medium.com: reddit for the coastal elite

wtf is wrong with this site. it doesn't *seem* like such a terrible idea.

how did they manage to attract so many people who think the bravest thing you can do is take a year off earning six figures?

is it a y combinator thing?

ev williams

i think the high profile awful bullshit gives it a bad name

nice people write nice things there also

how do you navigate this thing

what IS the idea, though. i want to agree that it doesnt seem like a bad idea but its just... a blogging platform right? with nothing to distinguish it but exclusivity and nice design?

i think they want to encourage quality content

which they seem to be failing at

lol

"5 min read"

https://medium.com/health-the-future/918b3d08f21f

yeah i think part of my confusion is i literally do not understand the mechanics of the site

i only end up there when there's a valleywag "look at this asshole" post or something self-congratulatory gets upvoted on hacker news

i think the idea is to blow your mind, man

there's http://svbtle.com too

I googled valleywag and stumbled upon this unexpected ilxor connection (sorry if it's already been posted)
http://valleywag.gawker.com/rap-genius-imma-rape-you-in-your-mouth-1177584961

what IS the idea, though. i want to agree that it doesnt seem like a bad idea but its just... a blogging platform right? with nothing to distinguish it but exclusivity and nice design?

― max, Thursday, August 22, 2013 1:59 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my impression is its a like gawkers kinja, its a blogging platform that also has paid writers and editors and you can write on yr own little blog and maybe one of yr posts will get called up to the big leagues

http://i.imgur.com/jgqMRrH.png

i was def conflating it w svbtle too this whole time

so many platforms man

so much content

subtle like the v in svbtle

i wonder what its pronounced like or even if its pronounced at all

it could just be a knowing glance

you have to pronounce it in latin

true svbtlers DONTVSESPACESANDTYPEINALLCAPS

lag00n otm

about relationship to kinja and so many platforms so much content

and the other stuff

i had forgotten that kinja exists

how could you

never forget

http://i.imgur.com/d0DHO45.png

the thought catalog of kinja

what was wrong w/ wordpress?

or blogger

http://i.imgur.com/TWph2Cg.png

I want to paint a different picture of a young man walking home from the convenient store but wearing a future version of what Google has produced. Once this young man realizes there is some sort of danger approaching and I mean someone stalking you in the night with a loaded gun. He would audio commend his Google Glass to “Record All Danger!” This command would start the video feature of his Glasses and turn on a light on the outside for all people to see there is a recording in process. Since he activated the “Danger Feature” the data would be stored in a separate encrypted cloud storage that would not be easily deleted if someone got a hold of your Glasses. The authorities would alerted of your location and a 911 operated would be routed to your Glasses phone feature. When the man stalking you approached he would already know a few things by the color light that was activated.

#26 most popular article last month

you can't make a title like that up

Er1c Kuhn Verified account
@Kuhn

UTA Agent, Head of Social Media. Former @CNN, @NBA @CBSNews social media man. Always a ski bum. Make magic. #BOOM

LA / NY / The World! · Er1cKuhn.com

6,031 Tweets
1,674 Following
15,449 Followers

omfg 26.

Why We Built Medium

In 1999, two friends and I launched Blogger, a simple tool for publishing on the web. Blogs, or “weblogs,” were largely unknown outside a small community of web geeks. The idea that anyone, anywhere, could publish for a global audience seemed radical.

Today, we carry the Internet around on pocket-sized devices with more computing power and pixels than we previously had on our desks. We have innumerable options for sharing our deep thoughts or cat photos — with or without a retro filter. And, while it’s easy to trivialize, our collective, casual, everyday shares demonstrate that millions of people have the power of a printing press at their fingertips. (And they use it.) That is an amazing advancement.

We love tweets as much as the next person (probably more), but sometimes we long for something meatier. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase the depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages great ideas coming from anywhere?

In short, we think that words (still) matter, so we built a better system for sharing them.

#BOOM

We love tweets as much as the next person (probably more)

this is a sly way of saying 'your tweets pay me lol'

while we're on the subject what is up with sulia, what is that

http://sulia.com/

no street team, swear

it's got that google+esque feel to it

i've never heard of it until now

i've only run into cos a couple journos on twitter i follow use it for longer thoughts

I only seem to see Sulia used by sports journos. It's like a social version of twitlonger, I think?

when did web design get so -- so FLAT

all of these sites

i think we need to unpack two issues here:

- what is this weird blogging metaplatform thing (medium, kinja, etc.)? does it have a future? how does it differ from livejournal?

- why are all the successful posts on medium.com by such awful people? are they just drawn by the bourgeois security blanket of 2012 era web design?

something else that might kinda fit here is the whole publishing on linkedin thing that seems to be happening

iirc he also was early on the podcast bandwagon. hosting them, not making them

oh yeah there was drama with him:

http://gawker.com/5791754/how-twitters-predominant-founder-was-fired-and-forgotten

but more importantly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/technology/31ev.html

"Pyra made a Web-based project management tool but soon saw a different opportunity: a tool that allowed users to easily post articles and photographs to personal blogs. That became Blogger, one of the first Web services that automated blog publishing.

Soon after, the tech bubble burst, and Blogger was running out of money. Mr. Williams told his five employees, including Ms. Hourihan and Mr. Bausch, that he could no longer pay them and that he would run the company alone.

But six months later, in June 2001, Blogger started making money by charging for added features, and Mr. Williams had a budget that allowed him to hire new workers. In 2003, Google acquired Blogger.

Several people who once worked at the company said they didn’t make money on the sale because Mr. Williams had never submitted the paperwork needed to allocate stock options. Mr. Williams says that this group hadn’t worked at the company long enough for their stock options to vest.

Others have a different view of Mr. Williams’s tenure at Blogger.

