The struggle for me in understanding why people use Medium is that I am a reader of Medium articles, but I only find them when posted on Reddit, HackerNews, or when they come up on a Google Search. So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
Medium has a built-in audience so the number of people who will see a particular post and share it on Reddit, HackerNews, etc., is higher than if you just host it on Wordpress and do all the marketing yourself.
If one ever makes the mistake of giving Medium a valid email address, one's inbox will be 78% Medium article recommendations until one gets quite aggressive with the spam flags.
It's quite easy to disable the daily or weekly digests if you don't want them. Not saying I think medium is perfect, but there are better ways to approach the problem then training a spam filter.
If I've tried to turn if off once, and either it hasn't worked or it later reverted, I'm not wasting any more time on it. I can press the spam button without even leaving my mail client. I don't work for these spammers, and I don't owe them anything.
Of course, the majority of said articles the site recommends seem to be those by someone with an existing audience/fanbase, or which already got a ton of likes and shares.
As far as someone without an audience posting an article is concerned, the chances of Medium suggesting your work this way is pretty slim.
> So as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter if it was posted on Medium or a personal blog on their own site.
Indeed it doesn't matter. Medium is just the quickest/easiest/nicest way to write something and get a nice webpage out. Compared to wordpress/blogger/... the UX is just that little bit nicer, and the resulting web page is nicer on the reader (at least, the reader who doesn't mind pushing the login button once at some point) too.
I don't buy the curation argument. I see a lot of Medium articles published on Hacker Noon/Free Code Camp and then posted to Hacker News which remind me of the PHP tutorials that we always complain about.
I think they had subscriptions but they were certainly far less in your face than Medium's paid content ads. I think tiered services are fine if they don't spam you about them.
I think the point is to reject the concept of "platforms" and "curation networks" completely, not to recommend that people try to create their own Medium equivalent. Just let your blog be a blog; you weren't going to win the social media lottery anyway.
Yes. Remember that in the earlies a lot of sites had web ring links at the bottom of the page? Wondering why this has not made a comeback yet. Maybe instead of static linking web ring 2.0 could utilize activity pub to highlight relevant fresh content from other sites in the ring.
if your mum actually wants to own/monetise her knitting blog SOMEONE will have to do this anyways. Stop putting effort into things that only benefit someone else(Medium). I'm not advocating monetising your hobby but instead that no one else should own content you create and do awkward things with it that you don't sanction or condone
I almost always end up posting in the comments when I see Medium on the front page of HN, basically the same thing every time.
I've found the Medium experience to be quite good, and even world positive.
I'd been running a self-improvement group blog as an ancillary initiative to the rest of my business. The blogging was kind of cool, but not successful enough to think much about.
Then Medium asked if we'd be interested in professionalizing what we do. Medium's CEO and I both worked for the tech publisher O'Reilly early in our careers, so I think that's why he thought we could pull it off.
And so I've gotten to really experience the before and the after of Medium's paywall. Before professionalizing, publishing seemed barely worthwhile. And it only was worthwhile if I could make the posts viral enough and the call to action catchy enough. That's not really my MO, which is why we struggled.
Medium's CEO has made the case that free content has been deeply corrupted by these marketing needs. Maybe some people can opt out, but I wasn't able to. I absolutely was cutting short my effort as a writer and then manipulating the start and end of articles to serve my marketing goals (otherwise, I couldn't justify the time).
In the new system, we just write differently. We know the article is the product people pay for and we don't need to corrupt it with any secondary marketing goals.
I see this as a world positive, where Medium has been able to create an ecosystem that allows for deeper and more authoritative articles. If you're reading self-improvement articles on Medium, a simple judge is to ask yourself if the author has any 1st hand experience. The vast majority of the free side of that topic on Medium is written by content marketers who are experts in virality but are basically just making up or cargo culting the advice. (Literally, much of it is farmed out to Upwork)
Part of what drew in our subject matter experts was enough money to be worth their time. We're going to send more than $100k to authors this year (probably a lot more).
