The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium

http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-extremely-frustrating-history-of-medium-2012-present/

by longdefeat • 7 years ago

85 31 7 years ago

idlewords• 7 years ago

There's a long history in American publishing of wealthy people taking on an expensive publishing venture as a pet project, which in turn takes on the idiosyncrasies of the founder. It's easy to get distracted by startup speak and the fact that Medium lives online, but its trajectory fits squarely in a tradition that has been around for as long as we've had the printing press and intellectually vain rich people.

tonystubblebine6• 7 years ago

I'm sure I'm biased, but this feels like a severe misreading of Evan Williams' history. He's abnormally persistent about enduring failure until he finds the big thing. Blogger and Twitter were both preceded by long periods of failure. Also, given that he resigned from the Twitter board and has other people making his investment decisions it seems pretty clear that Medium is not a pet project for him.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

He's abnormally persistent about enduring failure until he finds the big thing. Blogger and Twitter were both preceded by long periods of failure.

If that "failure" still got investor money, then there's not so much "persistence" involved.

Blogger was sold in like 4 years, that's not some incredible tenacity either.

tonystubblebine6• 7 years ago

I was the first publication in this program starting two years ago, basically the test case. We've renewed and expanded it twice since then and are in talks to expand it again. I feel so fortunate in that the experience has been useful and profitable.

tonystubblebine6• 7 years ago

Here's the gist for how to professionalize a pub on medium.

https://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/status/11002148450755256...

wodenokoto2• 7 years ago

Why is this being downvoted?

A user is willing to share their first-hand experience with the content-matter of an article.

How is that not both interesting and relevant in a HN context?

nkozyra2• 7 years ago

I have absolutely no idea what the value add of medium is supposed to be to publishers?

Amateur tooling? Half assed distribution? Unreliable relationship? Constant new ways to annoy readers?

For an incredibly basic blog I get it but even the publishing tools there are so limited I'm perplexed it hasn't grown up.

tonystubblebine6• 7 years ago

FWIW, I make a full time living there on part time work and they've sent my articles several million readers that never otherwise would have heard of me. Also I was just approached for a mainstream book deal. Those are all massive goods.

The bad is that I think Medium hasn't stayed in one place long enough for people to accurately understand it. But I've been working with them from the beginning of this strategy shift two years ago and the basic strategy hasn't changed at all.

rrdharan• 7 years ago

The basic strategy hasn’t changed in 2 years? Per the article it sounds like it’s changed at least five times since 2012. Perhaps the most recent change was in 2017?

striglia• 7 years ago

Strong agree -- the distribution was a solid deal when it happened and didn't require a paywall. I just gave up on them (http://www.locallyoptimal.com/blog/2019/03/24/publish-indepe...) now that they're forcing you to choose no-paywall or medium distribution. If I'm not wanting a paywall I may as well use my own site and be totally free.

It's a shame, I found the editing interface pretty convenient (image embedding in particular) and conceptually the Medium-run publications make a ton of sense.

nkozyra2• 7 years ago

FWIW, I make a full time living there on part time work and they've sent my articles several million readers that never otherwise would have heard of me

I suppose there are publishers and then there are publishers. I have no doubt they're trying to court people like you but it seems like their bigger ploy is to rope in the big publishers into embracing their platform, to abandon traditional digital publishing platforms.

If I'm a basic blogger or tiny digital publisher, Medium can work, though the tools are so archaic and limited I would become frustrated very quickly. If I'm even at medium-sized, the whole thing is a mess of half-measures that now seems singularly focused on annoying readers.

Throwing my content into a network or allowing me to pay to promote my content or whatever really isn't enough of a sell. I can do that anywhere and keep more of the money.

grey-area• 7 years ago

audience

smichel17• 7 years ago

For me as a reader, it used to have a value add that it was a great experience for reading. Clean interface, minimal formatting, columns not too wide.. basically, it just got out of the way and made posts easy to read.

