"Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing because it was made by "web celebrities"."

This is dumb to the point of annoying. Did you read the article at all? Lots of great design thinking went into Medium. I'm constantly finding new features on Medium that are very well thought out.

Yes they have a huge problem of not letting the authors own their own work, which is why I will never use Medium as-is, but let's not say nothing is special about it either.

Even if the only thing you want to give them is credit for their beautiful typography, you have to at least them give them.

And the way they've got inline comments working is beautiful.

Like you I have problems with the lack of ownership, it feels like submitting work to a magazine (which appears to be what they're trying to be). I'm looking forward to polished open source clones being created.

> let's not say nothing is special about it either.

Now you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say that.

Do you think great writers all over the world would happily give me their content for free if I designed something better than Medium?

Sure, if you generate the same amount of traffic.

Dumb? Take away all the Silicon Valley celebrities and then show me how popular Medium is.

> Lots of great design thinking went into Medium.

Blah blah blah. Yeah right. The design is a clone of svbtle. Lots of ripping off and self promotion went into Medium.

That's silly. Medium is another well-executed minimalist design like Svbtle. Neither one of them is particularly ground-breaking, but they are both better executed than 95% of similar web designs. I say this despite the fact that I have always had something of a visceral distaste for blog networks.

> Build a Medium clone in Rails in 4hours.

I remember many of my engineering friends saying the same thing about Twitter in the early days.