> In his post announcing the layoffs, Williams said the business model Medium had been pursuing, advertisement-driven media, was to blame for "misinformation," and that Medium would no longer sell ads or help the publishers it hosted on its site with ad revenue, and therefore it no longer needed the people it had hired to work in those areas.<p>> "The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It's utter crap," he told Bloomberg's Brad Stone in 2013. "They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self-destructive and unsustainable." And he said he was "pessimistic about the state of media, and that's why I want to work on this problem."<p>The irony.
I was recently talking with my girlfriend about print media, and she brought up a point I have been unable to shake from my head: because we get all of our information digitally, we don't value it as much as a physical medium that we pay for. Instead, there is just so much free information at the click of a button (and even paywall stuff can be bypassed if you put in the extra 5 seconds), that consuming information comes to feel like a chore.<p>It reminds me of the famous scene in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer", when Tom convinces a group of kids to paint the very fence he was contracted to paint. Instead of offering money for their services, he pitched the activity as a fun privilege to enjoy.<p>There's a lot of good stuff on Medium. There's also a lot of crap. And there is no way to seamlessly progress from article to article without encountering any crap at all.<p>Are the comments going to be informative, or an argumentative flame war? Roll the dice and see how much time of your life was well-spent or wasted.<p>I got the daily newsletter from Medium for years. Read it fairly often. Then I just got sick of it and unsubscribed. With the exception of links from HN, I haven't gone back since.
I've never found Medium to be a compelling idea, even less so since Williams said:<p>> The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites.<p>The course was easy to predict. Publishers move the platform. The platform discovers its interests (i.e. it's investor's interests) don't really align with those of the publishers. The publishers are left in the lurch.<p>Here's what I don't get: there's absolutely no need to centralise. Hosting a website isn't especially complex. If you control your own site, you control your own destiny. Medium is a pretty CMS, but that's not enough of an incentive to give up control over your publishing platform.<p>I feel the same about Google AMP: it't not hard to do what AMP does. A lightweight site and decent CDN will get you 90% of the way there. So what's the upside?