medium.com: reddit for the coastal elite

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

when did web design get so -- so FLAT

all of these sites

― your authentic guitar playing self (elmo argonaut), Thursday, August 22, 2013 7:20 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its the new hotness

windows (!) helped make it a thing and now even the new iOS has flat icons

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/06/12/what-is-the-principle-behind-the-flat-ui-ux-design-being-adopted-by-apple-google-microsoft/

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

― R'LIAH (goole), Thursday, August 22, 2013 3:16 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

been wondering abt this too

Welcome to Sulia, the Subject-Based Social Network
Sulia is a subject-based social network that connects you to the top social sources on subjects you care about.
We all have interests that we're extremely passionate about. Whether it's our family, a sports team, breaking news, Hollywood gossip, a hobby, a career or a political issue, we obsess over our interests everyday.
However, with an endless number of sources talking about an endless number of topics, it's nearly impossible to find the best sources to follow across your interests. And, even if you were able to identify the top sources, sifting through all of their content is maddeningly time consuming.
We built Sulia to address these problems (which were driving us mad too).
Sulia's subject-based structure of social channels connects trusted sources and enthusiasts on shared interests across thousands of subjects, including breaking news and events. How?
We use a combination of network managers and sophisticated algorithms to identify the best-regarded sources across thousands of topics. We then dynamically filter content from those sources, regardless of where it's created (a blog, a social network, a media site, through Sulia's publishing system, etc.), into high-quality, realtime social channels. The result is streams of timely content from trusted sources that is always on-topic, readable, and relevant.
People use Sulia everyday to discover new sources and engage with their interests. We hope you do too!

gotten the impression some people were getting paid to write there

Sulia started out as a list service for Twitter. Then it turned into a filtering service built with Twitter in mind. Last year, it moved away from Twitter and positioned itself as a standalone “subject-based social network.”

http://allthingsd.com/20130723/sulia-says-its-homegrown-social-network-is-growing-raises-6-million/

readthat.com

when did web design get so -- so FLAT

all of these sites

― your authentic guitar playing self (elmo argonaut), Thursday, August 22, 2013 7:20 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its the new hotness

windows (!) helped make it a thing and now even the new iOS has flat icons

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, August 22, 2013 3:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think flatness is kinda overstated, like ios7 while stripped of a lot of drop shadows and what not isnt really at all flat eg the new parallax effect is all abt rendering depth, its mostly imho a result of trying to fit a lot unnecessarily busy design thing into little phones which has resulted in a much need emphasis on simplicity, truly flat designs for complex things like an operating system say windows are really not that great imho youre left bereft of a lot of useful visual clues, for a simple website its nbd and a lot of websites have been flat all along, like say ilxor.com

truly flat designs for complex things like an operating system say windows are really not that great imho

agree but like cmon, there's a definite reaction to fake-leather and taking your notes on fake yellow lined paper happening imo

i don't think it's bad tbh, maybe i just didn't realize how ubiquitous it was becoming

sure but the opposite of skeuomorphism isnt necessarily flat and i think that particular bugaboo has overshadowed some more substantial design shifts xp

We rely on multitudes of tools and various products to help us live our lives.

However, it is easy to forget that it is not the tools that matter, but the result and outcome of using them.

im working on an iphone app at the moment as fate would have it and i was poking around apples documentation where they repeatedly advise against drop shadows in all sorts of situations for ios7 and then look at the keyboard these lil fuckers

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

Madrigal, ilx lurker:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/what-is-medium/278965/

McConlogue and Shih were just blogging, as people have done since the dawn of time.

good article, answers a lot of my urgent qs

https://medium.com/waho-cooooolllll/94ea348e3345

how *is* tasha

https://medium.com/waho-cooooolllll/3562d432a18b

http://i.imgur.com/FIa54cQ.png

im working on an iphone app at the moment

excited to see what you do for path

hah

https://medium.com/p/16046aeb2d41
Media Moguls: Ted Turner
[Note: I wrote this as a senior in university.]

is this app.net

ok here we go https://medium.com/the-web-we-make/b7a98098b342

i mean that kind of explains it. i still don't get why everyone on it is so awful.

Hard Knocks, not Harvard.

gross

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-22/twitter-co-creator-ev-williams-stretches-the-medium

https://twitter.com/FalseMedium

that's pretty dead on

http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/28/buzzfeed-has-a-medium-problem/

pando daily

Creation is not yet available on mobile devices, so even if you can post on the web, you won’t be able to post on your mobile device. We’re working on this.

teh future!!

https://medium.com/p/4382e09934e

haha what is this website https://medium.com/editors-picks/37d58af643bb

on the other hand tho: https://medium.com/p/d7e5d14065f1

I like that what-is-medium piece:

They could skim the cream, and let the bad posts just sink, unloved and unshared. They got a bunch of great free stuff they could promote and any crap that got published on Medium didn't besmirch the great work they were doing with their paid-for stories. They could have their cake and a free one, too. (In this analogy, I suppose eating it would be making money, and so far, there's no sign Medium is doing anything but stockpiling cake.)

i've started to get interested in this blurry distinction between "platform" and "publication" -- specifically the way that semi-curated sites, sites that do have an editorial line for at least some of their content, nevertheless hold on to the idea of being a "platform" (as if they're just, you know, tumblr) as I guess a way of disavowing any content that might be damaging to their brand? It came up in this piece on the Awl, recently, a piece of inside baseball on techcrunch's response to the Awl's piece on Elite Daily--

"platform" is a buzzword now for publications. Medium, for instance, really is a platform: it has no dedicated writing staff, though it has assigning editors. BuzzFeed is sometimes a platform, such as when it throws up its hands at its inability to keep contributing "authors" such as The Heritage Foundation from publishing lies on its website. These publications have open publication technology.

(& elite daily does not, viz it is not a platform)

there's this sense that the "platform" is more of a free-for-all and more "disruptive" and therefore egalitarian/meritocratic and that somehow magically the cream is going to float -- even though the mechanic that gets stuff to the front page, even when it's a little shaped by editors, follows the same old success-breeds-success mechanic. yr Medium dudes argue that they're coming from the idea that "culture is better for amplifying the voices of those whom traditional institutions exclude, even if that requires giving a platform to those who are thoughtless or negative", and maybe they are-- but medium does not actually serve to amplify the voices of those excluded from traditional institutions. It's just amplifying a different set of traditionally-successful people.

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'

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].”