[robmerki]

It's easy to forget that blogging before Medium was mostly ugly & slow WordPress websites. I am grateful that Ev & team were able to push online writing in a better direction.

Unfortunately Medium slowly turned into a incredibly frustrating & hostile user experience. I haven't purposely clicked a Medium link in many years because of it. I empathize with how difficult it can be to generate revenue from online writing, but I wish they figured out a better way.

[capableweb]

Did you forget about cool and snappy Blogger (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or cool and snappy tumblr (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or even cool and snappy LiveJournal (before it turned ugly and slow)?

It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy.

Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).

[Mezzie]

I'm still sad at LJ's downfall. I've been reminiscing since I got an email two days ago about my LJ's 19th birthday.

There are several aspects of that site in its heyday that I've yet to find really replicated elsewhere, particularly for longer text discussions.

[notRobot]

Unfortunately I was not able to use LJ during its heyday, would you mind elaborating a bit on the features you miss?

[Mezzie]

Most of the things I miss revolve around the community features and how good LJ was for MEDIUM-SIZED conversations: You weren't stuck in your immediate circle but neither were you just shouting into the terrifying public void like you are on, for example, Instagram or Twitter.

There was very, very fine level of access control over who could see what which meant you could require CONTEXT to be a part of a group. In addition, tagging support was robust and NOT just a mixture of hashtags. So you could do things like, in a politics group, click 'Elections: 2004' and see, in chronological order, every post related to that topic in the group. This made actual search possible and cut down on reposts/recycled content, because things weren't just lost the minute they fell off the front page, etc.

[notRobot]

This is very interesting, thank you!

[wyclif]

I agree with Mezzie about the good things about LJ, but one thing I think he/she is wrong about is that Twitter is "shouting into a void." In fact, even though your tweets may be set to public and any user can read them, your followers are your "circle" and most interactions come from there, not from random people.

[Mezzie]

The difference is that the access controls were built in to LJ and they're an afterthought on Twitter. The ability to finely control VIEWERSHIP (multiple different friends groups, for example) dampened a lot of things being shared without context.

Then again, screenshot culture wasn't really a big thing, yet. I don't think we could replicate some of what made LJ work anymore. It's sad.

[rchaud]

No it wasn't. Blogspot was fine. TypePad was fine, as was WP. These are what powered the blogging boom of 2003-2010. They are all still around. If you were a regular writer, you would also have eventually developed a strong command of whatever platform you were on. A writer doesn't stop because the pen isn't as nice as they would like.

Meanwhile, Medium failed to create any kind of boom at all, despite its clean UX. They just kept the marketing/analytics cruft out of the product JUST long enough to attract a large enough audience, and then jacked everything up to 11. Standard bait-and-switch for 'free' technology products these days.

[lesstyzing]

How to your two paragraphs go to together? Wordpress websites can be good if they’re set up right (and that’s why Wordpress powers such a huge portion of web content). Medium developed a nice platform and turned it into something completely user hostile and horrible. We shouldn’t be grateful they started with good intentions when it’s currently so awful. I’d says we should be thanking Wordpress and condemning Medium.

[pessimizer]

The Medium experience is worse than any ugly & slow Wordpress website I'm aware of.

[rchaud]

I have yet to run into a slow Wordpress blog. The slow WP sites are usually corporate websites running a ton of plugins (appointment scheduler is a popular one) that wouldn't exist on a pure writer's blog site.

[pottertheotter]

I completely disagree. It used to be so easy to subscribe to everything I wanted to read via RSS and consume it quickly how I want to consume it. That user experience was 100x better than what we have now.

[nyanpasu64]

Most blogs today are still accessible via RSS, even though few of them actually advertise their RSS feed. However some don't put full articles on their feed.