I don't know if Medium cares that much about their own content discovery/cliquing/etc. Sure, the content has to be accessible from the site in some fashion so web spiders can reach it--but really, as far as I can tell, Medium blogs seem built for the generation of standalone post pages that get shared via their authors self-promoting them on their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, and then other people putting them up on social bookmarking websites like Reddit and HN. (Or at least, anecdotally, that's where I've found all the Medium articles I've ever read.)
You don't really visit someone's Medium blog. I've never seen anyone say, on their profile somewhere else, "here's a direct link to my blog; it's on Medium." It looks the same as every other Medium blog, after all; that's a strong disincentive to people promoting links their blog root, since they can't brand it--and I think that's intentional on Medium's part.
Instead, you just find someone's Medium posts shared in your feed on some sharing service, because someone you know linked to them. Which is really what the web has needed for a while, I think: a nice, clean, "here is a long standalone essay" hosting service which is ancillary to your more usual blogging, which occurs on FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.
A geeky comparison, that might explain their value proposition, as I see it: FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. are like a VM stack: you want to only hold tiny little objects on it, because reading those objects (scrolling past them) takes time and "processing cycles" for the reader. You don't want to pass huge ones around, because they'll take up a lot of space everywhere they go, and you have to copy them piece by piece (there have been novels written over Twitter, but they're a bitch to read or quote or export, etc.)
Medium, then, is a VM heap to stick large objects on, and then pass them by reference on the stack (FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.) In effect, it's a pastebin with really nice styling, feed generation, and collaborative editorial features, not a "blogging service" per se. Make sense?
I agree with you. Medium isn't trying to be the next blogspot. It's not all things for all people. Medium is a place to read recommended essays. Having a group of more influential writers emerge who happen to read and recommend each other more doesn't kill this.
I think the analogy is Time magazine versus Foreign Policy. I may subscribe to Time and read every issue cover to cover on the subway to get a broad view on what's going on. I'll only buy Foreign Policy from the newspaper stand if there's a long article that specifically interests me. In that case I'll look it over and give it a deeper read.
My recommendation system for what to read in Medium isn't Medium. It's HN.
> My recommendation system for what to read in Medium isn't Medium. It's HN.
Exactly. I would suggest Medium run with this idea, actually: detect your referrer, then wire a single "like this" button to that service's equivalent of an upvote, and "comment on this" to that service's equivalent of either a reblog/retweet mechanism, or a comments page. Don't try to keep users on Medium, in other words; instead, make Medium a seamless part of whatever site they were already using.
Yeup, I don't go to Medium, except when articles are posted here, or the couple other sites I visit where I let either editorial or community selected content drift up into my consciousness.
I will add that a lot of the stuff on Medium seems pretty 'self aggrandizing' (not the best word I'm looking for, but the gist is close enough). I'm not sure why it feels that way compared to people's blogs that they maintain themselves....maybe it's the whole 'OMG, I got a Medium account, I'm going to promote the @!#%$ out of myself." Anyway, that's sort of the stigma I give to content on Medium when I click through to read something there...
That may be a tough thing for them to monetize. Generally websites do better owning the customer experience and then farming the users out for content after they're already engaged. (Think Facebook) But I concur - being the recipient of the referral does seem to be the way for Medium to go. They're run by people who understand social media and viral behavior, so I do believe they have a master plan of some kind.
Simply looking at the site and its content model, it's obvious, to me at least, that it's the internet equivalent of a publisher's slush file. People have a greater appetite for reading, but are not yet willing to pay for it. So content pieces that wouldn't fit into a more serious publication can be shown there.
Authors can complain all they want about the platform, how there's little money in it, how they can't build an audience, and all these complaints do is highlight the author's naiveté. These things are set by the market's appetite, not your ego. If you want your writing to be taken seriously, then take seriously the craft of writing. Medium doesn't suck, you suck. And you're on Medium because you suck. It's about an efficient a market as you can find, because there's exactly zero barriers to entry.
Hmm, a bit harsh, ok a lot harsh, but essentially I agree with the premise that Medium is where you publish if you can't get published elsewhere (yet).
