But hey, slide-out comments.
Thankfully, disabling Javascript actually helps a lot there.
You don't really visit someone's Medium blog. I've never seen anyone say, on their profile somewhere else, "here's a direct link to my blog; it's on Medium." It looks the same as every other Medium blog, after all; that's a strong disincentive to people promoting links their blog root, since they can't brand it--and I think that's intentional on Medium's part.
Instead, you just find someone's Medium posts shared in your feed on some sharing service, because someone you know linked to them. Which is really what the web has needed for a while, I think: a nice, clean, "here is a long standalone essay" hosting service which is ancillary to your more usual blogging, which occurs on FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.
A geeky comparison, that might explain their value proposition, as I see it: FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. are like a VM stack: you want to only hold tiny little objects on it, because reading those objects (scrolling past them) takes time and "processing cycles" for the reader. You don't want to pass huge ones around, because they'll take up a lot of space everywhere they go, and you have to copy them piece by piece (there have been novels written over Twitter, but they're a bitch to read or quote or export, etc.)
Medium, then, is a VM heap to stick large objects on, and then pass them by reference on the stack (FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.) In effect, it's a pastebin with really nice styling, feed generation, and collaborative editorial features, not a "blogging service" per se. Make sense?
I think the analogy is Time magazine versus Foreign Policy. I may subscribe to Time and read every issue cover to cover on the subway to get a broad view on what's going on. I'll only buy Foreign Policy from the newspaper stand if there's a long article that specifically interests me. In that case I'll look it over and give it a deeper read.
My recommendation system for what to read in Medium isn't Medium. It's HN.
Exactly. I would suggest Medium run with this idea, actually: detect your referrer, then wire a single "like this" button to that service's equivalent of an upvote, and "comment on this" to that service's equivalent of either a reblog/retweet mechanism, or a comments page. Don't try to keep users on Medium, in other words; instead, make Medium a seamless part of whatever site they were already using.
There is at least one example of this that I'm aware of: defense writer David Axe and his "War Is Boring" blog. http://www.warisboring.com/2013/06/04/war-is-boring-is-movin...
Authors can complain all they want about the platform, how there's little money in it, how they can't build an audience, and all these complaints do is highlight the author's naiveté. These things are set by the market's appetite, not your ego. If you want your writing to be taken seriously, then take seriously the craft of writing. Medium doesn't suck, you suck. And you're on Medium because you suck. It's about an efficient a market as you can find, because there's exactly zero barriers to entry.
I for one am enjoying seeing how the markets around writing are evolving, in many ways they are much more effectively evolving than video and music markets.
For writers we got the great "Internet" where you put download blogging software put up a server and start posting. Except you were one of a trillion zillion people so discovery was basically impossible. Then we got blogging "sites" which collected people who want to write, and among those sites added some discoverability. Then we got "Blogzines" which are essentially all on the same topical area by a fixed stable of writers which feels more like a magazine. And of course e-books which are single topic / single author.
It is interesting to compare the likes of Blogger to Medium to Ars Technica to HufPo to Salon etc.
In fact, I think Medium is a perfect place to hone your craft. If I were looking to write professionally, I'd be working on my tone and content constantly. I wouldn't even think of the sorts of stuff the OP is thinking about until I was absolutely sure that all that's left to work on is the outlet. That's when you'd be getting comments like, "Wow, you're the best writer here!"
Really? And you know this how?
And why should I have to fiddle with the font size for one site when I don't have to think about it elsewhere? Are Medium bloggers so arrogant as to think that their revelations deserve to be shouted in my face at 22px?
I have a 23" 1920x1080 monitor and a 13" 1440x900 Macbook Air.
[1] There's a web book on typography that was just released, which details how to make type legible: http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html
The other has been helpful for me, personally, especially if you want to do $thing and have no idea where to start. An article where the author details their methods and why they worked and what problems they had.. is awesome.
It wouldn't be my blogging platform of choice, but I'm the sort of person who'd go to all the trouble of hand-crafting a personal website for something like this, just for the fun of it. Medium is obviously for people who want the opposite experience.
None of this is to say that Medium doesn't have its share of problems, but I think it is at least decent from the blogger's perspective and IMHO pretty good from the reader's perspective.
Traffic is all yours. You can do amazing things.
To me at least Medium is meant to appeal to the kind of bloggers who want to post something but don't want to maintain a blog. If you want detailed analytics and even Google Analytics are just good enough you don't sound like the sort of person Medium is for.
As for monetizing I could see Medium offering paid plans. Maybe using them to offer the kind of detailed analytics you want. Or maybe they will charge for mobile apps the way the NYTimes does with it's subscriptions. Judging by their focus on nicely laid out content I really doubt they would plaster it with ads.
Specifically:
* The rectangular 'M' in the top-left that hides a menu
* The inline hidden/comments that animate in on hover.
* The weird "suggest a link for further reading" functionality at the bottom of the article.
It really seems like a lot of confusing eye-candy to me and my assumption would be that it's cool/fun for a sophisticated technocrat, but the usability falls apart quickly after that.
Personally, I hate the inline commenting ideas. I read an article, and then scan the comments at the bottom. It seems pretty gratuitous to save the effort of "quoting" snippets to discuss.
I appreciate them thinking differently about things, though.
I would like to see something that can step in as a social layer to connect a wide variety of blogs over a multitude of platforms. Maybe something that offers standardized categories - - like AllTop with self-discovery.
