Renewing Medium's focus - <AUTHOR> https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be <comment><USER2> Newly ex-Median here. This was not a huge surprise. On the surface, this is a change in product strategy. The underlying story is the company positioning itself so it can survive an adverse environment if it needs to. It's hard to fault managers for dealing with that potential (and its hard to deny that the next 2-4 years could be really bad). Hopefully not, but it would be malpractice not to prepare.

So better to focus resources now than be walking dead in a year or so, jettison unnecessary products/projects, and hope for the best. It's a great product, and with time and luck, they'll sort out a good business model, but like the rest of the publishing world, they're still sorting things out.

Despite being one of those made redundant, I enjoyed being there, and wish them the best. On that note, you should ask yourself if you are prepared for winter, because winter is coming.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by an "adverse environment over the next 2-4 years"? Please be more explicit.

<comment><USER2> Local picture: the revenue model for online publishing is still broken, Medium is in the publishing business.

Big picture: Donald J Trump, and the potential to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody. Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

In either case, reducing your burn rate by $10M per year is a smart move.

<comment><USER4> Really? Blaming Trump for a terrible business model?

No matter how far you are in the SV bubble, even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.

> Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with > hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

Sounds like a great thing to me.

<comment><USER5> > even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.

Yeah who does this ex-median think he is? It's not like he worked there.

<comment><USER6> If he knows how Trump has influence on Medium's business he didn't show it. I'm more than eager to hear that storyline. I would be interested in something more concrete than the numerous "the sky is falling" articles based 99% on the author's personal feelings and fantasies though. That obsession with Trump is a mania by now, that and "Russian hackers", a self-feeding frenzy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion, Medium has a problem - It's not really a product that is supposed to make a LOT of revenue (for it's size).

In all honesty, it's very easy to technically build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business (not a crazy growth startup) that can generate revenue and most importantly be sustainable.

As for generating revenue: it's very easy to charge people a few $ / m for stuff I'd consider extra features (premium themes and custom domains).

It's sad those 50 people lost jobs (I feel for them - I had lost my previous job when a startup decided to downsize), but in all honesty - what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]?

[0] - [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity)

<comment><USER8> I always find it amusing when people say "I could run XYZ with a 10th of the engineers, easy!", as if they have any actual insight into the engineering backends that run these services.

I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.

<comment><USER9> That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until recently) to name a few.

<comment><USER8> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to have over 1,000 employees?

There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.

<comment><USER10> > Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch

You say that like it's a bad thing.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I suspect that it is a bad thing. People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber people who like ones from the '90s.

The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is simple: network effects.

<comment><USER12> Mind you that you're writing that point on news.ycombinator.com (another '90s-esque site).

Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners, popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25 tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail.

The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends (make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on the server!).

<comment><USER13> The "how it looks" of Craigslist is fine, just like HN. The "how it works" is abysmal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn't even profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn't even pay for its content.

Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

There's obviously no shortage of hate for "mainstream media" right now, so probably many people can't await the demise of that industry. I'm just wondering which blogger we'll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which twitterer will file & finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works just as well without people digging into "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents".

[0]: [http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303](http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303)

<comment><USER15> >Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

Even at the Washington Post (profitable now), what drove growth was their opinion pieces (which they're doubling down on). And opinion pieces, while having their own merit, is rarely _journalism_. It makes me sad.

<comment><USER16> I guess the argument is that journalism is, in many ways, a commodity. Journalism, when defined as the reporting of precise core facts (X happened in Y, Z people were hurt), is available all over the internet.

In order to provide value, newspapers need to provide exclusive value-add, which in many cases includes opinion pieces. Opinion pieces allow experts in the area to link many different news items together to provide a more holistic view of the news item.

Anyone can tell me that 5 Coalition soldiers were killed by an IED, but it takes an opinion piece by an expert in counter insurgency tactics to provide context about how that might represent a shift in tactics/approach by a group.

<comment><USER17> Even at that, I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism. News will continue to get disintermediated.

For news firms seeking survival or sustainable operations, you'll see your "value add" opinion pieces consume more of the content with less actual news. This is WaPo's strategy [0].

[0] [http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew- digital-s...](http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew-digital- subscriptions-145-percent/)

<comment><USER18> _I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism._

I think there's some truth to this. I think there's also a need for accreditation or other validation/reputation services, not to serve as a gatekeeper, but to assist in helping people determine which sources are likely worthwhile to listen to. If the vetting needs to be done for each person on a per-author basis, that can be overwhelming, not dissimilar to the paradox of choice.

