21–30 of 121 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A prerequisite to the cut-your-way-to-profitability plan is income. There's no evidence Medium had much income.
Can you provide evidence there is no income? They aren't a publicly traded company so I haven't seen their earnings reports...
I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress? I still don't understand how very simple business like that can raise hundred of millions...
> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a…
I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress? I still don't understand how very simple business like that can raise hundred of millions...
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
well they were half right
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a…
You're conflating two very different things. WordPress.org is open source software that runs a substantial portion of the modern web and do all those things you say. WordPress.com is a hosted blogging SaaS like Blogger. Medium is a WordPress.com competitor, a very important distinction.
My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.
I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.
I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and t…
- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.