[jonstokes]

From the Medium piece:

"Our editors and algorithms help you find the best stuff."

I already have three sets of editors and two algorithms for finding more stuff than I could ever care to read: they're called "Facebook", "Twitter", and "Hacker News".

So their curation piece isn't interesting to me at all; only the payments.

Put another way, the web has thoroughly solved the problem of "show me some stuff that I want to read right now" -- it's like trying to drink from a firehose. There is no need for another player in that already crowded game.

Where the web is failing is at funding all this stuff.

I imagine that the answer for this is easy, though: a "read it on blendle" button for whatever article you clicked through to from FB, Twitter, or HN.

[JeanMertz]

You mean a button like on this page? (It's in Dutch, scroll a bit down)

https://www.vn.nl/het-debat-21/

We hear you. And we're working on it. This is only the first step of which many more will follow in the coming months.

[jonstokes]

Yep, rockin'. Now please just let me sign up as my own publisher and write directly on the platform :)

[JeanMertz]

Good point. Our current "onboarding process" for publishers is a bit too heavy-weight to allow "just anyone" – even you ;-) to join Blendle right now.

This is definitely something we're investigating though. And in The Netherlands, there's already a collective of journalists who created a non-profit umbrella organisation to represent freelance writers, who have been onboarded into our system.

Also, the Blendle Button that I linked to above is it's own product, with a much less heavy-weight onboarding setup. We've already seen great success using the button on a German site like http://uebermedien.de/abo/ (in this case, a flat-fee subscription button). So that's definitely something we'd like to roll out to as much freelance publishers as possible.