In some ways this may end up looking similar to existing publishers, though with a little less tight-coupling between author and publisher. It's pretty clear there are large changes underway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a pretty committed Medium writer, I've been impressed by their platform and how it has worked for my purposes. Very similar to SoundCloud. I haven't ever really figured out how either intended - or will eventually - turn a profit. I'm quite familiar with the "value gap" argument and the acrimonious relationship between, ahem, content and tech heavyweights in the US.

> _So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for > writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for > people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans > who want to get smarter about the world every day.

It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like._

Oh, I've got a guess, and it certainly doesn't involve me getting paid more per view or read than I do via Spotify or any other "Artistic Content as Commodity" platform. Medium has been a decent trade-off: They don't charge me, and I don't expect anything but "exposure" in the grand sense. Not surprised this isn't exactly rolling in dough as a business model, but I'll stick around to see how they fare.

[https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/media-analytics-prtsc- beer-d...](https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/media-analytics-prtsc-beer- december-2016-edf3d2e76ed0#.ejkxri9vi)

<comment><USER20> You are helping them build their business by providing your content for free, as did contributors to Huffington Post.

How do you feel the balance of compensation is, and how do you feel about your control - or lack of - of your own content?

<comment><USER19> As with Huffington Post, the hosting platform of Medium also sets an expectation floor for audiences / readers that the format will likely be to their preference. Thus the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome somewhat: Do they come to Medium for my Content, or did they discover my Content because it is on Medium? I think both avenues are realistic. Equal? I dunno, really I don't, and I think that's the secret sauce too a "community" of getting people to latch on and stay in it (e.g. Facebook).

I think the balance of compensation is fine for my purposes. I don't recoup the $19.99 annual fee via DistroKid that gets me into iTunes, Spotify, etc, so I'm generally a skewed perspective. In practical terms though - and this I truly believe is important - I think less than 1% of the Content Creator Population in any given Commercial Art Enterprise in the United States earns a Middle-Class Living (Wage + Benefits). Basically I think it's unfair in Modern Times to think that Musicians and Writers really had a lot of opportunities to make a good living before technology came around. Of course I'd like that to change, and maybe Spotify and Medium can play a role in that, but breaking the grip of RIAA and AP/Reuters isn't exactly an overnight proposition.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for calling out DistroKid, that seems like a great service. Going to pass it along to some musical colleagues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like:

[https://theringer.com/](https://theringer.com/)

[https://electricliterature.com/](https://electricliterature.com/)

[https://medium.com/the-economist](https://medium.com/the-economist)

[https://medium.com/@generalelectric](https://medium.com/@generalelectric)

[https://medium.com/@Starbucks](https://medium.com/@Starbucks)

You'll notice the engagement is absolutely _terrible_. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.

Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium _because_ there aren't any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.

It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium. (Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".

I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*

*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com)

<comment><USER23> > so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 view

I think there's probably a problem in these numbers, but I'm 99% certain you've misread the tea leaves.

The Ringer page views are through the roof. But those are not coming from regular Medium users who typically leave reviews. So the problem is, why don't these visitors engage more, rather than why doesn't The Ringer have any page views.

IMO, big sites like The Ringer are bets that obscure what's wonderful and working at Medium. For a blogger like me, posting to Medium is a 10x on page views. 37Signals posted something similar. All the mid-size blogs that come over are having a great time.

<comment><USER22> Okay, that's a fair criticism. I don't have inside info on The Ringer's page views. I have info on another dozen or so publishers though, and the ~1:100 ratio generally sticks.

Since you're a Medium advisor, maybe you can shed some light: how many of The Ringer's page views are coming because of native Medium readers vs. because Bill Simmons is linking to articles?

If I'm a deep-pocketed advertiser with little social media engagement (unlike Simmons), how does posting to Medium benefit me? Why am I not better off paying Bill Simmons to tweet about my product than pay the Medium middle man?

Relatedly, is it fair to extrapolate Medium's "10x on page views" on your blog to the average user, who doesn't start off with 20k Twitter followers? (Note: Medium uses Twitter followers to kickstart your Medium following.)

For the average user who doesn't know how to market their posts, I agree, Medium is a godsend. There's a small community of committed readers (good for page views) and the design is great (good for sharing.) But do you really think that these are game-changing advantages? Do you think that these advantages will survive once/if Medium starts plastering its posts with banner ads?