I'm trying not to jump in here to market my own stuff. What I'm talking about above is our self-improvement publication. We're also testing two more pubs on different topics, which I think says something about how lucrative we're finding the editing. But it's too early for me to say how those are going. I have a number of other biases here (small amount of Medium stock, Medium's CEO was on my board for a long time and was my boss in 2005), but I'm hoping people see my actions, which are to double down on Medium over and over again, to be an indication that I'm a true fan.
It's the same for Android vs iOS as well. With Android you have so many options that it's overwhelming, with an iPhone you'll have a product that is better than most Android phones and you don't have to worry about the chance of choice.
Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product?
I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)
About 6 years ago we had a self hosted reddit that someone hacked to hook in to our ActiveDirectory.
It's the best QA/Wiki/Group communication tool I've ever used at a company.
I've thought a few times that you could build a startup on selling a modified version of open source reddit to enterprises. (Not sure how much of reddit is open source anymore though.)
If I post an interesting article in our team slack room, if people aren't actively discussing it, it gets lost very quickly. The threading in slack never seems to attract people's attention (but that may be just people on my team ignoring it.)
With reddit, you can have discussions and sub discussions, and sub discussions if you really want to.
I actually left that company a couple months after they set up the reddit server so I'm not sure how it ended up being used or if it even was. When I was there we mostly used it for discussing interesting articles or projects that people came across. (Much like you'd use reddit for in general.)
I feel a subreddit is a good solution when you need to have a discussion with over 1,000 people. That’s an arbitrary number, but it’s the point at which personal relationships break down and it becomes a “flat” discussion.
I don’t think Reddit is a very good way to push say, an HR policy to a bunch of branch offices. There are better tools for that job (including Facebook’s corporate offerings).
1) The actual app isn't complex, not if you are only scaling to an internal audience. Most Enterprise IT coders could whip out a clone. On a build vs. buy decision, this just isn't hard enough to be worth buying.
2) Discussion apps have been available as parts of various enterprise platforms since literally before the web. Sure, some are better than others, and none of them are great. But from a value prop perspective, putting up topical discussions just isn't a big pain point in enterprises. Even if it were, Slack tends to work just as well when we are talking about internal communications. Why would an enterprise pay for another discussion service, unless it solves a significant problem in their core busines?
That's not entirely true. Candidates have to meet employers halfway.
Employer's have a limited amount of time and money too, why should they waste those resources having to mine for someone's skill level when there's plenty of candidates out there that will display that on some online site.
Perhaps in a recession, but in the current market, the employer must meet the candidate. That's how supply and demand works.
To confirm (as an example), check out the last HN Who's Hiring [1], and compare to the next one. I assure you, most of the positions go unfilled because demand is exceeding supply. A company can either make their filters more reasonable, pay more, or a combination of the two.
> For the good jobs, you're competing against other good people. Good luck playing coy.
Everyone does not need the best job. They all just need good enough jobs that continually must improve because demand outstrips supply. See Basecamp for an example; I'm confident developers reading that post began to think about their compensation after reading that.
"Basecamp doesn’t employ anyone in San Francisco, but now we pay everyone as though all did"
Sometimes an employer has more than one slot to fill, or the business is growing and gets another slot to fill. I may post the same thing next month, but that doesn't mean we haven't hired. There is an ongoing need.
Been to a lot of very nice parks out here, nearly every city has one or more. Some of which are huge with large trails.
>transportation,
You might be confusing the Bay Area (or perhaps even LA) with all of California in general. I'm from San Diego originally. Public transportation there is a joke, plain and simple. BA and LA are both special in that regard.
Bake it into the protocol that each connection is regularly confirming the other party's active and passive security measures, and that if one of these tests fails the connection is severed.
From the perspective of someone who works at Docker, we still use it to quickly spin up machines to test the installation of Docker on various kernel setups / OS's.
It still has its use-cases and Docker can't cover some of those special test cases since it shares the kernel with the host system.
We need to stop acting like it's easy to build these types of platforms.