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

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'

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

this part i thought was maybe the only interesting thing

At Medium, there’s no need to register a website, sift through a mountain of design options, and re-organize your schedule for the habit of blogging. You just write. “If it’s on a whim, that whim is killed the moment you’re forced to find a unique sub domain and find a template,” explains Williams.

The sheer simplicity of Medium’s writing platform is garnering accolades from respected writers and designers. Medium is “the best composition experience on the web, hands-down” wrote early Facebook designer Julie Zhuo, in a Medium post about Medium (so meta). “You see exactly what your post is going to look like. There is no translation, no guess-work, no typey-typey into some fat text area and wondering whether it’ll do ‘s and ‘s and :) ‘s correctly.”

New York Times tech columnist Nick Bilton also gives Medium a thumps up. “I really like Medium — it’s one of the rare instances where the technology is truly in the background,” he writes to me in an email. “I’d love to be able to replace WordPress with Medium on my personal site.” Fortunately for WordPress, Medium has no plans to become a separate blogging platform — but, it might become home to the occasional industry muse who doesn’t want to hassle with setting up a blog.

idg why these don't-want-the-committment-of-a-blog ppl couldn't just use facebook notes tbh

also where the hell is the option to turn off smart quotes, they are super bullshit

typey-typey

Facebook Notes won't make you internet famous.

WE NO TYPEY TYPEY

also nsfwcorp. what is that? i mean i get what it is. but. does anyone subscribe?

I follow a few nsfwcorp guys on twitter. I had to unfollow Gary Brecher though

I know maybe three people who subscribe and the rest of us swarm in for a day when they unlock articles. I sort of hate the house style though??

maciej (the pinboard guy) likes them, but the fact that they did a series of posts on pando daily was a red flag for me

haven't actually read them. i try to find reasons to write people off without looking at their stuff these days.

its a bunch of idiots

Yeah Paul Carr and the one from the exile who wasn't Taibbi, together at last. It seems a bit like a riff on Carr's old Friday Thing emails except not so britisher

wd subscribe to something like this by maciej btw. He is great.

A personal note on that, because it really shook me: I don’t care how much you hate me, how much it irks you that I was able to raise money from my “rich friends” to start a company, or the extent to which the prospect of my personal failure brings you to the brink to schadengasm. I don’t care about any of that. No amount of animosity towards me personally can excuse the vile gloating I saw from some writers at “rival” publications at the prospect that a dozen fine journalists, developers, illustrators, and support staff – several with young children to support — would soon be out of work.

Salon’s Alex Pareene, on hearing that we may have to lay off our staff, tweeted a single word in response: “aahahaha.” Gawker’s deputy editor, Max Read described the news as “BEAUTIFUL” (emphasis his).

If I should run into messrs Pareene or Read, perhaps while taking a late night stroll through the lowest circles of hell, I’ll be sure to ask them how they’d have felt reading Tweets like that about their colleagues and friends. But of course, the answer to that question presupposes a capacity for empathy or even basic humanity.

To quote one member of the NSFWCORP editorial team when he read those Tweets: “those fuckers had better hope we don’t survive.”

lol pwned

medium is about balloons https://medium.com/beautiful-stories/8d615d86ac04

i still dgi

imagining the post-antibiotics future, in which all of our children die before reaching their teen years.

wtf is medium is becoming a platform of it own https://medium.com/nelsons-errata/c100ebe0158f

Gruber is a sharp cookie, one of the sharpest in the design blogger set

^^delete humanity

http://pando.com/2013/12/30/what-if-we-are-really-in-a-matrix-like-simulation/

Thirty years from now a Sony PlayStation should be able to compute 10,000 human lifetimes simultaneously and in real time, or about a human lifetime per hour. Between PlayStation 1, PS2 and PS3 there are about 100 million devices in the world. If each held 10,000 humans, more people would reside in Sony PlayStations than maintain a corporeal existence on earth.

http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif

reality is basically just one of those tv shows inside a tv show

i remember when the medium was just a bunch of racist freshmen complaining about their roommates