<comment><USER23> Here are my recent stats. I don't know really that the 1:100 ratio is real at all: [https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony- Stubblebine](https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-Stubblebine)

I do know though that specific to The Ringer that their page views are completely decoupled from what you can see in engagement. I have no idea where that's coming from or even what's required for them to be a media success. But I do know that they are getting heavy traffic.

Re: game changers. I wrote in one of the other threads that my analysis of the market is that there is has been a non-stop demand for personal publishing products since 2000: blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Twitter, Tumblr.

And we're in a moment now where many of those seem institutionally unable to modernize. This word "game-changer" is so loaded. Is changing the game the goal? Or just serving a huge market?

From the start, I've seen Medium as at minimum a modern version of an evergreen class of software. Obviously, they've done that by simplifying out features that end up not mattering a lot (customizable themes) and making a beautiful text editor.

On top of that, none of those other platforms ever did anything to boost my page views. I think that's a real benefit of the platform that goes well beyond whatever audience you bring with you.

I see my own stats (based on 20k Twitter followers) and the stats of people in my publication (Better Humans). It really seems like the pairing of a strong title with strong content is the primary driver of traffic. Publications will take those articles and then recommends will drive a ton of traffic.

Many of the people who write on BetterHumans are starting with no audience to speak of. It's certainly a huge ego boost to experience a few thousand page views for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _> As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally._

This is an enormous failing on the part of management as well as Silicon Valley culture in general. These startups hire far too many people far too early, piss away a bunch of money, and then lay off half their workforce and "pivot" once they realize their business plan actually sucked balls from the start.

<comment><USER25> Meh. It's a hard balance to strike, between being poised for growth, and knowing the growth will work. It's expensive and failure-prone, but if you don't do it that way, you get passed up or hit an upper boundary.

<comment><USER26> You also hurt people in the process, and that's something that tends to fall out of the calculus.

At the end of the day, humans are pretty much the only thing that matters.

<comment><USER27> What would you prefer instead? That they not hire these 50 people at all?

<comment><USER26> I'd prefer that they adopt a sane and reasonable growth strategy that doesn't depend on pump-and-crash cycles. There's a certain pernicious idea in business in general and in startups particularly that your worth is in large part how many people are working for you (I've heard multiple people answer "hey, how are things going" with "we just hired five people!" and my blood runs cold) rather than the efficacy with which you are achieving your goals.

(I'm a little less sympathetic in the case of engineers, who are an in-demand resource and so their opportunity costs are less, but the opportunity cost of your support people is higher and the recovery from the problems that that failed explosive growth phase cause is much worse.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with a lot of the discussion here around what 150 employees are/were actually doing. I also wonder – as some other commenters have mentioned – what Facebook/Twitter/Google do with their many thousand employees.

However, the more I reflect on it the less I feel this is isolated to tech. What on Earth do 55,000[1] employees find to do at Morgen Stanley for example, or 200,000[2] employees at Ford?

I see two possible options:

1\. This is just a limit of human perception. Companies do so much stuff it is hard for us to conceptualise.

2\. Some combination of bullshit jobs & making work for ourselves.

I find the former believable simply because there are a hell of a lot of humans and 90% ish have a job.

The latter quickly leads to me to wonder: do we as a society bias towards job creation regardless of its function.

I therefore suspect both are the case, at least to some extent.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company)

<comment><USER29> It's mostly 1 in your examples. Morgan Stanley and Google do lots of different things, which requires lots of different people. Ford does lots of labour intensive stuff with a heavily unionised workforce. Facebook and Twitter do more than you'd think, but more importantly do it at massive scale. Medium, however, has one relatively simple website, at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google. I struggle to imagine what they all did.

<comment><USER30> I don't know about Twitter.

I don't have the feeling they are moving very fast.

They could probably still do good with 1000 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Medium downsizes by 33%, disenchanted by the ad-supported model. Pledges to pivot to heretofore undefined but different publishing model.

<comment><USER32> This is a glorified article saying 'no one is buying our ads'

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I hope they know what they're doing, because that post was extremely vague. I guess downsizing gives them more runway to pivot.

The obvious alternative to advertising is micropayments, either behind a paywall or on a donation basis - similar to what Brave is trying to do. The problem is our habits as consumers are so deeply ingrained to expect content as free it's going to be a huge uphill battle if that's what they're thinking.

<comment><USER34> Could also be a huge pile of money that gets distributed to writers based on words read or something like that. Just like Amazon's _KDP Select Global Fund_.

