medium.com: reddit for the coastal elite

basically, ~disruption~

its like when everyone wanted to be a social network

i think the "disruption!" thing is the public pitch because it sounds cool and noble and forward-thinking. but really you want a "platform" instead of a "publication" because a "publication" requires salaried or at least paid employees to create content, whereas a "platform" is a pitched to its users as a "free product" but is just a mechanism by which they provide content, against which the platform can sell ads, for free

i should say, not just ads but also targeting information

what's the quote 'if you can't figure out what they're selling, its you'

a "platform" is a pitched to its users as a "free product" but is just a mechanism by which they provide content, against which the platform can sell ads, for free

"web 2.0" in a nutshell

well it was web 1.0 too, or a component of it. the difference, i think, is at that point there was a delusion that the 'quality' of the content was somehow related to its potential popularity.

When I think of "platform" I think of Wordpress. But there's a difference between Medium and Wordpress, right?

matt mullenwag wasn't the founder of medium. you can set up wordpress on your own server.

OK but most people don't, right?

im setting up a wordpress site atm

web 1.0 was brochure-ware, web 1.5 was database-driven retail

web 2.0 was (is) you make our content for us and we'll make attempt to make money from it

When I think of "platform" I think of Wordpress. But there's a difference between Medium and Wordpress, right?

Well, on wordpress people still have separate blogs, and the norm is to read one person's wordpress blog at a time, or pick a set of wordpress blogs that you'll receive on your rss reader. If there's a wordpress-curated space that highlights interesting/popular pieces, it's not central to the reading-stuff-hosted-on-wordpress experience.

Medium's more like a tumblr dashboard or facebook homepage, where content produced by lots of different people that appears to you in a non-chronological fashion. Someone could write a post that gets popular on Medium while not having the consistency of content that would keep people visiting a wordpress blog. What sets Medium aside from tumblr and facebook is that the people who are determining what content comes to your attention aren't your 'friends'/'followed' - instead it's Medium readers as a whole (+ potentially some interference from Medium's own editors??).

welp http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/14/twitter-co-founder-evan-williams-lays-out-his-vision-for-medium

skyemediagroup03 6 hours ago
People are still going to search for what they're interested in. Very ambitious indeed.

that techcrunch piece is unreadable

Williams is taking aim squarely at the news industry’s most embarrassing vulnerability: the incessant need to trump up mundane happenings in order to habituate readers into needing news like a daily drug fix.

jesus christ this is what happens when editors don't have the time to do their actual jobs

the closest I can get to medium is that medium is basically everything I hate about everything

this part i thought was maybe the only interesting thing

At Medium, there’s no need to register a website, sift through a mountain of design options, and re-organize your schedule for the habit of blogging. You just write. “If it’s on a whim, that whim is killed the moment you’re forced to find a unique sub domain and find a template,” explains Williams.

The sheer simplicity of Medium’s writing platform is garnering accolades from respected writers and designers. Medium is “the best composition experience on the web, hands-down” wrote early Facebook designer Julie Zhuo, in a Medium post about Medium (so meta). “You see exactly what your post is going to look like. There is no translation, no guess-work, no typey-typey into some fat text area and wondering whether it’ll do ‘s and ‘s and :) ‘s correctly.”

New York Times tech columnist Nick Bilton also gives Medium a thumps up. “I really like Medium — it’s one of the rare instances where the technology is truly in the background,” he writes to me in an email. “I’d love to be able to replace WordPress with Medium on my personal site.” Fortunately for WordPress, Medium has no plans to become a separate blogging platform — but, it might become home to the occasional industry muse who doesn’t want to hassle with setting up a blog.

idg why these don't-want-the-committment-of-a-blog ppl couldn't just use facebook notes tbh

also where the hell is the option to turn off smart quotes, they are super bullshit

typey-typey

Facebook Notes won't make you internet famous.

WE NO TYPEY TYPEY

also nsfwcorp. what is that? i mean i get what it is. but. does anyone subscribe?

