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Ending our Medium integration

write.as

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#331

Post by veddox »

potta_coffee wrote: post #136
taude wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic popup that interferes with me getting to the content. I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more disco…

I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.

You know, I'd completely forgotten about forums? I used to be active on two. Doing a quick search now: one seems to have disappeared, but I managed to log in to the other one for the first time in nine years! (Those were the days before I used a password manager.) And it's actually still semi-active...

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#332

Post by Swizec »

arielm wrote: post #288
zrobotics wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will always be a concern, even for a nonprofit. You need to keep the lights on, and people need to be paid. However, the trouble with VC funding is the expectation of scale. A VC won't be happy with a small organization that makes enough to pay its employees and sustain a small amount of growth. Unfortunately, that business requires large successes. So the founders and the investors can easily have very differen…

I disagree with this view completely. Companies like MailChimp and Atlassian are great examples of bootstrapped companies that became very successful. There are more. Money is great to have at any stage of a company, and bootstrapped companies prefer to trade stability and time for the freedom of not having money (and those who only focus on it) control decisions. You can build a great company with and without invest…

And with VCs you have someone breathing down your neck to either grow fast or die fast. With bootstrap, you don’t have that pressure (and instead have the fuck we don’t have money to fund faster growth problem)

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#333

Post by thebaer »

kareemm wrote: post #138

Somewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were: 1. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check, and run through tools like Hemingway 2. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe missing some…

That's definitely good to know -- I appreciate the insight! We were indeed headed down this route in the early days with these integrations. In another life, I might do this. Particularly, having a simple format (like plain text / Markdown) that could then be interpreted in its own ways by all these platforms was the original dream.

But the consumer space is our sweet spot. I can genuinely talk about why I care about building a $6 / month blogging platform for consumers -- I wouldn't have that same passion building something I don't have much personal interest in (even if there was more money involved).

From a business perspective, this space is very under-served, as far as platforms that writers can rely on still being here in 10 years. And we have plenty of avenues to business customers, from support [0], to more API access, to larger community hosting [1]. Mostly, I personally want everyday people to have a service they can depend on, where they aren't being mined for data, they get their digital freedom back, etc. That's not something many others can say or even have interest in.

[0] https://write.as/pricing

[1] https://writefreely.host

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#334

Post by codebook »

mrzool wrote: post #39
dhh2106 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similarly about Medium: waning enthusiasm. I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to. I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising po…

> The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.

I thought I am viewing different website from yours.

I am totally not satisfied hackernews website design and UI.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#335

Post by callahanrts »

kpennell wrote: post #318
callahanrts wrote: post #237

With all my frustrations with medium, I decided to build a desktop app--for myself, and maybe to monetize later. It's basically the medium WSYWYG editor combined with a static site generator that automatically hosts on S3. Out of curiosity, is that something that anyone else would be interested in? EDIT: Here's a google form for anyone who wants to keep in touch https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23

I use https://getpublii.com/ for this. Works really well.

That looks pretty sweet. I'll have to try it out.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#336

Post by fucking_tragedy »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #306
daveFNbuck wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College kids have to search for the answer to what the probability of getting a 5 or higher in a die roll is?

There are still people that think that buying multiple lottery tickets actually lowers your chances of winning. I tried to argue against someone with this. I even tried scaling the problem down to being two balls drawn from a pool of four, and showing how if you buy multiple tickets, your chances of winning greatly increased. And they accepted what I was saying, but just insisted that the math "doesn't scale" and it…

> There are still people that think that buying multiple lottery tickets actually lowers your chances of winning.

This blows my mind, but at least it means they aren't wasting even more money on the lottery.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#337

Post by Transfinity »

wlesieutre wrote: post #211
jopsen wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github

Easy to say that right now, but Microsoft hasn't owned it long enough to have any negative impact on the service. For all we know 5 years from now they'll pull a Sourceforge and start bundling malware into your downloads.

I am cautiously optimistic about this one. Partly because of promising recent decisions from them, and partly because if there's one thing Microsoft knows how to do well, it's business software.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#338

Post by baroffoos »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #251
bogomipz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.

My solution was to use an extension – Make Medium Readable Again – that, as of its features, removes the intro fullscreen ad. It's available for Chrome and Firefox, as far as I'm aware.

Could also use your browsers reader mode which does an amazing job at making websites usable.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#339

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dabockster wrote: post #321
callahanrts wrote: post #237

With all my frustrations with medium, I decided to build a desktop app--for myself, and maybe to monetize later. It's basically the medium WSYWYG editor combined with a static site generator that automatically hosts on S3. Out of curiosity, is that something that anyone else would be interested in? EDIT: Here's a google form for anyone who wants to keep in touch https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23

So we're so fed up with the "modern web" that we've resorted to reviving Microsoft FrontPage? Hang on, lemme eat my own foot.

Say what you will, but FrontPage was a great way to get into webdev for people who were new to development.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#340

Post by IshKebab »

new_here wrote: post #56

Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.

I don't recall Quora ever being good. What decade was this?
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