Medium has unambiguously, objectively succeeded by that metric. They are by far the premier blogging destination. President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium.

If you think that's easy, you should try it yourself. Maybe you'll be the next Ev.

I'm not saying what they've done is easy by any means, I'm saying that what they've done is not innovative and should be considered so just because they have a lot of users. Clearly a lot of users does not solely make a business successful, as evidenced by their layoff of 1/3 of the company today.

Also, innovation is doing something in a new way, whether by customers or product. And nothing they are doing is by any definition new.

Visit their homepage. Do you see a content aggregator or something closer to Squarespace?

Even if you want to restrict to .com, WordPress.com (VIP) competes for many of the same users which Medium has been competing for.

Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform, and then once they became enamored with social and Google Plus they let it languish to the point where it had almost become unusable.

Medium's genius was recognizing this empty market that Google had conquered but abandoned, and created what blogger would have been had it continued to be updated for the world of gifs and emojis.

I think your analysis is spot on, Google did a great job of consolidating the world into a place you could pull off a single RSS feed and get lots of good content, and then pissed it away. And I think Medium has done an excellent job of stepping into that space.

What I find interesting is that Google hasn't done the follow on which is figure out that this team understood the blogging space well and could be a part of a "print" side of Google (much like Youtube is the "video" side of Google). Of course there is that whole Tumblr thing which did poorly under Yahoo!'s care.

Sometimes I think it is like playing Milton Bradley's "Battleship" where each effort helps map out a part of the space where there is, and is not, a possible product present.

No they didn't. Wordpress powers some absurd number of all websites (25%-ish). Tumblr is still fairly popular. And Medium of course. What google did do is effectively kill off RSS readers, but that's a different story.

I'm with this guy. Blogger if anything, brutally assassinated LiveJournal. Unless you're in Russia.

Is that really "doing something in a new way"? Or is it "doing the same thing in a new place?"

You could say the same about Obama posting on Tumblr: http://barackobama.tumblr.com - except he hasn't done so in three years.

Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

You say that as though it's easy to do these things...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down Medium's product - it's fantastic. But the OP claimed that Medium has "unambiguously, objectively succeeded" in being innovative, and I just don't see it. I'd actually argue that Tumblr was far more innovative - there are some fascinating forms of content that came out of that place, not to mention the whole social network, reblogging effect, etc. etc.

But neither has shaped up to be a particularly successful business, and placing perceived innovation above that might not be wise when you're talking about user generated content. What happens if either of them fails?

That's... not an easy thing to do. Making anything to do with technology "easy" is no small feat; that Medium was able to do this with as big an incumbent player as WordPress (for example) is an even bigger feat.

Offering something easy to post that's looking good across devices?

Gimme a break, they have a single basic template, and minimal authoring tools. With these constraints, there are literally tens of thousands of Wordpress, Ghost and vanilla HTML templates by various developers/designers with 1/1000 the resources of Medium that look just as good across devices.

Agreed. I feel the same way about Dropbox. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It's a blogging platform. A good one. Someone wanted to make it, and he built it, and now it's successful.

Maybe it didn't revolutionize the way we make toasts, but it's a solid incremental improvement over the alternatives. So was facebook, so was iphone, so were most of the other things people have made.

Namely "Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration"

Satire doesn't work if most people believe it.

...are you serious? Yes, I could do all of those things, then I'd have a terrible Dropbox-like clone that only I can use. And I'd be responsible for running it.

Human society is literally built on the idea of us not needing to do things that we could do for ourselves. Most of the things you can do "for free", or even "for cheap", are only on that value spectrum if your time is worthless.

I'm pretty sure the goal of people at Medium is to create value and it's not obvious to me how much innovation is required.

For 15 years or more the world has demonstrated a huge appetite for personal publishing: Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr.

And in this moment, a lot of those options have not aged well. They haven't stayed particularly current and a lot of them seem institutionally incapable of modernizing.

So, Medium can provide an enormous value just by being the same thing we already know works but done in a modern way.

The "huge picture header" is a case in point. A few years ago Medium's default design was to have a large picture at the top, with a headline laid out in white text on top of the picture. That design is not possible anymore (I think they removed it because it wasn't mobile-friendly)... But if you took a break from Medium and came back, you'd just be left wondering how to do it.

I remember spending about 30 minutes googling for that option, until I found mention of its deprecation tucked away in a FAQ section at Medium.

Those are all valuable features that give it an edge over Blogger and Wordpress and other platforms.

You can also see the difference in quality of comments/discussion on wordpress vs medium. On medium, people are highlighting and sharing and discussing. On wordpress, they aren't doing that often (at least not on my blogs).

However, in 2016-2017, Medium is the best answer to the questions "How do I quickly write a pretty blog post?" and "How do I get people to read my thoughts?"

Tumblr fading out of public consciousness made room for Medium too.

Of course some good writers are still there but they are lost in all this really annoying noise that stopped me from reading medium.

I wish I could decide which people/publications to follow, and be certain that I will not miss their posts. And I would love to discover the content reddit-style, sorting it by number of upvotes and filtering it by tags. Instead, I get recommended a bunch of garbage by some weird machine learning algorithm.

It creates problems for writers as well, because I can never be sure that my followers will read my posts, and the amount of views I receive from Medium, compared to HN/subreddits is truly pathetic.

I really wish they would fix the discovery system, because I'm a huge fan of everything else they're doing and I would love to use Medium as a platform way more.