I for one am enjoying seeing how the markets around writing are evolving, in many ways they are much more effectively evolving than video and music markets.
For writers we got the great "Internet" where you put download blogging software put up a server and start posting. Except you were one of a trillion zillion people so discovery was basically impossible. Then we got blogging "sites" which collected people who want to write, and among those sites added some discoverability. Then we got "Blogzines" which are essentially all on the same topical area by a fixed stable of writers which feels more like a magazine. And of course e-books which are single topic / single author.
It is interesting to compare the likes of Blogger to Medium to Ars Technica to HufPo to Salon etc.
Yeah, I took a harsh tone because of the egotism displayed in the title. I don't think everyone on Medium sucks, but if you feel entitled to the same perks you'd get, say, with a magazine, then you really do need to come down out of the clouds. It's hard-ass work establishing yourself as a writer. There aren't any short cuts. Even if you get lucky and get a magic book deal, if your writing sucks you won't get another one. And no one will really respect you, either.
In fact, I think Medium is a perfect place to hone your craft. If I were looking to write professionally, I'd be working on my tone and content constantly. I wouldn't even think of the sorts of stuff the OP is thinking about until I was absolutely sure that all that's left to work on is the outlet. That's when you'd be getting comments like, "Wow, you're the best writer here!"
All I know about medium is that it won't render in opera mini which I use on my phone for speed and battery life. I know I have no excuse if I don't use a "modern" browser so I can't complain. But still, for a site that just displays some text with inline pictures, I wonder why they couldn't deliver it with some simpler tech.
Their scrollable container gives me problems with my graphical browsers. There are ways that I can get it to work (enabling JS, disabling CSS, or plugging in a mouse and using that), but I usually just load it in a text browser or pipe wget into some filters instead. For a site that is just text on a page it sure is complicated.
Qz is another new site that's horrible for just reading text out of the box. Half the time I get redirected to some other article or the front page (!?) while scrolling down or just having the page open in a background tab and not doing anything, scroll is something proprietary and doesn't work most of the time, entire thing is clunky and slow.
Thankfully, disabling Javascript actually helps a lot there.
Am I the only one who doesn't think Medium is some horrible, evil thing? It's still a solid, pretty, functional, and easy blogging platform for people who just want to get something out there. It doesn't do much to allow authors to distinguish themselves from the pack; I think this is left up for the author to do, if they want or even care, via other social media, like Twitter. It seems there's a general trend away from a single, all-inclusive social platform like Facebook towards a distributed system of smaller pieces which can fit together.
It wouldn't be my blogging platform of choice, but I'm the sort of person who'd go to all the trouble of hand-crafting a personal website for something like this, just for the fun of it. Medium is obviously for people who want the opposite experience.
None of this is to say that Medium doesn't have its share of problems, but I think it is at least decent from the blogger's perspective and IMHO pretty good from the reader's perspective.
It seems like they're making it more about the site than the content. There have been a lot of absolutely vapid medium posts that have ridden to the front-page of HN, as Medium currently exists in the "it is somehow illuminating and academic" halo period.
Since we're complaining about Medium: the font is too big. We may be in the post Web 2.0 era where huge text is more of a norm, but I feel assaulted every time I load a Medium article. The text is not readable without physically changing one's position, or adjusting the browser font size.
And why should I have to fiddle with the font size for one site when I don't have to think about it elsewhere? Are Medium bloggers so arrogant as to think that their revelations deserve to be shouted in my face at 22px?
On the contrary, the font size on many sites is too small[1] (in the case of HN or Daring Fireball, far too small). I need to increase the size, or zoom in when using Safari on my laptop/iPhone/iPad, to have any hope of reading them without straining. Medium is one site where I don't have to do anything to read comfortably on a desktop or laptop.
I have a 23" 1920x1080 monitor and a 13" 1440x900 Macbook Air.
I've never thought of Medium as a blogging platform but rather an article publishing platform with tools to encourage conversation and sharing around each article.
>> "Stats are too coarse - There are one or two lovely graphs but it just doesn't give me the depth of knowledge I'd like to know about my audience - even Google Analytics only just makes the bar."
