[state]

I guess this is the direct counter-argument to my comment in the thread about Svtle.

Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content? I find it so strange that these services which are pitched directly at people who consider themselves to be brilliant also become the archive for your stuff. It just seems like a conflict of interest when, yes, what exactly is their game plan?

[eob]

It's a distribution / curation thing, like writing an Op-Ed for a magazine instead of publishing it on your blog. Either way you get the word out, but by ceding control to the magazine you gain access to a wider audience, unless you are in the 1% of bloggers who are a destination themselves (like daringfireball.com). Even Krugman "blogs" via the NYT instead of on his own domain.

Both ways are valuable, of course. Just providing the counter argument.

[ThomPete]

The comparison doesn't hold up quite IMHO.

NYT curates much more and so if you manage to get accepted you are more likely to be read.

The same as far as I understand is not true for Medium. I have an account there and I am no Krugman.

[eob]

You're correct, of course.

My comment was directed at the question of why someone would share copyright of their written work with an external party. One common answer is the distribution channel and pre-packaged audience. In that respect, NYT and Medium provide similar function.

[mdwrigh2]

Medium sends out an e-mail with hand selected stories every week though and I find myself reading a couple quite often though. That's much less likely to happen with your own blog.

[ThomPete]

The real question you need to ask yourself though is, how likely are you to get your story in the email?

[yen223]

As long as

    P(story read by audience|written in Medium) > P(story read by audience|written in self-hosted blog)

Medium will continue to be a better choice.

[kmfrk]

Yeah, Medium is tantamount to the blogging equivalent of an online petition in 2014.

Lots of Open Letters. :)

I wouldn't mind if they disrupted away the opinion columns and letters to the editor in newspapers, though. Better to fit it all in one place to ignore.

[taude]

For a distribution/curation thing, I just prefer everyone write their own articles/content on their own website, and then have something like Hacker News, Retweets, Kottke, FB, Flipboard, etc...to float the good things to the top.

EDIT: the only time I've ever gone to Medium to read anything was when something surfaced on Hacker News. I don't really see it as anything more than another blogging engine.

[dredmorbius]

There's also RSS/Atom, which I'm belatedly discovering, and appreciating greatly.

[steveklabnik]

> Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content?

Sometimes, it can be good for things. Take parody, for instance. My favorite Medium collection is "CSS Perverts"[1], which is basically really silly, fake articles about programming stuff. Sample article: "How Node.js will replace JavaScript."

Because it's on Medium, people are more willing to believe that Jenn is serious, and so she gets confused readers[2], people who are actually quite upset[3], and serious rebuttals[4].

It's one of my favorite things on the internet right now.

1: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal

2: https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/cf72b588b1b#ad4c-7315e80e40...

3: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/424683365980069888/p...

4: https://medium.com/p/5133e7296592

[nl]

"A Call For Web Developers To Deprecate Their CSS"[1] is most awesome thing I've read this year.

California Style Sheets are a standard, meaning there is a group of people at W3Schools who come up with new properties (like border-radius and box-shadow) every year. For some time, they did not know that the Node group at W3Schools was coming up with ways to update the styling of a page without CSS. Recently, both groups finally met and realized the overlap in functionality and therefore opened a spec to deprecate CSS entirely. That spec became HTML5. The rest of the story is present day. More and more developers are using HTML5, but do not realize the redundancy of using CSS.

[1] https://medium.com/cool-code-pal/1f6430781393

[voyou]

Wait, you're saying Medium is the new http://adequacy.org/ ? Finally, I understand!

[lowglow]

> Is it true that people actually don't care about keeping ownership over their content?

You comment here. Isn't that basically the same thing? What are comments if not for mini-blog posts sometimes.

[minimaxir]

Hacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay.

Additionally, Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit. (Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways)

[bhouston]

> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways

Comments are the price some websites pay to encourage higher levels of engagement, and the high level of engagement here on HackerNews makes it a more valuable resource to its readers (more submissions, more voting, and sometimes informed comments from the community) and thus it has a halo effect on YCombinator. Thus the comments in the grand scheme of things are surely a net positive.

Reddit and YouTube are built in part on comment driven engagement even if a large majority of the comments are poor.

[atmosx]

I dislike not being able to leave a comment. Yes, I'm outspoken, strong-opinionated and I want to express myself. I liked the HN community before realizing that YCombinator is an incubator, etc. I am/were/came here for the community.

[lowglow]

> Hacker News comments don't require the blood, sweat, and tears involved in writing a 1,000-word well-edited essay.

Some people do take the time to write well thought out replies.

> Hacker News comments aren't used by the owning website for potential profit.

I'm going to disagree. HN profits GREATLY from your participation.

> Y Combinator as a brand is likely hurt by HN comments anyways

Not likely. Comments from an engaged community (no matter how cynical at times) still drives traffic, and that is a powerful in and of itself.

