"In order to know what channels to focus on or improve, I need to know the source of my traffic."
Alternatively, medium lets you focus on post quality instead of analytics hustling.
"Won’t other writers send readers to me? Maybe, but I’ve noticed that the content recommended at the bottom is usually picked by editors. So if I’m never chosen, not really."
Post quality is rewarded by editors. Only hustlers have something to fear.
"Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design, but the functionality can be improved."
So if we take the advice and don't use Medium what alternative do we have whose functionality can't be improved?
"People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear them. They want the limelight and attention. "
I think people blog for different reasons. A lot of people just blog because they are interested and enthused about something and as a blogger you're not subject to some other communities focus and moderation. Some people have a dozen items a day, others might not write a dozen posts in a year. Medium seems like it favors less prolific bloggers who aim for quality content. Instead of having to each build their own brand, they build a shared brand. This is one of the jobs some periodicals historically fulfilled sans the dead tree imposed volume limits.
I agree with your bottom point, Steko. Thinking of Medium as an online newspaper as opposed to a blogging platform seems most correct. Perhaps Medium should further restrict personal customization and branding, like TechCrunch does with its writer profiles.
I found plenty of articles on the pros of writing on Medium but hardly any on the cons; hence, I wrote this to argue the other side and save some people time.
Also last night, I made a quick graph on medium.com submissions to HN, containing the top 20 posters by number of submissions, for 1000/1315 links containing the medium.com domain:
http://i.imgur.com/WIJ4cT9.png
It's also worth noting that out of those 1000, there were only ~650 unique submitters, implying that most HNers only submitted one medium.com article. If anyone is interested in a more thorough statistical analysis, I can write up a blog post. (hopefully with better graphs)
I published my first article on Medium over the weekend (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/a27e01e84fac). It got it's first bump from HN, but 17k+ reads following was from Medium's readership. It also got featured on LifeHacker. I don't think they would have found it on my own blog.
Honestly, I didn't see any compelling reasons in that article not to use Medium. My post got it's initial bump from Hacker News, but then everything following has been due to Medium already having a built in readership. If I posted this to my own blog, sure HN would have driven the same amount of traffic. But I don't have a readership like Medium. There's something to be said about Medium's writing tools as well. I found myself enjoying writing again using their system. It's very clean and focused. Maybe I wouldn't have produced as good of an article without it.
To be fair, a lot of his complaints about Medium don't copy over to Svbtle, even if they seem very similar to readers. The page has Google Analytics running, and links only to writing by the same author.
It'll be interesting to see which platform does better. They've both got the beautiful reading pages, so it'll come down to who can get the writers.
- If you care about minimalism, its very easy to make your wordpress (or any other platform) look minimalistic. (zenhabits.com, the theme is also free).
- You have full control over every aspect of your blog.
- You are not creating content for others to make money off of your writing.
This post does not contain a single criticism that indicates a fatal flaw in the platform. Design flaws and analytics can all be improved.
What he fails to mention is how Medium is actually moving web publishing forward. It's not supposed to be like your personal blog. Instead, it's a collection of stuff from all kinds of people on the same/similar topics.
svbtle is the new 9rules. Medium is a different animal.
Poor arguments. While I would agree that Medium's UI/UX is geared towards what you pointed out [i.e. the the "collaborative and almost stumbleupon nature of finding articles], the platform can be controlled at an individual level by the author quite well. It's value lies in it's excellent experience when you're reading an article you've been linked to. The typography, layout and experience at the individual article level are fantastic.
You're first point, lack of analytics, reeks of narcissism.
"Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design, but the functionality can be improved."
Fucking hell. A testament to what people think design is nowadays. Pretty pictures for all.
Why not something like medium.com? Well, it does look pretty nice (though, not as nice as mine), and it would save having to pick a domain name and such. Interesting note, same founder as blogger. While their beta/editor and area specific comments features are pretty cool (it seems easy to communicate to author), I am not too big on the social element, I do not prefer the lack of control (an example of this being how your writing will be linked to by or link to random other articles or not being able to link my soundcloud on my landing page), I don't think there is rss/email support, and it is also that it is rather new, and while I am not too proud to follow trends and I doubt it will die anytime soon (it is not like blogger is the most secure option), it will probably change and new features will roll out. What if there is ever ads that you can't control, or they add publicly available revision history, or you can't turn off public comments? So, while pretty cool, overall I still like blogger and my control over the html/css. We will see where it goes.
Side note: Why no svtle (or really any decent) theme/template for blogger?
I've read a couple of things on Medium, but I didn't realize it was a blogging platform; I thought it was just a site with writing (i.e. "a collaborative writing community sort of thingy-mah-bobber").