Although I guess on Medium, this would result in even more click-baity shallow articles, which doesn't seem aligned with the mission _to make people smarter every day_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wrote a response to this medium post, figured I'd copy it here since I'm unsure of the overlap in forum participants:

I had an idea for a model last week that I think would be worth consideration. It's sort of a Humble Bundle x Kickstarter x Patreon model.

I'm envisioning a system that allows consumers to pay what they want for access to the content they value, but also allows creators to establish a threshold point where the content would become freely available.

So Ev Williams does a bunch of research and writes an article and says "Awesome article Ev! I probably put 10 hours into it and if I got $500 in return for that work I'd be super psyched… but I also want EVERYONE to read my awesome article cause it's important…"

I would propose a system by which the article is published with a paywall indicating that the article is only available to contributors until $500 threshold is reached. After the $500 threshold is reached, the article is released publicly and those contributors who paid get Patron/Contributor credits on the article (or some other social reward).

Consumers interested in AI will pay for AI content, those interested in Marketing will pay for marketing content and any content in any subject good enough to reach the threshold can be enjoyed by everyone.

This is off the cuff and I'm sure there are issues, but I think this category of model is worth exploring since it compensates creators for their work, allows eventual free distribution of information and doesn't make the platform or creators beholden to advertisers.

<comment><USER36> Wouldn't 99% of content go unread? For those who would get readers, wouldn't most be willing to wait?

<comment><USER37> Would it mean 99% of all content is worthless then?

<comment><USER36> Not necessarily, just unknown authors who may have a lot of great content, but would never achieve escape velocity for the world to discover them if there's a patron paywall in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. You need to have some metric to calculate impact. Likes and views can't have too much weight in the equation, because they can be gamed. Furthermore, page views are heavily influenced by Medium's recommendation engine.

I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game.

Ultimately, Medium might introduce something like Amazon's KDP Select Global Fund that pays money to writers based on _some_ metric, but I doubt that it will be much better than what've got. Why? Human nature.

The current media landscape is refined to _perfection_ already, in a way. "Modern" articles push our buttons, we are like junkies waiting for their next fix of information (I guess every HN reader can relate to this – I certainly can). That's what we really want. We read what tingles our senses, preselected by a relatively stupid algorithm and _social proof_.

How on earth would you construct a better algorithm that truly measures _impact_ on our lives?

<comment><USER38> Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do something better.

I think an argument can be made that Ev is _right_ that the advertising model for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting recommendations.

I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I quietly move _all_ my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross- posting certain articles over to Medium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm astonished there were 150 people working at medium.

I'm still astonished there are 100 people worked at medium.

<comment><USER40> Yes, I'd really like some insight into why they need _that_ many people.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for > writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for > people.

There's an incentive alignment issue with these types of models which try to quantify "value" from a holistic perspective. You could say those Facebook Pages which steal memes and do likes-as-votes shennanigans "create value" for people too as they generate tons of Likes and EdgeRank exposure.

Medium was always a hub for clickbait thought pieces, but a revenue model like the ones implied would only make it _worse_.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not sold on using Medium, or definitely not exclusively.

Why would a content creator publish content on the Medium platform when you can't even get the e-mail addresses of your subscribers unless THEY pay you for a membership (that's what I got from their membership FAQ).

In other words, Medium expects content providers to produce top content in order to grow the Medium platform while the content provider has no way to realistically obtain a following that's not directly tied into Medium.

That means when Medium goes down, you lose not only all of your posts but your entire following as a content producer.

<comment><USER42> I split the difference and setup a custom domain for my Medium blog. I own the content URLs. If Medium dies then I'll pick a new blog format and new web host. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last I'll have to make such a change.

<comment><USER41> Yeah but if you have a bunch of followers on Medium, all of them will no longer receive updates when you post new content.

Sure, some percentage of them will know your domain name and check manually but you're going to lose a huge amount of readers.

My concern isn't so much with Medium dying, it's spending 3 years building a brand around yourself and eventually figuring out how to monetizing your audience but now you can't because you have "Medium followers" instead of your own subscriber list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't have any strong opinion about Medium, but generally when a firm lets 1/3 of its workforce go it's a Big Problem. This is hot news insofar as it tells us something about the future of the media market, but bigger point to me is that 50 jobs is such a tiny number. Of course it sucks for those let go, but 50 new unemployed people won't dramatically reshape the SF tech landscape and Medium is a well-known firm, so most of those folk will likely land on their feet.