[untog]

"The HN crowd" has become an online meme for man-child Silicon Valley programmers. So I'd say there is at least a danger of that overflowing to perceptions of YC - just not for anyone YC probably cares about.

[dasil003]

Really? My perception is that "the HN crowd" is known for being pedantic know-it-alls criticizing every minute detail of anything. "Man-child" seems much more Slashdot/Reddit/Digg/4chan plus the rest of the internet.

[yen223]

I like the irony of a person talking about pedantic know-it-alls, via a comment that dissects the exact meaning of the phrase "the HN crowd".

[dredmorbius]

HN also has a posting limit that's limiting for longer posts as well. Not to mention some crippling deficiencies in markup and other capabilities.

[state]

Good point! My comments are somewhat ephemeral to me. I'm not a very prolific commenter, and I don't feel all that attached to the content. To concede the point in practice, I'll just go for it with a long reply. I do wish comments were somehow a part of my own complete archive though. That seems like it would obviously be better.

Although I think the quality of discussion on HN is interesting, it's not that the HN brand is explicitly about the quality of the comments. The writing interface is pretty dissimilar from what Medium offers. To me there there appears to be an obvious conflict: if you're all about attracting brilliant users wouldn't those users also want to retain complete ownership over their content? Isn't that the smart long-term thing to do in a world of quickly changing services?

What's especially fascinating to me is the role that design plays in these services. Medium has clearly spent an exceptional amount of money to create a particular user experience. Without commenting on its quality, it seems that the aesthetic they have chosen has almost become a red flag. Spent all our money on design? Don't worry, we're going to sell you out anyway!

That should come with the disclaimer that I'm trained as an architect. Design is important, but most important is the tool. In so many cases design is just a way to send messages that distract from the actual workings of the tool.

[dredmorbius]

The reward for commenting on HN is generally engagement and discussion.

I've been casting about myself for a suitable platform. I've actually mostly settled on reddit as it's got a community, some of whom are interested in the topics I am, good search tools, and a serviceable posting infrastructure. Markdown, Imgur for image links, semi-embeddable images with the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and a Wiki for more structured content.

I've also got a more traditional blogging platform (Dreamwidth).

Since I prefer to operate pseudonymously, self-hosting is not a good fit, though I could do that if I chose. And finding a good mix of platform and tools is tough.

As for layout, I've got enough CSS chops that I can shove the more annoying bits of a site out of the way, at least to my preferences.

http://dredmorbius.reddit.com/

http://dredmorbius.dreamwidth.org/

[blumkvist]

There's quite a bit of difference between annonymous ramblings in some corner of the internet and long form journalism that took you serious amount of time and money to put together.

[lowglow]

time is money, regardless of how it's spent.

[lmm]

I don't consider myself to be brilliant. But I write stuff, I enjoy the writing, and some people seem to enjoy reading it. That's enough. As for being the archive, they're probably more reliable than my hard drive. I'd like my stuff to still be somewhere people can read it, for as long as people enjoy reading it. If medium figure out some way to monetize it, more power to them - it's not like I'm bothering to try. (And if they try to lock the content in a dark dungeon then I trust the internet to jailbreak it)

[drawkbox]

I agree writers should have more of an ownership stake but think of writers at large newspapers, journalists etc. Even though they are writing for the brand they are also building their brand. So in a way Medium, Svbtle, etc are all new magazines or papers that are a chance to get noticed more. The smart brand aware writers will use it as another draw. It is a bit like a new 'guest post' combined with writing an article for a third party.

But is ev getting rich again off your content a third time? Yes he is a smart man.

[stephenson]

Most people care about getting readers, get there message out. This is mediums power.

Running your own blog and getting readers tend to be harder.

[lowglow]

It's all about distribution. I agree.

[chuhnk]

Think of Medium as a new age New York Times. Curation will be done by the general public rather than a paid editing team. Think of the shift of real time news to Twitter. It's basically the same idea for long form journalism. You may disagree at this point in time but given a few years it'll end up being just that.

[MaybiusStrip]

Twitter became the de-facto source of real-time news because there was no good alternative. Replacing a reputable institution like the NYT is a completely different game.

It's not even a good comparison. The NYT is a daily newspaper. The better-written pieces on medium have aspirations closer to what you'd find in The New Yorker or Vice. You have absolutely no precedent for thinking public curation will yield better results than the professionals who work for those institutions. In fact, most of the evidence so far (reddit, digg, etc...) indicates the contrary.

[tobiasu]

I find the assertion that the general public will curate high quality content pretty amusing.

One only needs to look at the front page of reddit or youtube to see what kind of an intellectual world we live in.

[trumbitta2]

If this is really the case, then Medium will be illegal in Italy. You have to be very very wary of how and what you write on your own, personal blog, here. Thanks Silvio.

[benihana]

I think people are much less interested in owning the content than they are in having their content promoted. The end goal seems to be internet fame, not having a huge archive of content. When viewed in that light, it makes more sense why people are doing what they're doing.