.
    - kkarakk 7y ago
      if your mum actually wants to own/monetise her knitting blog SOMEONE will have to do this anyways. Stop putting effort into things that only benefit someone else(Medium). I'm not advocating monetising your hobby but instead that no one else should own content you create and do awkward things with it that you don't sanction or condone
  - dickeytk 7y ago
    Which costs money, and medium does not.
    - chrshawkes 7y ago
      It sort of does when they take and or restrict your content which took time and effort to create. Time and effort creating content is certainly money.

robjan 7y ago

I don't buy the curation argument. I see a lot of Medium articles published on Hacker Noon/Free Code Camp and then posted to Hacker News which remind me of the PHP tutorials that we always complain about.

wmf 7y ago

I think the point is to reject the concept of "platforms" and "curation networks" completely, not to recommend that people try to create their own Medium equivalent. Just let your blog be a blog; you weren't going to win the social media lottery anyway.

jsilence 7y ago
Yes. Remember that in the earlies a lot of sites had web ring links at the bottom of the page? Wondering why this has not made a comeback yet. Maybe instead of static linking web ring 2.0 could utilize activity pub to highlight relevant fresh content from other sites in the ring.

tonystubblebine 7y ago

I almost always end up posting in the comments when I see Medium on the front page of HN, basically the same thing every time. I've found the Medium experience to be quite good, and even world positive. I'd been running a self-improvement group blog as an ancillary initiative to the rest of my business. The blogging was kind of cool, but not successful enough to think much about. Then Medium asked if we'd be interested in professionalizing what we do. Medium's CEO and I both worked for the tech publisher O'Reilly early in our careers, so I think that's why he thought we could pull it off. And so I've gotten to really experience the before and the after of Medium's paywall. Before professionalizing, publishing seemed barely worthwhile. And it only was worthwhile if I could make the posts viral enough and the call to action catchy enough. That's not really my MO, which is why we struggled. Medium's CEO has made the case that free content has been deeply corrupted by these marketing needs. Maybe some people can opt out, but I wasn't able to. I absolutely was cutting short my effort as a writer and then manipulating the start and end of articles to serve my marketing goals (otherwise, I couldn't justify the time). In the new system, we just write differently. We know the article is the product people pay for and we don't need to corrupt it with any secondary marketing goals. I see this as a world positive, where Medium has been able to create an ecosystem that allows for deeper and more authoritative articles. If you're reading self-improvement articles on Medium, a simple judge is to ask yourself if the author has any 1st hand experience. The vast majority of the free side of that topic on Medium is written by content marketers who are experts in virality but are basically just making up or cargo culting the advice. (Literally, much of it is farmed out to Upwork) Part of what drew in our subject matter experts was enough money to be worth their time. We're going to send more than $100k to authors this year (probably a lot more). I'm trying not to jump in here to market my own stuff. What I'm talking about above is our self-improvement publication. We're also testing two more pubs on different topics, which I think says something about how lucrative we're finding the editing. But it's too early for me to say how those are going. I have a number of other biases here (small amount of Medium stock, Medium's CEO was on my board for a long time and was my boss in 2005), but I'm hoping people see my actions, which are to double down on Medium over and over again, to be an indication that I'm a true fan.

chrshawkes 7y ago

I feel I could make a sufficient replica with free open source tools in a matter of days, maybe hours.