“I don’t think he took care of the people who got him to where he was,” says Ms. Hourihan, who earned millions of dollars from the sale. “It was bitter, horrible and tough. He’s not C.E.O. material. It doesn’t play to his strengths. He’s a better inventor; he’s better at coming up with ideas.”"

(notably, I'm pretty sure Meg Hourihan was Williams' girlfriend at some point in here too. I used to read her and Jason Kottke's blogs all the time, like 15 years ago; she's married to Kottke now)

she also was the co-founder of kinja!

twitter was one of a handful of services that had its fate really decided by the advent of widespread smartphones in the late 00s. the group messaging feature was really their original pitch -- some phones had web access, but very few, and it was mostly useful for people in close proximity (it really broke out at a sxsw event) or your friends.

the web interface was kind of usable on pseudo-smart phones, but if you had your computer you'd just bust out an instant messenger client. friends with t-mobile sidekick phones had a client at some point but I don't think that was a breakout point for twitter. iPhone/Android kind of made it along with a web interface that was slowly getting better, and people starting to follow/interact w/strangers

williams seems like he's really into ideas for a while, doesn't necessarily know where to take them, and then continues to be in charge for like another year or two while the product flounders

i'm pretty proud of this thread title. the incoherence should have been the clue that there's no market.

idk like a lot of these companies it sounds like it cldve been a fine business... with a smaller staff, and lower vc expectations

like he cldve self funded it an just had 15 ppl in an office somewhere and it wldnt have been that different

the same is true of twitter except obvs on a much larger scale and its market rather than vc expectations

so many services humming along making good money for 1-10 people b/c they're not trying to take over the world

VCs are all about business plans that require six hundred million MAUs and 200% annual growth

instagram had like 12 employees when it was sold for a billion lol

people who know how to business

you can't serve 5 paragraphs in 10MB with a 15 person office lag00n, think big!

lol the page size thing is a hilarious subplot, dude is hyper focused on product detail, except how fast the page loads, if it will load at all, if it will use up ppls entire monthly mobile allotment

its weird too cause most huge media webpages are because of the byzantine ad tech crawling all over them, but medium nope just strangely huge

there are people that don't have unlimited mobile data plans??

hello

(canada has some of the most expensive prices for telecommunications of any developed country)

i have a 4gb plan and i rarely go over it

i share it w/ my wife too

i have like 500mb :'-(

I'm generally at work or home and both have wifi so it's kinda nbd mainly

no medium blogs for me on transit tho

it's not the cost, it's the fact that it takes 20 seconds to load on a phone

that too

would you guys be into a blogging platform that was pretty much just plain text long form articles?

that's what medium is for most articles! only it loads all the possible images and page design tweaks no matter which article you go to

so you guys want a medium...lite?

medium is a great software imo, page load thing aside

their attention to detail w things like typography is v cool https://medium.engineering/typography-is-impossible-5872b0c7f891

it prob wldnt even be very hard make the pages smaller they were prob just ignoring it cause it wld slow down their ~innovation~ tho not sure what having all those employees is for if not doing work like that

"there are people that don't have unlimited mobile data plans??"

yes, in fact I think these were scarce for the past few years; but now I hear they're showing up again. I have AT&T though and don't have it; they capped me years ago. They did raise it slightly last year and I never go over but I also don't stream music much off wifi.

Yeah, I have the lowest mobile data plan available on my carrier. Hard to see why you'd need unlimited with wi-fi everywhere, unless you're in a remote place, in which case there's probably no cell service either.

lol

Wow, I gotta say Medium's new pivot is very interesting. Definitely a big market, though. pic.twitter.com/P8ANpSof3u

— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) July 2, 2017

The good people of WSB are hunkering to take down South Africa in the currency market because uppity ANC types have ruined the country and done white genocide while marxist bands of pirates(?) roam the country. Great stuff! https://t.co/8BulMzRYYq

— Neil (@irl_neil) February 16, 2021

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) June 12, 2016

oop wrong thread

have we talked about substack?

https://doyles.substack.com/p/in-queers-we-trust-all-others-pay

knew this would be a problem when the substack new yorker article said 'moderation decisions are made by the founders, and, McKenzie told me, the company does not comment on them. Best has suggested that Substack contains a built-in moderation mechanism in the form of the Unsubscribe button.'

theyre providing a valuable service putting obnoxious writers behind a paywall

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp7y3/medium-tells-journalists-to-feel-free-to-quit-after-busting-union-drive
https://ev.medium.com/medium-editorial-team-update-8679bcb9fe81

these people with infinite wealth could actually do something good for journalism, instead they do things like this, over and over

the people with actual infinite wealth who have arguably succeeded in journalism are the ones who have 1) bought a traditional newspaper 2) given it a ton of money (washington post, la times (although that might not work out)).

these people with infinite wealth could actually do something good for journalism, instead they do things like this, over and over

stewart bainum jr. is out there trying to buy the tribune co. out from under a vulturous hedge fund so that's at least one +1 for people with infinite wealth as far as I'm concerned

yeah buying newspapers is prob the way to go, the real move imo would be rather than going for one of the real big names instead just buy a ton of other papers and fund them to do good reporting etc

I read that the medium guy could afford to run medium at its current rate of losses for 200 years

Ok ev has extreme growth hacker brain

imagine punting on 700k subscribers because it doesn't represent google-worthy scalehttps://t.co/zAK1ebSP86 pic.twitter.com/VEtg5gmrs9

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) March 25, 2021

lol jesus

What a ding dong

700,000 people?!?!

Are you suggesting that is a lot or not a lot

i don't know whether it's enough to run an editorial operation (seems like it should be tbqfh) but it's more: who subscribes to medium dot com?!

venturing a guess that 20% were subbing for "cuckold love stor[ies].”