The reason I think it's news is that it's a glaring example of how network effects leverage employee productivity so drastically. The tech industry is always looking for more people, but it's simply never going to employ the same huge numbers of people that other sectors like manufacturing have. google only has ~60k employees, which is only about 1/5 as many as IBM. Jobs are a form of political currency, and while it may be a lot harder to fill 50 tech jobs than 5000 warehouse jobs people often choose quantity over quality. I would expect the tech sector to carry much less weight under the new administration and that the next 2 years will be characterized by vicious competition and consolidation.

</comment><comment><USER32> My biggest issue about Medium so far, is the content. Too much opinion, not that enough investigation, like junk food dressed as fine dining with clucky javascript.

<comment><USER44> So you object to blogging in general. Which is what Medium is.

<comment><USER32> Github pages are good, if that could be classified as blogging, I am a big fan!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm very very surprised that Medium has issues and they needed to cut 50 employees. And sad. I was thinking they were doing quite well.

Now, I'm concern that there are other startups which have similar problems like Medium even if they are considered as success stories. So I'm not even sure which companies I should use as example of "this is how to run the startup".

What you think about following companies?

\- Slack: maybe it is just a temporary hype?

\- Uber & Lyft: maybe rides should be 100% more expensive?

\- AirBnB: a lot of money is spent on fighting regulations - but elections are every 4 years and regulators will change...

\- Dropbox: maybe it is the end of PC <-> cloud sync?

\- Github: maybe it is just hype because they are have free option? Maybe large companies are not ready to source dev to github?

\- Stripe: Maybe they have high valuation just because a lot of small startups are using them - but as soon as startups grow they move to cheaper systems?

<comment><USER46> Slack: used it at a hackathon and found it better than Facebook or Skype or whatever groups use to organize; happy that the club I joined recently as an officer is using it for communication

Uber & Lyft: haven't used it personally because public transportation is cheaper and I can wait, even though they were giving out free credit on my campus; I think carsharing is here to stay, especially if selfdriving cars become mainstream.

AirBnB: surprisingly cheap, found a $200 a night place in downtown LA for 6 people; I enjoy the concept of people sharing their homes and introducing tourists to local culture; however, some regulation is needed to protect both homeowners (from issues like squatting), customers, and renters -- no home should be used for the sole intent of renting to AirBnB and acting as a hotel.

Dropbox: I only use Google Drice so I can't say.

GitHub: hasn't this company been around long enough so that it isn't just hype -- anyhow they should find a way to stop burning so much money.

Stripe: I've heard their API is easier to use than competitors, and it seems they launched Atlas this year to diversify themselves from process payments to include business incorporation.

<comment><USER47> Github used to be a no-vc company, then they took a bunch of money and grew really fast. I do not know if they are profitable again, but this two part history is why people worry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> _> We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform_

So they are going to start charging for reader access[1] but they don't yet know how. Is there any other interpretation?

I am sad they did not explore a _restrained, regulated_ advertising model. As much of a dirty word it is, it's not in practice as disliked as "paywall". Daring Fireball does good ads. Even Google (at least in its earlier days) had restrained approach to text-only, short, clearly separated ads that people were ok with.

[1] Note: as I read it the quote specifically precludes a paywall-free approach such as charging writers for premium features a la other hosting platforms (sans paywall, at least). They want writers to receive compensation and they don't want ads.

</comment><comment><USER49> People who say Medium is "just a blogging platform" obviously haven't written many blog posts. Writing a post is easy. The interface to do that is easy. _Distribution_ is hard - that's the bit Medium solves in a revolutionary way: getting people to read your stuff.

<comment><USER50> What about when they were brand new and didn't have the distribution at the start?

<comment><USER51> They had built a free platform that was dead simple to use and it grew from that :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is this just an extremely well written PR piece to handle layoffs?

Or are they actually making some concrete changes to their focus?

I was genuinely curious to hear how they were going to switch their focus, and agreed with most of what he was saying throughout the article, but after having finished the article, I came away with no new information. It made me feel like it was the former--an extremely well written PR piece to cover for the layoffs.

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER53> I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of networked blogs, started by a really popular Silicon Valley dude.

And now they've realized that ads slapped onto content isn't sustainable. Gee whiz, welcome to the wonderful world of content publishing, that all other newspapers and magazines have been made painfully aware of in recent times.

It sucks that a bunch of people lost their jobs today, but really, to think that Medium was doing literally one single thing in an innovative way was just plain naive.

<comment><USER54> > I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or > innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit.

