medium.com: reddit for the coastal elite

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'

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