Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Medium's Meltdown

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 121 posts

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#41

Post by geoka9 »

kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - 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…

> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area.

That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#42

Post by battlebot »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #25
wmeredith wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point remains; given the size of Automattic/Wordpress.com, it is very understandable how a wordpress.com competitor founded by the creator of blogger could raise large sums of money.

No, it actually boggles my mind, much like how people who create memes somehow make money.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#43

Post by noobermin »

epberry wrote: post #11

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…

Actually, the substance of the article wasn't that bad, but after looking again at the browser title, I realized the title didn't square with the article at all, as usual.

Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#44

Post by jamez1 »

whathappenedto wrote: post #32
coldtea wrote: post #2

> They were shocked. Their adored boss, billionaire CEO Ev Williams, best known as the cofounder of Twitter, seemed to care so deeply for each of them. LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.

I guess this is one aspect of academia that seems to be more humane than corporations. Faculty advisers and universities have interests that are aligned with their graduate students. When the students do great research and win awards, the adviser and university gets credit. While there are of course horror stories when they don't get along, academia at least still believes in investing in people, and not just using t…

Academia relies on students to exist, the students are the customer not the workers - so the power is a lot more in favor of the grad student, not that academia itself is any more noble or humane.

I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#45

Post by mrwilhelm »

kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - 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…

>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading.

I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#46

Post by keypusher »

dpweb wrote: post #14

I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere. They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles. For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful fig…

What you describe is basically running an online magazine or media organization. You hire writers to write pieces, and users pay a subscription fee. This is what the NYT times. The article mentioned that this was their original business plan but it was scrapped.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#47

Post by keypusher »

If they are going to a subscription or patronage model, they will need to cut way more jobs and costs. That type of model can work but you have to run very lean, and you might end up replacing those ad banners with ones begging for money. Organizations like NPR and Wikipedia are some of the largest to use such a model, they have the benefit of goodwill and tax breaks due to their non-profit status, and their cost structure and business model looks very different from most valley startups. You can kiss that valuation goodbye.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#48

Post by pryelluw »

I feel medium would have a chance if they allowed video and audio content to be published there. They already have the users that produce such content. Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults (I don't mean pornographic content). They could then sell many products and services around it.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#49

Post by mgkimsal »

gvb wrote: post #20
Thaxll wrote: post #5

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...

Medium is all about the content on the web site "medium.com". Wordpress is software that displays a web site's content.

Wordpress is also about the content on the web site "wordpress.com".

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#50

Post by whathappenedto »

jamez1 wrote: post #44
whathappenedto wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is one aspect of academia that seems to be more humane than corporations. Faculty advisers and universities have interests that are aligned with their graduate students. When the students do great research and win awards, the adviser and university gets credit. While there are of course horror stories when they don't get along, academia at least still believes in investing in people, and not just using t…

Academia relies on students to exist, the students are the customer not the workers - so the power is a lot more in favor of the grad student, not that academia itself is any more noble or humane. I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.

I'm not sure how you're making the distinction between customer and workers. I'm talking about graduate students here, particularly research-producing Ph.D. students.

I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.

My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.

Post reply on HN