Why do people use Medium?
Somehow Medium has become the defacto platform for professional blogging, and I have no idea why.
As far as I can tell, the bulk of people have an unexplainable attraction to creepy corporate interfaces.
Livejournal, which had what I would characterize as a normal interface that behaves more or less as a person would expect it to, was somewhat popular with young people (and Russian political activists) for a little bit, but never took off with the "parents" generation the way that Facebook (whose major interface innovation when it got off the ground seems to have been something called a superpoke) did.
Livejournal was fun and promoted creativity. Facebook was built on.... I don't know? ...some kind of weird intersection of memes and peer pressure? There was always this weird conformity thing where everyone was making the same jokes and engaging in the same activities.
And yet, Facebook took off while Livejournal stagnated. 90% of the people who I used to interact with on Livejournal left LJ/DW for Facebook and very few of them ever came back. Everyone hates Facebook, but everyone also needs to be there. For some reason.
When Twitter came on the scene, people made jokes about how stupid its entire model was. How could you possibly express anything with such stringent character limits?
And yet Twitter took off as well.
Twitter, unlike Facebook and Livejournal, has a veneer of professionalism, which is also very mysterious to me. What's the magic sauce that makes Twitter into the go-to place for professional microblogging?
Whatever it is that Twitter has, it certainly isn't good interface design. Even Facebook has better threading.
But for some reason Twitter is the place to be if you're a public intellectual or pundit.
People say that the appeal of Facebook is that everyone else is there. Social network effects are offered as an explanation for why no one to speak of left Facebook for the federated Facebook clone Diaspora, but there has to be something else going on besides network effects.
People do leave Facebook. They just don't (as a general rule) leave it for more democratic platforms. The big social media are all corporate.
A decent handful of my friends made a concerted effort to move from Facebook to Diaspora. It didn't work. Was it doomed to fail from the beginning? And why?
These days the same general crowd seem to have flocked to Discord. Again, why?
Discord might be an outlier here, in that a core of people got drawn in by gaming stuff (I don't actually know the details; I'm not part of that culture), and then once there's a critical network size it can make sense for things to take off, especially if a lot of the people being drawn in are into gaming as well. So maybe Discord gets a pass.
But I'm utterly baffled by these others.
In a very weird way Gmail is another example. There used to be a good handful of online companies offering free email services. Gmail lured everyone away, and it isn't clear to me why. People started giving out free Gmail accounts and then suddenly everyone had to have one.
Allegedly the appeal was the free data storage ("we'll give you a Gig of data storage and allllll you have to do is let us comb through your data for advertising purposes"... because that isn't creepy at all), but I don't think that most people actually need that much storage space. It really felt more like everyone suddenly said "oooh... sketchy contract?? I'll sign!"
And now there's Medium, which, like Twitter, has this veneer of professionalism that I can't quite understand. A while back I mentioned (on Dreamwidth) the idea of setting up a blog for myself, and a couple of my friends indicated that Medium was a great option for that. But I never really got a good explanation of *why*.
The people I know who promote Medium are technically competent people who could very easily set up independent blogs if they wanted to. But instead they use Medium, and encourage others to do so.
Earlier this morning I read a blog post on Medium and wanted to pull out a quote to comment on elsewhere on the web. All naivety, I took my mouse and selected the text and pressed CTRL-C on my keyboard, and... nothing happened.
So I tried again more slowly, and this time I noticed the little dialog bubble that popped up, with a Twitter bird and a pencil. Um, okay. I click on the pencil. Larger dialog pops up telling me to create an account in order to highlight text.
Are you fracking kidding me?
It isn't enough to force people to create accounts in order to post things or leave comments, now sites like Medium are trying to force you to create an account just to copy a few words of text? Text that is right there in front of you on your screen?
Why on earth do people choose this kind of environment over the web as it used to be?
It would be so easy to go back to a user-centered web experience. The tools are right there. Everywhere. There are oldschool web design tools, and there are new open source apps. I even know a couple people who maintain professional Patreon-supported blogs on Dreamwidth.
We have Mastodon. We have Diaspora (not that I ever use it). We have Matrix. We have email, for crissakes. And there are continually odd little social media experiments that pop up and fizzle out, but nothing free and open ever seems to gain any real traction.
Do Facebook, Twitter, Diaspora, Discord, Medium and others offer some service that the open source community has somehow overlooked? Surely it isn't that they have better interfaces. Twitter's interface design is terrible, and always has been.
Does... does all of this come down to the fact that they have marketing departments and we don't? I'm beginning to suspect that that might be the case, and I hate it. I especially hate it when I see so many smart people who I want to believe can do their own research and not be swayed by irrelevant fashion trends sway their behavior choosing high-surveillance corporate tools over open source alternatives, and even over low-surveillance private alternatives.
So, holding the "marketing" hypothesis aside for a moment... what is going on here?
Thoughts welcome. Boosts welcome.
@dynamic One thing that the unified services have over distributed services is the ease of finding people. You want to find work colleagues? Go to LinkedIn. Want to find family? Go to Facebook. Want to find celebrities? Go to Twitter.
The fediverse has a lot more anonymity, and even without anonymity, it is harder to search. I was anonymous on Twitter, so employers wouldn't use my politics against me. Many of the questions you can't ask in interviews can be found on social media.
@dynamic firstname.lastname was started by Microsoft Outlook. Who would have thought that Microsoft would introduce such a privacy/security concern?[sic] Corporate norms before Outlook were 8 letter user names composed of letters from your name.
I think people abandoned pseudonymity with the rise of Facebook. You wanted friends and family to find you. I really can't say it was ever an internet norm. On Usenet, it was mostly spammers and trollers.
I was pseudonymous on AOL Instant Messenger, on Yahoo, and later on Livejournal. It felt pretty normal at the time.
@lwriemen
Searchability is a good point. Also the Gmail norm of "everybody's" email address being firstname.lastname@gmail.com (I have a friend with a common name who keeps getting emails intended for people he's never met).
On the flip side, it is interesting to watch how the internet norm of pseudonymity has fallen by the wayside. In your Twitter example, anonymity was an asset. And yet users in general seem to have basically given up on the idea of pseudonymity.