franzen

Please do! I'm just about to buy the book :)

Agreed that the title is clickbait, but it's also quite clever.

Honestly, not surprising! The unit economics of services like Sprig (and, to a lesser extent, DoorDash) are horrifyingly bad. If you've ever thought about starting a delivery service, this is a worthwhile read. They predicted Sprig's demise last year: https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

While I can't vouch for anything beyond Just Kids (which is spectacular), here are some other ferociously good reads on the lives of artists:

* Ernest Hemingway - A moveable feast

* David Lipsky - Of course you end up becoming yourself

* David Sylvester - Interviews with Francis Bacon

It's not supply. It's speculation.

>From 2000 to 2010, the population of New York increased by 2.1 percent while the US Census reported that the number of occupied housing units increased by more than twice that amount, 5.3 percent. . . . If we could build our way out of our affordability crisis, the ratio of housing costs to income should have gone down during this period. However, average rents and the share of income spent on rent both increased well above inflation over the same period. [0]

[0] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/new-york-housing-gentrifi...

What skills does Biz have exactly? It always seemed like Ev was a product genius, Jack was the business brains, but Biz?

$40/post seems pretty low-end, no?

Or Montreal!

Want to develop a HN for writers with me?

For anyone curious, here's a comparison of the signed-out, signed-in, and "members" signed-in homepage:

http://imgur.com/gallery/h3tN3

Instead of a feed of stories (recommended by people you follow) you get them in a grid layout.

Worth $5? Hell no. If I was paying for design, I'd pay it to the folks at theoutline.com (nicest media site by miles and miles). However, there are great writers on Medium and they deserve to be supported. Take my money.

>If Zuckerberg dies, gets fired, or leaves the company on his own, he’ll still lose control.

TIL you can't control a company after you die. Thanks Wired

Okay, that's a fair criticism. I don't have inside info on The Ringer's page views. I have info on another dozen or so publishers though, and the ~1:100 ratio generally sticks.

Since you're a Medium advisor, maybe you can shed some light: how many of The Ringer's page views are coming because of native Medium readers vs. because Bill Simmons is linking to articles?

If I'm a deep-pocketed advertiser with little social media engagement (unlike Simmons), how does posting to Medium benefit me? Why am I not better off paying Bill Simmons to tweet about my product than pay the Medium middle man?

Relatedly, is it fair to extrapolate Medium's "10x on page views" on your blog to the average user, who doesn't start off with 20k Twitter followers? (Note: Medium uses Twitter followers to kickstart your Medium following.)

For the average user who doesn't know how to market their posts, I agree, Medium is a godsend. There's a small community of committed readers (good for page views) and the design is great (good for sharing.) But do you really think that these are game-changing advantages? Do you think that these advantages will survive once/if Medium starts plastering its posts with banner ads?

If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like:

https://theringer.com/

https://electricliterature.com/

https://medium.com/the-economist

https://medium.com/@generalelectric

https://medium.com/@Starbucks

You'll notice the engagement is absolutely terrible. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.

Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium because there aren't any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.

It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium. (Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".

I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*

*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com

And I recommend you read some Dickens. Good night.

Then how are workers supposed to win better terms from their capitalist employers, outside of collective bargaining or state intervention? Is a football player being infantilized when he joins a union -- because he ought to be able to negotiate contracts by himself? When a union helps him extract a more equitable share of the profits, is he being infantilized, or is he being smart?

You're free to frame this argument in terms of individual rights or "economic competitiveness" or state paternalism. Unfortunately it amounts to little more than economic handwaving. At worst it's a disingenuous ploy to undermine the interests of the labour class, deluding workers into thinking you're giving them economic rights and freedoms ("you should be able to choose when you work!") when really you're just justifying your extraction of an even bigger share of their labour.

The common labourer has no economic power. The state, the firm, and (to a diminishing extent) unions do. I hate paternalistic states (and unions) as much as you do, but when you place no limit on firms' ability to extract labour from their workers, you end up in twisted situations where people are being paid sub-livable wages and expected to be on call 24 hours. Not because it's an economic "inevitability" (child labour inevitable? You seriously believe that?), but because it's the most amenable socioeconomic arrangement for the capitalist class.

Yes indeed, and it's also a disgrace that children lack the freedom to work! Many children want to work in factories, why let the state interfere? Absolute bollocks.

Montreal slays. Most underrated city in North America IMO.