博客与个人写作2016news.ycombinator.com
Ask HN：为什么大多数科技和创业博主都搬到了 Medium？
Ask HN: Why have most tech and startup-related bloggers moved to Medium?
导读
这是一条 HN 讨论帖：为什么大量科技/创业博主把博客从 WordPress、自建站搬到 Medium。几位资深博主从分发机制、写作体验、平台的文化符号意义和技术维护成本几个角度给出解释，对正在选发布渠道、思考"内容与平台关系"的写作者很有参考价值。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
平台自带的分发与推荐机制（邮件、应用内推送）能把一篇文章推到远超个人博客的读者面前，选渠道时要算上这部分"免费流量"。
- 02
Medium 故意砍掉大量设计与排版选项，反而让写作过程最顺畅——写作者应尽量降低工具摩擦，把精力留给内容本身。
- 03
每个平台都代表一种写作身份（LinkedIn 的职场观点、Wattpad 的同人、Medium 的沉思式长文），选平台等于选读者和语气。
- 04
对非技术出身的作者来说，"一个不会崩、能稳定发文的文本框"比功能丰富更重要；可靠性也是写作生产的一部分。
HN 评论精选
Medium 的优势在于内建分发、极简写作体验和平台的文化符号意义，而不只是赶时髦。
（披露：我是 Medium 顾问。）部分原因是选择偏差，因为最流行的博客平台其实可能是 Tumblr 或 WordPress。但在你提到的这个圈子里，Medium 有三个特质让它站稳了位置：一是平台内建分发，推荐机制能把文章推到多得多的读者面前，尤其是被放进邮件或应用通知时；二是写作体验，我用过几乎所有主流英文博客平台，Medium 的最简单顺滑，部分原因是它砍掉了大量设计和排版选项，只留下多数人真正需要的；三是文化含义——这点极客们可能最不爱听：Medium 已经代表某一种写作，好的时候相当有思想，自我推销的时候（早期很多高曝光文章就是）则让人难以忍受。但平台确实会积累意义：营销人员写 LinkedIn，同人作者去 Wattpad，想倒数据的人去 Pastebin。这些站点本可以承载任何文章，但每个社区都代表某种东西。我写了近 17 年博客，只是太忙才一直没搬。
anildash查看英文原文
(Disclosure: I'm an advisor.) Some of this is selection bias, since the most popular blogging platforms (depending on how one defines it) could be Tumblr or WordPress. But within the community you mention, Medium has a few traits that earned its place as the forum for these posts. First, there is distribution built into the platform. Recommendations can get a piece in front of a lot more readers, especially when a piece gets promoted in an email or through notifications in the app. Next, there's the writing experience. I've used pretty much every major English language blogging platform and Medium has the simplest, smoothest writing experience, in part because they remove so many design and formatting options, while still leaving the ones most people want. The final key reason is the one that geeks here will probably find most annoying, and that is what Medium signifies in culture. It's come to represent a certain kind of writing that, when good, is quite thoughtful, but when self-serving (as were many early, high-visibility Medium pieces), can be insufferable. But platforms come to signify meaning; marketers write thinkpieces on LinkedIn, fanfic writers gravitate to Wattpad, and people with illicit data dumps find their way to Pastebin. There's no reason any of these sites couldn't host any piece of writing, but each community is a place that represents something. I've been blogging for almost 17 years, and being busy is the only thing that's really kept me from moving my blog to Medium. I understand others have legitimate qualms about using hosted services, but given their APIs, I'm not worried about that. And a tool that's robust enough to host the White House's transcript of the State of the Union will definitely handle my dinky blog.
Medium 是潮流驱动、质量参差，外观千篇一律且缺乏控制，评论体验糟糕。
就是赶时髦。结果是 Medium 文章质量参差不齐，这让我个人很 frustration。我在上面发过一篇反 Product Hunt 的文章来体验它现在的系统：没什么特别的。是的，它好看，但如果每个博客长得一样，那就没有博客是特别的。而且它的可控性远不如我的 Jekyll 博客，而我需要那种控制。另外评论系统差到近乎暗黑模式：你得点开每条评论才能回复或看到谁点了赞，还得点开评论才能看到回复，而且可以无限嵌套——想看第三层的评论，要访问四个加载缓慢的页面。
minimaxir查看英文原文
Fad/coolness factor. As a result, the quality of Medium articles is highly variable, which is a source of personal frustration. I published my anti-Product Hunt post there to get a sense of Medium's system nowadays: https://medium.com/@minimaxir/the-questions-on-transparency-that-product-hunt-is-intentionally-ignoring-b579fba14048 It's nothing special. Yes, it looks pretty, but if every blog looks the same, then no blog is special. Regardless, there is not as much control as my Jekyll blog, anyways, which I need. Also, the commenting system is hilariously bad to the point of it being a dark pattern: you have to click on each comment to reply or see who even liked each comment. You also have to click a comment to see any replies to the comment, and this nests infinitely. To see a comment 3 levels deep, you need to visit 4 different, slow-loading pages.
Medium 的崛起靠的是创始人的网络效应和精英圈的连锁采用，而非产品本身。
Ev Williams（Medium、Twitter 和 Blogger 的创始人）因为过去的公司，在科技和创业圈人脉极广，所以他大概很容易说服很多科技/创业名人迁移过来。任何人都能做出一个漂亮的新博客平台（事实上很多人做了），但只有 Ev（以及其他处在类似有利位置的人）才能真正让它在科技精英圈里迅速铺开。TL;DR：成功带来成功。
w1ntermute查看英文原文
Ev Williams (founder of Medium, Twitter, and Blogger) is well-connected in the tech and startup communities due to his past companies, so he was probably able to easily convince a lot of famous tech/startup people to switch. Anyone can build a slick new blogging platform (and many have) - only Ev (and others in a similar position of privilege) can actually jumpstart its adoption among the tech elite. TL;DR: success begets success
对非技术型作者而言，WordPress 的维护痛苦是迁移的真实推力：稳定可用的发布工具本身就是刚需。
你可能低估了 WordPress 对"身处科技行业但不是技术人"的人来说有多麻烦。按 2015 年的标准，我的博客流量不大，但每篇都稳定有量。它一年要彻底崩好几次，原因是 2GB VPS 上 Apache/PHP 的默认配置。我为此砸进去几千美元的工程师工时，最近每年还要花约 2000 美元托管费，只为避免因为某个名人转了我的链接、凌晨三点还得当业余系统管理员。"一个你能发链接推文、又不会崩的文本框"，是有人愿意花钱买的产品，或者用"把 Medium 当作主要写作阵地"的社会成本来换。
patio11查看英文原文
I think you may underestimate how much of a hassle WordPress is for people who are in tech the industry but not technologists themselves. I have what should be, by 2015 standards, a blog with a small level of traffic very predictably on every blog post. It broke several times a year, catastrophically, due to out-of-the-box settings of Apache/PHP on a 2 GB VPS. I threw thousands of dollars of engineer time at that and, more recently, $2k or so a year of hosting costs to avoid having to play amateur sysadmin at 3 AM because Jimmy Wales had tweeted a link to me. "A textarea which you can tweet a link to that doesn't break" is a product people want to buy, either with money or with the social transaction costs of adopting Medium as your main writing presence. (I cannot conceive of why a serious author would do that but then again I write more on Twitter than my blog these days so...)
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