(the porn industry is constantly innovating)

http://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/897/1*-xYcdg-uXIQlyXBemICiEQ.png

meh, try here: https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/897/1*-xYcdg-uXIQlyXBemICiEQ.png

https://medium.com/@reifman/5ebf4e53294c

disgusting

men... men... what are we, anymore? what the fuck? get so mad at shit like this

saw someone i knew state intentions to pick up and move from (neglected blogspot/wordpress/whatever blog) to medium 'for longer pieces', it seems like part of the pull is the idea that people might pay attention to your writing.

the world of blogs out there away from the high-profile frequent-post buzzy-newscycle many-commenters model that apes web 2.0 journalism pioneered by i dunno sullivan and yglesias or whoever - it is a desolate wasteland compared to what it was like say 10 years ago. it seems like most writing is not being read, or being read and responded to in a kind of pings-in-the-void fecklessness that is probably not very stimulating for the writers.

throw in feely uplifty 'mattering' dimension to it, and welp.

damn goole that shit is a 14 minute read can a brother get a pullquote or what

what the fucking fuck

here's the deal: not all people want to be your friend or communicate with you after a relationship ends. if they don't want to, you respect their wishes.

I've been the persistent person when it came to talking to an ex before and I was completely in the fucking wrong. This dude, wtf.

a guy got dumped, and it's a problem for him

xp

dude dated someone for four months and has been dwelling on it for two years

Breakups are often hard for me, but hardest when there is cutoff. For me, Emma’s flip from care and openness to withdrawal and, ultimately, hostile rejection mirrored my mom’s behavior and re-opened deep wounds from my past.

Following her withdrawal, I cried nearly every day and struggled with sleep for months. People often see me as a successful technologist, an ex-Microsoft millionaire, but I can attest to the capacity for trauma to upend your emotional stability and make life a living hell.

Often, the partner doing the cutoff may also have experienced trauma. Cutting off may be a way to avoid pain — or it may be a way to exercise power to feel in control. Anderson says that for serial abandoners, “Creating devastation is their way of demonstrating power.”

Cutoff culture is violent in its own ways. The person cutting ties gets what they want, but the person getting cut off is left in a situation where what they need or want doesn’t matter.

and he's painting her as an emotionally-stunted person on medium, because she doesn't want to hang out with some dude she dumped and "resolve emotions"

serial abandoners YOU MEAN HUMAN BEINS

man this thing is long as shit

my amateur psychological analysis tells me this guy has a codependency issue

CUTOFF CULTURE!

why do you guys read this crap

some cutoff culture for ya
http://cdnl.complex.com/mp/620/400/90/0/bb/1/ffffff/d56d0ee52fb0f5ce73af9c216bbfd8cf/images_/assets/CHANNEL_IMAGES/STYLE/2012/09/dappy-like-pappy-50-style-tips-you-can-learn-from-your-dad/dadjorts_318743.jpg

medium, that's where successful technologists livejournal!

so the eighth circle then

i am very proud of this thread title

http://i.imgur.com/0PGvHas.png

Is this a piece of original art by Jeff Riefman???

she doesn't want to hang out with some dude

lol at cutoff culture lol at the trend of adding culture to the end of another word and declaring it a thing

this relationship isn't over until i say it is

http://youtu.be/dCPWlF_ZjU8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCPQZ1Le6dg

it seems like it's becoming more of a legit thing and less stupid

don't really appreciate how it gives the livejournals of any random who happens to get an account an excess of gravitas

like you could paste timecube into that template and give it some parallax-scrolling stock photographs of educated stupid one-day nonbelievers and it'd look reasonable

i have never looked at this website before. https://medium.com/@byroncrawford/blue-ivys-hair-is-perfect-good-hair-is-just-more-perfect-43145b2984dd wtf is this

silby tom the more of a legit thing medium gets the worse it gets

damn autocorrect silby OTM

like you could paste timecube into that template and give it some parallax-scrolling stock photographs of educated stupid one-day nonbelievers and it'd look reasonable

― heck (silby), Thursday, August 28, 2014 3:48 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

This was a claim too bold not to be tested

https://medium.com/@fldlxnc/time-cube-4ce-c5347e6b0068

if you deleted those linebreaks we'd be on to something

needs parallax, that is the key UX feels maker

h8 parallax such pointless garbage

What's parallel scrolling

lmao at the recent extremely long medium article about underlining ad typography

and typography

https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-underlines-on-medium-7c03a9274f9

if you deleted those linebreaks we'd be on to something

― heck (silby), Thursday, August 28, 2014 4:10 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I thought about doing this but 1) This would go against the spirit of Timecube and 2) You must be fucking joking if you think I'm gonna delete every line break in that thing

have you heard of…regular expressions?