The tags only have "top stories", which is obscure, and looks like it works more like a "hot" sorting. I can't see the most upvoted stories to discover the best ones, and at the same time the "top story" in the tag I'm interested in hasn't changed in a long time.

I can neither browse the best stories of all time, nor the best stories published since the last time I've checked. So either way it's basically worthless.

Also, if I follow the popular tags, I'm afraid that the firehose of the new content published in them will bury the new stories published by people whom I explicitly decided to follow.

That is why should be a way to view the posts from the people I follow in the reverse-chronological order, and a completely separate system for discovering the most popular/upvoted posts. As in HN + RSS reader.

Medium can have the same key ingredients as Blogger and still replace it.

Both have also become more tailored for their use case. For example, shampoos sell better if they create a pleasant lather, and soaps if they also moisturize your skin. Those additives are why a modern bar of soap might not work well in your hair. But pure soap does, and so do some modern soap bars.

Medium managed to make normal the act of downloading around 1,500 KiB of javascript and 500 KiB of CSS in order to simply read a text blogpost.

Can I ask how many long form publications you've read lately on Medium? For me it's a lot. To be so dismissive of a product that's quietly made its way pretty deeply into your life is strange.

The same (silly) logic was once applied to facebook. "It's just another friendster/myspace!" people said.

Once they opened up to everyone, they captured an entire generation. And once they introduced Chat, they basically killed every other IM service [1]. At this point, it was game over for everyone else.

Meanwhile, Medium is another Tumblr, or another Blogger, or another LiveJournal, but the visual design attracts thought-piece bloggers instead of personal ones. This is a self-selecting but heterogeneous group, so there's no strong network effects. How do they grow beyond this, or adapt to monetize their existing userbase? What makes them think they won't just jump to the next free blog host?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

Many can also make the argument that facebook is worse than Myspace, quite validly for a number of reasons.

And making money from opposing models would act as an anchor, preventing from following the direction they believe.

[i]So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.[/i]

He wants to give great rewards to people who create great content. It's not just about views, numbers of followers, or how many people shared the content. It is about how this content impacts other people's lives and how positive it could be to have your brand or signature supporting the creator.

I personally think it's kind of hard to achieve this on a big scale. It is the opposite of the most successful program on the internet. Google AdWords.

But will change a lot of concepts if he succeed

2) What you're struggling with is the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges [1]. Purely solving technical problems (what you call, "innovation"), will not get you anywhere if you don't pay attention to adaptive challenges. You might simply just be deluding yourself to work hard on "hard problems" that don't really matter for the course of your company and your success.

[1] I actually wrote a blog post exactly about this common misconception on Medium just this week: https://medium.com/@melvinmt/so-you-want-to-work-hard-and-ch...

I would like to reply to your article, but there is still a sign-in wall on Medium. Maybe that's why there are no other replies yet either. I'm surprised it was even readable on my main rig, where Medium failed completely to provide text for quite some time after they launched, so I gave up a long time ago until now. I'm just a user, not a developer (of software), and I'm not in California so I usually find the most buzz about these type of companies after they are shrinking rather than growing. For me to even be aware of Medium at launch was solely a function of HN. I would have been more impressed if it would have had a user (reader) experience as satisfying (advanced?) as you used to enjoy with well-done HTML from the '90's, but time marches on, and lowered standards are the direction of movement.

Everything I ever had was a result of doing without, rather than prosperity, but sacrifice is not necessarily a factor, especially when you are not actually seeking a reward. Frustration & upset are also very common when there is not any sacrifice at all, and after numerous rewards have been received.

Not to be too unkind, but that's the reality of lots of stuff coming out of SV.

Whether or not Medium is "remarkable or innovative" is whether it becomes successful. If it's successful than it's remarkable and people will bend over backwards to determine what innovations made that possible.

1) Easy publishing with high quality layout (your prettier outfit comment)

2) Easy collaborative publishing.

3) Extremely easy inline editing.

4) Contextual comments

It's really just digital publishing done right.

To look at a business model that works I believe much more in the Khan Academy, BrainPicking and WikiPedia models.

It seems to be quite common where capital markets are guided by popularity or capitalist connections, that the lowest hanging fruit & largest source of money for many persuasive operators are those particular capitalists themselves rather than potential customers or profitable operations.

As I read it, Ev is aiming medium to be a TedTalks of the blogging world. Somewhere you go to find deep/compelling/interesting content, not just your average blog platform.

They wasted a lot of dev time reinventing the wheel with not enough time left over for essentials.

1. let’s stop coddling white feelings

2. Women in Salt

3. I Have a Maiden Name - An exploration of surnames, beliefs and actions.

4. Warm Takes on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4

5. The UBI already exists for the 1%

6. Atheism and Honesty - My atheism will not be about making believers comfortable.

My medium.com home page has some technical articles that interest me, an article by some Obama press flunky, and then "We should be meaner to racists", apparently because the editors recommended it.

Did I ask for a mediocre but otherwise acceptable list of technical articles to be gunked up by college student identity politics? No? Then why do the remaining 100 medium.com staffers think this is a good idea? Is that what they're getting paid to do? Why can they not be replaced entirely by an algorithm?

"Be that police officers or the descendents of those who hung us from trees with smiles on their faces, I want to limit any interaction with people who seek to harm me or my loved ones."

That's not out of context either. There seems to be some implicit definition that all white people == people who seek to harm me.