Agreed. I feel the same way about Dropbox. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

<comment><USER55> Your analogy is flawed. There were and are plenty of other "create a blog with a few clicks that you don't have to host" services.

<comment><USER56> Woosh! He's making a satire comment about when Dropbox was first introduced to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

<comment><USER57> thus implying that the parent post made the same mistake when judging Medium, which nawitus (IMHO rightfully) thinks is a flawed comparison. No "Whoosh".

<comment><USER56> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Ads are a serious problem, and they're failing. However, the standard alternative (people paying directly) has serious problems of its own. Basically people pay for what they want to hear. Woodward and Bernstein wouldn't have survived that model.

</comment><comment><USER59> I hope that trying a non-ad based model will be successful for them. It would be a huge breakthrough if it happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> Switching away from ads from a _moral_ standpoint as presented in the article is a harder sell when the content publishing industry _as a whole_ is having issues making money off of it.

<comment><USER60> Ad driven media has been crumbling for decades. It's good that Medium is seeing the light.

Even a startup gets blinded by the fake money that ads promise. I would hope that this move starts something in the media industry to stop thinking about ads as a revenue source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> As a creator of a publication that got invited to join the beta test of their new monetization strategy, I am very happy about their decision to pivot away from ads.

I was very disappointed when they have introduced the ads, it never made sense to me, it flies in the face of their main value prop - clean, elegant, beautiful, distraction-free blogging platform.

On the other hand, they are in a great position to create a content monetization system, where people are paying for the content they enjoy. So far, most of such systems have failed, but I think that Medium is one of the few companies that can actually make it work. I'm really looking forward to what they will do with this during the next few months.

</comment><comment><USER62> Interestingly, all products tied to Twitter are struggling (twitter, medium, vine, periscoope etc.)

And all products tied to Facebook are thriving (fb, instagram, whatsapp, messenger)i

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't think Medium understood the online media economy when it began, and I don't think they understand it now. With the advent of the Internet, content creators like newspapers and television networks saw the barriers to competition slip away. They were confronted simultaneously with burgeoning supply (which pushes prices for that supply down the curve) as well as more rigorous methods to track how people respond to advertising. One reason why online ads cost less than those in the print edition of newspapers is because they can be tracked, and the results show that people don't respond that much to them. The argument for pricing print ads higher is that print editions have actual subscribers, and therefore disposable income. That subscription model was the basis of a golden age of news for decades, because publishers could be assured of their income, and disengage their reporters from the battle for clicks. They were free to pursue the most newsworthy news. It was a kind of ivory tower. Now that tower is crumbling, faster every year, even if Trump's election caused an uptick in subscriptions in the digital editions of some newspapers. Online subscribers will always be a tiny minority of all readers (I subscribe to some publications, but I understand why many don't), because of the river of free content. In an age of disintermediation, content has gone in the opposite direction, handing more and more money over to middlemen like the ad networks and search engines and social networks, while content creators get less and less of every dollar. They are, in a sense, like farmers, who raise our food from the earth but receive very little compared to the distributors. Laying off 50 people and changing one's business model won't change that dynamic one bit.

</comment><comment><USER64> I applaud Medium for renewing their focus on achieving what seems to be the holy grail for virtually all content producers, but especially writers: getting people to pay directly for content. Netflix and the like seem to have it figured out for video, but somehow it is a much harder nut to crack for text.

I agree that it would be better, both for producers and consumers, to find a different model, so I hope they can figure it out!

</comment><comment><USER65> _> However, in building out this model, we realized we didn't yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content._

You can't make people buy something they don't want.

</comment><comment><USER66> > _So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for > writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for > people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans > who want to get smarter about the world every day. It is too soon to say > exactly what this will look like._

Could this be any more vague and Silicon Valley baloney-ish?

</comment><comment><USER67> > So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for > writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they're creating for > people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans > who want to get smarter about the world every day. > It is too soon to say > exactly what this will look like.

I like the general message - acknowledging that the ad model is broken, not being a jerk to the (many) people they are laying off. I am, however, uninspired that nothing was actually said about how or what their new model will be. I can see NOT putting that in the "we just laid off a bunch of people" message, but that's when you mention that you'll be going into more detail next week, or at such-and-such conference, or ANYTHING to indicate this isn't a sign that the company is doomed and this is just the first step.

</comment><comment><USER60> Yes! This is what I was looking for from Medium when I heard of their ad driven plans:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089574)

Ad driven content basically is a sham. It's a way to let companies do whatever they want with people's minds.

