Aug. 16th, 2018

roadrunnertwice: Dialogue: "I have caught many hapless creatures in my own inter-net." (Hapless creatures (Rainy Days))

Few days back, I celebrated my return to networked civilization by being catty about Medium. Well, maybe 50% catty, bc I also was truly and honestly curious/baffled about how it managed to get as much traction as it has. It's clearly doing something right for someone.

Anyway, it sounded like one or two other people were also curious, so I figured I'd share the partial answers that I either heard from people (mostly Brenna and Brook) or inferred from the other stuff I heard from people. (Keep in mind that I'm not exactly Internet Popular, so my lazyweb network is pretty small, i.e. take me down to Anecdote City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty [according to a friend of mine who went there for like a day last year].)

  1. Yes, the lure of windfall traffic via the related articles system seems to be most of it.

    This probably breaks out into many subtopics: the death of "surfing the web," the decline of diversified web advertising, the specialized expertise needed to fish traffic out of social media channels and searches, and of course Medium's success in marketing their youtubey "similars" thing as a solution to any of that.

    Is this windfall traffic actually sizable or good? I don't know, and I don't seem to know anyone who knows.

  2. They had some innovative interfaces for doing cool page layouts at one point, but later they threw that away for some reason. Nowadays the layout and typography look ok.

    I suspect they found that talking a lot about how good they look made people anxious about their own ability to get things looking ok, and induced doubt that other hosted tools really looked ok ("I mean they look like they look ok, but if they were really ok, wouldn't they be talking about it incessantly?"), and that that ended up being a more efficient advantage than developing new capabilities for looking beyond-ok in an individualized way.

    And to be clear, yeah, a fair lot of blogging platforms either don't look ok by modern design standards or take a lot of work to look ok. (This here journal doesn't look ok! Though that's on purpose. I do have some renovations I want to do at some point, but best believe it's staying baby-aspirin orange, which BY THE WAY seems to be having a moment, e.g. it's a color option on this year's Priuses?!)

  3. Straight up herd mentality. Especially for tech startups or open source projects at a delicate stage where it's important to adopt the plumage of other, already well-regarded startups or projects, or at least important not to NOT adopt that plumage. (Herd mentality can be quite rational, just ask your local prey animal.)

  4. People forgot about all the other tools for putting a blog post on the internet, because it's been so long since they fuckin did that.

    Well, that's a bit uncharitable, but how about this: it used to be that maintaining your own blog software was too onerous, so people moved to hosted solutions; now the target has moved so that maintaining your own stable visual, conceptual, and structural identity for a blog is too hard, and Medium's homogeneity and porous boundaries are a response to that need.

    And in cases where the balance wasn't firmly tipped Medium's way yet (like maybe you could have afforded the effort of lightly customizing a WordPress.com template), well, it's free, and hosted WordPress for your biz ain't.

  5. They have some highly evolved Twitter sharing/engagement features (which might be how that "popular highlights" thing is powered, I've never really figured that out). Mind, I don't know any readers who actually use that kind of shit. But I guess having it available is comforting to certain types of marketing folks, and it would be prohibitively difficult to build it yourself.

Update: Here's some more detail from a friend of a friend with experience running a company blog on Medium, which has some info about the Twitter integration that I didn't know!