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by joelrunyon 4811 days ago
Tangent - Can someone please explain to me what medium is? It seems like it's the new svbtl, but I'm not quite sure if it's a collection of individual blogs, a curated selection of posts or an open community platform.

Their home pages (https://medium.com) states "Sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward" which sounds really nice, but still tells me absolutely nothing about what the platform actually is/does.

2 comments

I consider Medium a new way of writing articles with some insight, instead of tutorials and online findings. I'm thinking of using it for the sole purpose of getting my opinions out in the open.

Medium only comes with a simple editor with minimal formatting options and you can push your posts into "Collections", by either yourself or by other people. With that you can create lists of articles about things that are related to each other.

I only just got into it, so I can't really say what the main focus is, but that's what I think.

How about first link from Google when asked your question? ;) http://gizmodo.com/5935016/what-is-medium
Even that link concedes - "There's really nothing new about Medium."

I'm really not trying to hate on Medium - it looks really clean, but I'm just trying to figure out it's placement in the content publishing space.

I see it as just being a brand.

Some of the old magazine publishers are exploiting their brands by having stables of people throwing up whatever topical crap pops into their brain, never mind quality or accuracy, so there is clearly some market for topical writing (seems to me the tendency for articles to occasionally get huge attention drives posting lots of articles).

If Medium can build a brand around having decent recent articles, more power to them (I see svbtle as the same thing, with different ideas about curation).