</comment><comment><USER68> Semi on topic: how does this "top highlight" work? I select sentences and paragraphs while reading as a marker - but it's unrelated to the content, it's to track where I am. Do other people only select text they find important or so?

<comment><USER69> This post explains it. It's related to Medium's "Highlight" feature, not the ordinary text selection:

[https://blog.medium.com/introducing- highlights-a4df69e8ed43](https://blog.medium.com/introducing- highlights-a4df69e8ed43)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Maybe it's not focus but quality of content.

When I see that a story is from medium I don't bother with it. History has taught me that once in a while something there might be of value but mostly it's very light reading and not worth the time to explore.

<comment><USER66> Plus a whole lot of "first world's problems" and "white person's activism".

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> My hunch is they're going to go to a subscription/patreon model.

</comment><comment><USER72> IMO, Medium (like Twitter/Blogger) is about self-expression, not publishing. Medium should optimize more for fostering self-expression and community discussion and decouple from Twitter.

Perceived consumer demand to fix publishing is overstated and solves the wrong nonproblem. Consumers arguably like fake news and click-bait, deriving self- reinforcement and entertainment value.

I wonder if hiring content marketers to write in verticals with high paying affiliate programs could get them profitable without compromising their social mission.

</comment><comment><USER73> tldr; they aren't making enough money and don't have an idea on how to change that. They are laying people off who worked on the old failed model and are winding down to maintenance mode until when/if they can figure out a new model that no one else has been able to figure out.

</comment><comment><USER74> > We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this > problem.

I don't know what model they can come up with except the Ad-revenue model from per post views. This is not a tech issue, but an issue with the business of Internet.

Since they have got a lot of good quality publishers, they may go for a subscription model, but then it would not seem very open to new publishers/readers. They may go for a per-blog subscription model for some high-quality publishers like The Economist, Backchannel etc.

Another thing about Medium that gets me boiling is their news feed, its always populated by very popular bloggers and I have to literally scroll a mile to get any post from a new or a small blogger with less than 10K followers on twitter. So it becomes about Popularity rather than Quality(Starbucks articles about Christmas gifts is not as good as my CS Professor's ramblings). So to get those posts I would have to unfollow other popular bloggers. There is nothing like Facebook's "See it First" approach. Only reason I use Facebook these days is for its "See it First Feature" which lets me control my news feed really well.

This really looks like failing CEO's post from here. But they have got so much content from good posters like Addy Osmani, Kevin Rose etc, that it would be hard to see it go. I don't know why many posters on Medium gave up their own managed blogs. I know it makes posts look pretty, but so does Wordpress (which even gives a lot of customization options).

</comment><comment><USER75> I love to read on Medium but it nly works for me when I NEVER recommend, reply or even read anything that's not outside my focused interest, which is programming topics.

Their algorithm is bad , way too sensible. I read a single opiniated post about politics or what have you and the next day my mostly Javascript / Front End feed is flooded with angry women talking about feminism, or people talking about Trump, or that idiot "SF Ali" writing pointless drivel.

They really need to add a way to make magazines of sorts, to be able to have different feeds. The notion of mixing together all kind of interests doesn't make sense. WHen I want to read about web development, I don't want to read about Trump. And vice versa.

I think the design of Medium gave it a certain "chic" but I quickly began to realize it's just another blogging platform and there are a LOT of badly written articles on there.

I wish there was something like Medium focused on creating ediucative content, where banter and personal opinions are frowned upon. So I can go to a feed, and just LEARN things. I don't know if it's even possible to do that though.

</comment><comment><USER76> It would be interesting to see if Medium pivots into a model similar to Spotify or similar streaming music services that charge a subscription and work out some sort of revenue split with writers/publications. However, they would still need ads to supplement free users. Should be interesting...

</comment><comment><USER77> Some people who publish on Medium (me included) have a commercial arm which is trying to gain recognition from publishing.

Better known examples would be 37Signals and Buffer.

Increasing sales via the commercial arm is the aim and so being rewarded for publishing is not completely necessary. In fact I would consider paying for more premium features. Such as ability to restrict read next to particular publications or even pay for greater reach in other publishers "read next" areas which could then compensate them.

I also use Medium to publish personally with no real need for financial reward. I use Medium because it is easy and I don't get distracted playing with navigation or sidebar or thinking "I could stick Adsense on this and earn $2.00 a month".

</comment><comment><USER78> I hope they try micropayments for content. Paying authors 1 cent per read, taken from the readers account, for example.