seriously this bullshit that web developers are crafters, journeymen, guildmembers or whatever engaged in blue collar stuff is on notice with me

e.g. jesus fucking christ at this garbage http://mimno.infosci.cornell.edu/b/articles/carpentry/

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1066/1*WhKrWKfZJ0yFI2YnQufd2Q.jpeg

lol

makers

patagonia gilets

Wait is parallalx scrolling that shit Pitchfork puts into their articles so that you click away from an article about Tame Impala less quickly

twitter fave @fart had this insightful post that has gained some acclaim: https://medium.com/@fart/why-i-am-the-most-important-devops-thought-leader-46a191ac0f42

seriously this bullshit that web developers are crafters, journeymen, guildmembers or whatever engaged in blue collar stuff is on notice with me

― caek, Thursday, August 28, 2014 3:18 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we just dress the part *rubs grease on pants, ketchup drips down chin on to shirt*

http://www.jonhendren.com

inspirational

looks like i missed a good discussion

btw I'm not actually a web developer, thank god

was gonna say but i didnt want to counterfeit yr joke on technical grounds

btw making websites is very cool

ugh no it's so boring and awful

i'm going to be buying this soon: http://www.abookapart.com/products/on-web-typography

heck (silby)
Posted: August 28, 2014 at 5:21:42 PM
ugh no it's so boring and awful

same diff man B-)

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/624096161339576320

haha very good

mik ‏@mik235 15h15 hours ago
@Pinboard reading medium has been 100% better since I blocked Javascript for the domain

Pinboard ‏@Pinboard 15h15 hours ago
@mik235 I can top that with a simple change to your /etc/hosts file that will make it 200% better

you should stick to kinja

or tilde.club

i like medium a lot its really well visually designed

but i mean whatever like sands through the hourglass so are the days of our lives

https://medium.com/life-learning/how-creating-a-meaningful-morning-routine-will-make-you-more-successful-1b7372655938

lol this is like every lifehack from the past 2500 years bred into one mean lean list for success

Cathryn Lavery is a serial entrepreneur dedicated to helping others become their Best Self.

is that like a serial monogamist

worse

Think beyond breakfast. Those thinking the market is saturated can forge a new one. For cereal makers, this could mean targeting the high number of shoppers who buy breakfast outside of the home, according to IBISWorld’s research. Welcome to The Cereal Bar, a Toronto-based food court stop where a bowlful of cereal (selected from more than 20 kinds) and three toppings (fruits, nuts and chocolate chips for those with a sweet tooth) runs $4 to $5. In its early days, the now eight-year-old business failed to garner an investment to expand from judges on Dragon’s Den—Canada’s version of Shark Tank. And a rival cereal-centric café that used to be located nearby—Cerealicious—closed within a few years of opening.

Life Learning
Accelerated Learning,
Antifragility, and Definite
Optimism.

("definite optimism" new to me)

haha I remember cerealicious and predicting that it would close fairly quickly, did we have a thread about it?

https://twitter.com/briansolis/status/647069103815962624

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-meltdown-of-evan-williams-startup-medium-2017-2

my friend who got fired says the article is basically all true

blogger 2.0

god silicon valley is wild

like why can't it just be a successful business making revenue - unlike, like most of the big websites - oh, because the vc it raised is so huge and that means its valuation is huuuuge and therefore anything less than everyone having a medium blog is failure

VC is how good ideas turn into bad advertising companies

"Ev is not that interested in revenue, to be honest," one former employee said.

holy shit the former CEO of Twitter isn't interested in revenue
how could anybody have seen that one coming

god silicon valley is wild stupid as hell

blogger blogs still a solid value-per-click nowadays

seems like a great year to start a blogger blog actually

probably just in time for google to decommission the service

I'm gonna host my own google wave server

Will it be kind of like ilx?

wavier

i didn't realize he was one of the blogger guys, I guess I forgot about that. I remember when blogger melted down and there were a couple of pretty angry cofounders who I seem to remember blamed him foreverything

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].”