Medium is Winning

http://m50d.github.io/2014/01/11/medium-is-winning.html

by lmm • 13 years ago

18 39 13 years ago

m50d.github.io

strict93• 13 years ago

I wish I could read that article, but full-width sentences and tiny typeface are painful. The beautiful large typography and layout of Medium is one reason it's winning, despite its sometimes laughable content.

pavlov• 13 years ago

In Chrome, the "Zoom In" command is in the View menu.

Zoomed in by two increments (125%), the font size and margins of the article become reasonably close to the Medium gold standard. Hopefully this may help you finish reading the article.</mildsarcasm>

strict93• 13 years ago

I already browse at 125%. It takes 200% to get to a comfortable readable level, and that doesn't address full width sentences. Too much effort for a wall of text.

Typography matters.

Kluny2• 13 years ago

I also made the window half-size to reduce the line length... ugh.

cliveowen• 13 years ago

Not only it's completely unreadable, but it's way too long. I bet I could make the same point in a couple paragraphs, tops.

People who show no hesitation in throwing a wall of text at other people show how much they really care about the reader's time.

andreaja2• 13 years ago

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Not everyone writes with you in mind as their ideal reader. Some people write for themselves and publish to keep themselves honest, though I don't presume to know what OP's motives and goals are in this case.

Ryel• 13 years ago

Holy readability, batman.

ecesena2• 13 years ago

[Warn: a bit promotional]

I'd like to have your opinion on Theneeds [1]. It can't be compared to Medium as we're not for blogging, but we do a lot of personalization/recommendation.

At signup you select your interests and we build personalized streams of curated content mixed with user generated one. Then, we learn from your activity to get smarted about what really matters to you.

Moreover, we have a newsletter (default daily, but you can change the frequency) where we recommend you 8 news across your interests.

[1] http://www.theneeds.com

sachleen• 13 years ago

not sure if it's just me but clicking the windows store link opens the store app's "home screen" instead of your app's download screen.

ecesena2• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

I guess you mean for Windows 8? Which market are you in? As the app is only available in the US + a few others (eng speaking).

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

I'm not a big fan of Medium's hip UI, to be fair. I also find their options to be awkwardly placed. It took me a while to figure out where the "sign out" button was when I first used it, for instance.

Kluny2• 13 years ago

Hey imm, could you just really quickly replace your stylesheet with this?

header h1 { margin-bottom:3px; margin-top:3px; }

nav a { padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-right: 10px; }

h1 a { text-decoration:none; color:black; }

h1 a:hover { font-weight:bold; font-size:105%; text-decoration:underline; }

body { padding:20px; font-size:120%; }

p, li { max-width:800px; }

li { margin-bottom:6px; }

small { font-size:75%; }

lmm8• 13 years ago

You misspell my name, you talk down to me, you didn't even take a superficial look at my source or you'd realize the stylesheet is external, part of strapdownjs. No.

markdown• 13 years ago

Wow. Try this next time:

Hey, thanks! I didn't write the css, and I can't change it, but I appreciate you trying to help :)

mkr-hn6• 13 years ago

Going to need those TPS reports.

coin2• 13 years ago

I dislike Medium disabling pinchzoom for mobile devices (user-scalable="no"). I have no idea why they think this is a good idea.

mulligan• 13 years ago

probably to reduce click delay, which may not be a useful thing given that people are mostly reading on medium, not clicking.

mkr-hn6• 13 years ago

The notes and recommend button probably lead to a lot of clicking.

vshade• 13 years ago

It is to avoid the 300 ms lag waiting for a second touch to zoom.

coin2• 13 years ago

Why would a text content site care about a 300 msec click delay?

quadrangle• 13 years ago

Your stupid website can't display plain old text in a reasonable format without JavaScript. Go fix your stupid site.

prodigal_erik• 13 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/kc7IXPj.png

Using a long-forgotten element to disable line breaking is pointlessly painful, but isn't as bad as some people get when they think every text processing tool runs javascript. The author sounded clued-in enough to know CSS, I don't know why he would think that doing it all in javascript isn't strictly worse.

abdophoto• 13 years ago

[This is also a bit promotional]

Although I do think Medium is doing a great job of letting you discover some good reading material, I often find it a bit confusing too.

Not too long I co-created http://thetechblock.com out of similar frustration of not being able to find good tech-related articles. Reddit often doesn't show the stuff we find, Techmeme is very Silicon Valley oriented and HN can get a bit noisy. Feel free to let me know what you guys think.

andreaja2• 13 years ago

"So it's ironic that, despite all these established old-media recommendation engines, there was nothing for one of my favourite media - online articles."

Prismatic[0] comes to mind.

[0] http://getprismatic.com

Medium is Winning

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