Why would any self respecting blogger interested in owning their own content, brand, identity or control over those ever use any sort of platform like Medium? For one, we know their short lived. For another, just freaking why? I guess if I wrote and needed people to read it to eat or get my ego stroked.
Very sensationalist title - the post points out a few (fairly minor) flaws in Medium, some of which are based on personal opinion. Are we really expected not to sign up to a site because it's not perfect quite yet?
People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear them. They want the limelight and attention.
I would argue this is not universally true; the vast majority of the people who blog don't do it to build a personal brand (which is what you lose from writing on Medium.)
First up, my bonafides: I've used Medium four different times. Two of my posts (http://sfbne.ws/17PPdPL) and (http://sfbne.ws/17PPhir) were editors' picks. And Medium even picked me as their writer of the week one week. (Which was sort of awesome, by the way.)
I think this assessment is a little off in a few ways. While I agree that the analytics leave a LOT to be desired, the thing that Medium excels at is amplifying an individual idea. Not necessarily a writer, but something that writer says. This is a big deal—it means that you don't need a platform to shout from anymore just to get traction. If the idea is good enough, thought out enough, relevant enough or challenging enough, Medium's staff will help push that idea out into the wider world.
I have a site with decent traction in the blogosphere, especially on Tumblr, and I know that if I put the ideas I discussed in those posts on there, they might have gotten noticed, but putting them on Medium had an amplifying effect. With my second post, about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's decline as a newspaper without a print product, I got pickup in the media, including the Seattle press. The executive editor of the Seattle Times, the publication's direct competitor, tweeted it. And though I couldn't do it due to time constraints, a local radio station tried to get me on the air to talk about the post. And in the end, it succeeded at its goal—it got a lot of people thinking and talking about what we could do better about newspapers and advertising online.
My story directly contradicts his entire point about the "leaky faucet." That is a powerful tool and one that stretches beyond the individual blog. If you wanted your voice to carry that far previously, you needed to be Andrew Sullivan or Michael Arrington, or working for someone with a built-in audience and/or a lot of access. It has this amazing way of cutting through the niche and surfacing voices into the mainstream.
These days, everyone has a voice. There's more noise than signal out there. Medium is great at cutting through the noise and giving nearly everyone the opportunity to be a quote-unquote "thought leader," as cliché as that term is.
The fact that it decentralizes the voices, in a nutshell, is what Javier Sandoval is complaining about above. But that's exactly the reason why it works so well.
(Side note: If a lack of directly-trackable ROI is really a deal-breaker for you, you could always do what Narratively did with their recent post on Medium—they wrote a long item, gave a good teaser on Medium, and linked to the full piece: http://sfbne.ws/14KVNRj)
"...the thing that Medium excels at is amplifying an individual idea. Not necessarily a writer, but something that writer says."
You hit it on the head with this. By and large I like following links to Medium, but I rarely connect to the author afterwards. It's almost like reading the Economist. Well thought out, but the magazine is the brand, not the writer.
My favorite comment so far. And that's exactly what I'm complaining about. I like Medium, but wrote this to argue the difficult side; there are plenty of "pro" Medium articles. I felt like evening the teams a little :)
medium.com - it's that webpage where you can stare for 5 seconds at a small picture embedded in a white page while the _font_ to the article is loading (or whatever it is they messed up in the webdesign).
Removed from everything in the post, it has to be said the piece is terribly composed.
Not as terrible as some of the other recent posts (and related comments) I've seen on HN; it is sufficiently terrible. Here's an example of a terribly composed comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968264
He doesn't sound like a native speaker and I know many who patronize HN aren't, but the terrible form and composition are inexcusable.
Please put some effort into your posts. Have a friend proof it for you. Don't hesitate to edit it post-submission if you find it unreadable, yourself. There's no shame in that.
Stand-alone technical prowess is not an excuse for poor writing skills.
Alternatively, medium lets you focus on post quality instead of analytics hustling.
"Won’t other writers send readers to me? Maybe, but I’ve noticed that the content recommended at the bottom is usually picked by editors. So if I’m never chosen, not really."
Post quality is rewarded by editors. Only hustlers have something to fear.
"Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design, but the functionality can be improved."
So if we take the advice and don't use Medium what alternative do we have whose functionality can't be improved?
"People blog because they have something to say and want other people to hear them. They want the limelight and attention. "
I think people blog for different reasons. A lot of people just blog because they are interested and enthused about something and as a blogger you're not subject to some other communities focus and moderation. Some people have a dozen items a day, others might not write a dozen posts in a year. Medium seems like it favors less prolific bloggers who aim for quality content. Instead of having to each build their own brand, they build a shared brand. This is one of the jobs some periodicals historically fulfilled sans the dead tree imposed volume limits.