Recently, it's lost a fair amount of that value as they push towards installing their app, etc. It's by no means the worst, but I'm no longer happy to see that a post is punished on medium vs $personal_blog.

oska• 7 years ago

4 of the first 8 comments in this thread are from a relentless self-promoter, evident in both their self-references in this thread and their submission history to HN in the last two years being almost solely comprised of their own articles on Medium.

hlieberman• 7 years ago

I suppose that's one way to keep faking it until you make it.

tonystubblebine6• 7 years ago

Ouch

reneherse• 7 years ago

Can't we all just judge for ourselves whether a particular user is overdoing it, without someone acting as the "self-promotion police"?

Your comment seems more like an ad hominem than anything else.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

And we had to know that because? To morally condemn them?

If we (people on HN) like their 4 comments enough to vote them to the top, then it's up to us.

Same for their "submission history". I could not care less if it's comprised from their own articles on Medium. As long as people liked and voted for the stories to go on the front page, that's enough. If people on HN didn't like and vote for the stories, they'd be lost, like countless other submissions. So there's that.

I would have a problem if antirez, or idlewords, or PG, or whoever posted their own articles either. Why not? There's the upvoting of submissions to tells us whether those are good or not.

I also checked the submissions history of the person you refer to. 30 submissions in 6 years. Hardly clogging the pipes.

Besides, what they share in this post is regarding Medium, so is totally on topic. There's this, too.

What's this putdown for? Jealousy? Moral indignation? I don't really like the tone and the finger pointing.

asaph• 7 years ago

Medium made it possible for anyone to blog and be seen.

This was possible long before Medium launched. I recall popular bloggers being a thing years before Medium showed up.

taneq• 7 years ago

Yeah, what about Wordpress, Blogger, etc.? They've been around forever.

sontek• 7 years ago

LiveJournal!

URSpider94• 7 years ago

I think you’re parsing that sentence incorrectly. The emphasis should be on “anyone ... be(ing) seen.” Yes, it’s been possible for a long, long time for anyone to set up a blog, but each blog lives in its own little shell, virtually invisible unless it generates links and traffic. With Medium, your post could be shoulder-to-shoulder on the same page with something written by a Pulitzer Prize winner, or by the founder of Amazon.

frosted-flakes• 7 years ago

From my perspective, Medium is little more than a place to host blog articles. I've never discovered other posts on Medium, only through other sources, like HN or Reddit, and I've probably read hundreds of Medium posts over the past few years. In fact, I don't think I've ever visited Medium's home page.

I don't really know why this issue—it's certainly not something I've done consciously. Perhaps it's the continual barrage of popups that makes me unconsciously distasteful of Medium, or the fact that it appears to be monotonous. When I arrive at someone's blog on their personal website, I always click around and explore because the whole site is a personal expression, but reading Medium feels like walking through a faceless, generic office building.

telltruth• 7 years ago

Ev Williams is my founder hero. People often sweat about having a cool idea or atleast great tech before they do startups. Not Ev Williams. He has created startups after startups that has no real novelty, has no technology challenges and even doesn't target any real problem that world has. Still, his startups eats of millions of dollars in investment while having tiny little teams and finally gets sold or even IPOed for billions of dollars in windfall. I wager that if anyone else appeared at any of the VC with ideas of his startups, they would have been laughed off out the building. The amazing part is that he stays low most of the time, avoids any self-PR and still manages to mobilize massive public attention to his startups. That one is his single most important skill that none of the other founders can even come close.

sytelus• 7 years ago

The amazing part is that he stays low most of the time, avoids any self-PR and still manages to mobilize massive public attention to his startups.

So how does he do that? This is obviously a billion dollar skill.

rchaud2• 7 years ago

He's the cofounder of Twitter and has a track record of getting traction with his products. I would imagine VCs care more about that than his public profile.

loriverkutya• 7 years ago

"none of Williams' notable businesses have been profitable" - wikipedia

rchaud2• 7 years ago

I remember writing for a review site called Epinions back when I was a broke teen in the mid-2000s. They paid for reviews of products, with the monetization based on views of my page. I bought a $100 Sandisk MP3 player when the average price of an iPod was $250, and reviewed it. I made $50, but over the course of 2.5 years.

I think about that sometimes and still think it's a better ROI than posting anything on Medium.

The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium

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