Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind?

My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years?

The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem.

[1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?

View on HN

"Has your content lasted 16 years"

As a matter of fact, yes. I've been blogging exactly that long too. Some of that content has gone through four or five software platforms, and twice that many physical hosts, and it's just as readable as ever. You do bring up a good point, though. The reason I've been able to make all those transitions has been because I retained complete control over the data even at the lowest level throughout. I wouldn't have that with Medium. I'd be at least somewhat at their mercy to keep my posts accessible and/or exportable. That's the argument Dave should have made. Maybe he considered it too obvious to state, but the fact that he didn't make it explicit is what turns a possibly-good rant into an incoherent mess.

Perhaps he means that blogging services would be more likely to have user interests in mind as long as there's multiple of them and they have to compete. By this reasoning using a competing underdog service is a useful act even if it's just as 'closed' or whatever.

To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam.

Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?

As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.

> What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?

Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this?

You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.

Medium already has an export feature. If you're arguing that they may take it away (which I think is vanishingly unlikely), then that's another thing entirely. The feature is there, though, so incentives about building one don't seem relevant to the discussion.

But even if you can get all your articles and re-upload them (and they look nice still) the URLs will change so anything that links to your channel or individual articles is going to break.

> Has your content lasted 16 years?

My first blog post is from 19 years ago. Before the term "blog" hit the scene, I believe.

Just wanted to brag. :-)

But it's also important just as a reminder that your content might last decades. Those old posts will no doubt still be up on my site 19 years from now. At least, if I'm still around and if something catastrophic hasn't happened to our civilization...

What's the over-under on Medium being around in 19 years?

I'm in a similar situation (old, pretty much dead blog, but still there).

If you're not a historian, I'm not sure that longevity is all that important. It seems like someone who writes a lot and changes platforms every so often without worrying about the past might be better off, even if their old posts might not be around anymore.

Do you still think Medium will have your stuff?

You step into the river, but the water has moved on / Welcome to the Internet

It's sad, I agree -- but it's naive to expect anything else even from Google, much less some random startup. If you want your content to last, get an FTP account with your ISP, tie it to a domain name you own, upload a static .htm file, and pay the bill every month. Nothing else is guaranteed to work.

I would think the same problem exists for all platforms, twitter, wordpress, disqus comments, etc. Why single medium out for criticism? If you want to maintain control over your writing, cross-post. If you don't, render unto Caesar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com