I follow a few nsfwcorp guys on twitter. I had to unfollow Gary Brecher though

I know maybe three people who subscribe and the rest of us swarm in for a day when they unlock articles. I sort of hate the house style though??

maciej (the pinboard guy) likes them, but the fact that they did a series of posts on pando daily was a red flag for me

haven't actually read them. i try to find reasons to write people off without looking at their stuff these days.

its a bunch of idiots

Yeah Paul Carr and the one from the exile who wasn't Taibbi, together at last. It seems a bit like a riff on Carr's old Friday Thing emails except not so britisher

wd subscribe to something like this by maciej btw. He is great.

A personal note on that, because it really shook me: I don’t care how much you hate me, how much it irks you that I was able to raise money from my “rich friends” to start a company, or the extent to which the prospect of my personal failure brings you to the brink to schadengasm. I don’t care about any of that. No amount of animosity towards me personally can excuse the vile gloating I saw from some writers at “rival” publications at the prospect that a dozen fine journalists, developers, illustrators, and support staff – several with young children to support — would soon be out of work.

Salon’s Alex Pareene, on hearing that we may have to lay off our staff, tweeted a single word in response: “aahahaha.” Gawker’s deputy editor, Max Read described the news as “BEAUTIFUL” (emphasis his).

If I should run into messrs Pareene or Read, perhaps while taking a late night stroll through the lowest circles of hell, I’ll be sure to ask them how they’d have felt reading Tweets like that about their colleagues and friends. But of course, the answer to that question presupposes a capacity for empathy or even basic humanity.

To quote one member of the NSFWCORP editorial team when he read those Tweets: “those fuckers had better hope we don’t survive.”

lol pwned

medium is about balloons https://medium.com/beautiful-stories/8d615d86ac04

i still dgi

imagining the post-antibiotics future, in which all of our children die before reaching their teen years.

wtf is medium is becoming a platform of it own https://medium.com/nelsons-errata/c100ebe0158f

Gruber is a sharp cookie, one of the sharpest in the design blogger set

^^delete humanity

http://pando.com/2013/12/30/what-if-we-are-really-in-a-matrix-like-simulation/

Thirty years from now a Sony PlayStation should be able to compute 10,000 human lifetimes simultaneously and in real time, or about a human lifetime per hour. Between PlayStation 1, PS2 and PS3 there are about 100 million devices in the world. If each held 10,000 humans, more people would reside in Sony PlayStations than maintain a corporeal existence on earth.

http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif

reality is basically just one of those tv shows inside a tv show

i remember when the medium was just a bunch of racist freshmen complaining about their roommates

(the porn industry is constantly innovating)

http://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/897/1*-xYcdg-uXIQlyXBemICiEQ.png

meh, try here: https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/897/1*-xYcdg-uXIQlyXBemICiEQ.png

https://medium.com/@reifman/5ebf4e53294c

disgusting

men... men... what are we, anymore? what the fuck? get so mad at shit like this

saw someone i knew state intentions to pick up and move from (neglected blogspot/wordpress/whatever blog) to medium 'for longer pieces', it seems like part of the pull is the idea that people might pay attention to your writing.

the world of blogs out there away from the high-profile frequent-post buzzy-newscycle many-commenters model that apes web 2.0 journalism pioneered by i dunno sullivan and yglesias or whoever - it is a desolate wasteland compared to what it was like say 10 years ago. it seems like most writing is not being read, or being read and responded to in a kind of pings-in-the-void fecklessness that is probably not very stimulating for the writers.

throw in feely uplifty 'mattering' dimension to it, and welp.

damn goole that shit is a 14 minute read can a brother get a pullquote or what

what the fucking fuck

here's the deal: not all people want to be your friend or communicate with you after a relationship ends. if they don't want to, you respect their wishes.

I've been the persistent person when it came to talking to an ex before and I was completely in the fucking wrong. This dude, wtf.

a guy got dumped, and it's a problem for him

xp