To me at least Medium is meant to appeal to the kind of bloggers who want to post something but don't want to maintain a blog. If you want detailed analytics and even Google Analytics are just good enough you don't sound like the sort of person Medium is for.
As for monetizing I could see Medium offering paid plans. Maybe using them to offer the kind of detailed analytics you want. Or maybe they will charge for mobile apps the way the NYTimes does with it's subscriptions. Judging by their focus on nicely laid out content I really doubt they would plaster it with ads.
I'd be interested in hearing some opinions from UX experts on the Medium interface?
Specifically:
* The rectangular 'M' in the top-left that hides a menu
* The inline hidden/comments that animate in on hover.
* The weird "suggest a link for further reading" functionality at the bottom of the article.
It really seems like a lot of confusing eye-candy to me and my assumption would be that it's cool/fun for a sophisticated technocrat, but the usability falls apart quickly after that.
Personally, I hate the inline commenting ideas. I read an article, and then scan the comments at the bottom. It seems pretty gratuitous to save the effort of "quoting" snippets to discuss.
I appreciate them thinking differently about things, though.
Technical and writer's issues aside, it's the "things that matter" that's been sticking in my craw. I was so excited for it to be a browsable collection of thoughtful essays from around the world. Instead one of the first things I read on it was "how to do task X on Windows". Now it's just long-form twitter, which as I type it seems really obvious but I was hoping for the "Things that matter" to actually be a guiding point for Medium.
"80/20" sounds good, but if what a blogger is writing is this good, then why not just create your own blog to attract their own audience? As the author said, it is free. Also, I would think that bloggers usually just want to share thoughtful articles and other information with the world and are not actually expecting to make money (I hope). I think a great idea is one that is just great (period) with or without any revenue.
The first one can be quite valuable, especially in the context of startups, architecture, heck, tech in general. Basically what this site is all about. Those who don't learn from history, etc.
The other has been helpful for me, personally, especially if you want to do $thing and have no idea where to start. An article where the author details their methods and why they worked and what problems they had.. is awesome.
The criticism on the business or social aspects of Medium may be valid, but the technical team at Medium is very impressive. I hope they end up open sourcing some of the work they've done. Right now they are mostly experimenting, but eventually they will create a very awesome product with great technology.
Every Medium article I have read via HN (all of which were found on the frontpage) were edgy, self-absorbed and pretentious ramblings. I guess the platform promotes such behaviour by creating this "cool kid bench" and aiding others toward it with a feeling of elitism because they blog on Medium. I wonder when Yahoo (read: Marissa) will buy them!
With these writing platforms coming up its starting to feel like the glory days of LiveJournal.
I would like to see something that can step in as a social layer to connect a wide variety of blogs over a multitude of platforms. Maybe something that offers standardized categories - - like AllTop with self-discovery.
There must be a name for a logical construct where you imagine an obscure explanation for a phenomenon, reject this explanation and then extrapolate this rejection to phenomenon itself.
throwww.com might be a good alternative. No curation by editors. Recommended articles to come based on algorithms and not circle jerks. Full disclosure: I built it.
You don't really visit someone's Medium blog. I've never seen anyone say, on their profile somewhere else, "here's a direct link to my blog; it's on Medium." It looks the same as every other Medium blog, after all; that's a strong disincentive to people promoting links their blog root, since they can't brand it--and I think that's intentional on Medium's part.
Instead, you just find someone's Medium posts shared in your feed on some sharing service, because someone you know linked to them. Which is really what the web has needed for a while, I think: a nice, clean, "here is a long standalone essay" hosting service which is ancillary to your more usual blogging, which occurs on FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.
A geeky comparison, that might explain their value proposition, as I see it: FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. are like a VM stack: you want to only hold tiny little objects on it, because reading those objects (scrolling past them) takes time and "processing cycles" for the reader. You don't want to pass huge ones around, because they'll take up a lot of space everywhere they go, and you have to copy them piece by piece (there have been novels written over Twitter, but they're a bitch to read or quote or export, etc.)
Medium, then, is a VM heap to stick large objects on, and then pass them by reference on the stack (FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.) In effect, it's a pastebin with really nice styling, feed generation, and collaborative editorial features, not a "blogging service" per se. Make sense?