I've been waiting for someone to do a really good job of that, since the good 'ol days of Gopher.

These guys have a big enough audience to make a genuine attempt at it.

</comment><comment><USER79> That was a very meandering, unfocused article about renewing focus. Granted, the important news about cutting 50 jobs is in the first paragraph, but the rest just seems like an attempt to distract from that fact without saying anything substantive.

</comment><comment><USER80> They may try a central Medium subscription setup that trickles funds to authors based on some criteria, or maybe medium as a subscription manager for authors. Google played with this approach. Does anyone know if they've had success?

</comment><comment><USER81> Does anyone have any insight into what happened to Svbtle (svbtle.com)? In its heyday it seemed to have a ton of momentum / buzz, albeit on a smaller scale than Medium does today.

<comment><USER50> Still around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> The tldr story seems to be: Be a better version of Patreon somehow.

</comment><comment><USER83> Calling it now.

Medium.com pivots to become marketplace where you can either publish for free on their platform or put your writing in an auction for other publications to buy it.

Journalist/writers/whatever all write in a single location and get published to multiple publications. The new model.

===

Shameless plug: Consider writing a guest post on scotch.io. Great exposure, help others, and get paid [https://scotch.io/write-for- us](https://scotch.io/write-for-us)

<comment><USER46> What about the twitch model? Writers rely on donations and subscriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Wait, they had 150 employees? Wow...

</comment><comment><USER85> Unfortunately this is a bit of a flawed blog post on Medium's behalf. The facts are that 50 people were fired due to burn rate and lack of revenue.

The second fact is that "NO" fact is given to how this will be rectified in the future.

The third issue is an opinion. That people need to be paid for the content they produce. This isn't true. There are plenty of people that are happy to contribute purely for the common good or for fame. Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do it anyway.

Lastly, if you do provide a platform people can monetize their following, just like Instagram and Snapchat celebrities can monetize their following on their own with Instagram or Snapchat providing them a direct tool for that.

No blogging platform outside of Wordpress has succeeded to monetize and self- sustain and it is the exception that proves the rule.

Basically that the content generated on blogs is too long form with a disjoint following and not enough focus on entertainment which is the primary driver of ad revenue to survive.

It's the same issue that is facing the news today, they either pander to the lowest common denominator or they aren't compensated enough to sustain themselves. That or they just have too much overhead.

Overall the reality is that many people lost their jobs and the response is just a bit of fluff, when the reality is we screwed up our business model and had to make cuts would have been much more honest.

Instead they are trying to revolutionize something? It just sounds empty.

<comment><USER86> Full agreement. Minor quibble:

 _> Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do it anyway._

I've read that Linus has a personal fortune of at least $40 million. (He presumably commands an hourly consulting rate in the high five or even six figures).

So yeah, he's no Gates/Jobs, but he's doing pretty well for himself. And Linux would never have been viable as a commercial product. (It would just be some Finnish dude's buggy/incomplete Solaris clone).

IMO a better example in tech of a founder making a financial sacrifice for the common good is Jimmy Wales. If Wikipedia had been a for-profit/ad-supported site, he'd be a billionaire now.

<comment><USER85> $40MM is definitely nothing to scoff at but if you consider the overall enterprise value of linux out there in the wild, then it's definitely less than even 1% of the value that was created.

So on absolute basis compared to a regular salary it's great, but relatively to the value created, it's no where near the value that he brought to the world.

<comment><USER86> But no value would've been created if Linux hadn't been open-source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> TLDR:

Not meeting profitability targets.

Starting to run out of money.

Selling ads isn't making enough.

Fired a bunch of people.

VC's want us to get back to hyper growth, whatever that means.

Hoping for the best.

</comment><comment><USER88> "The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation…and pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be damned. It's unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers alike...We need a new model."

This statement sums up today's social media state.

</comment><comment><USER89> > We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their > ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few > seconds of attention.

Does that mean they are going to start paying people blogging? "Rewards" is a bit unclear.

</comment><comment><USER90> To those speculating as to the new monitization model: NLP. Improvements in NLP will open new opportunities for data mining behavioral trends. A company like Medium is very well positioned to benefit from this coming trend.

</comment><comment><USER91> Medium's customer isn't readers nor advertisers. It's publishers - they're a B2B business and should syndicate content to publications around the world.

</comment><comment><USER92> "blog.medium.com" \- Why does Medium have a blog?

</comment><comment><USER93> It would be interesting to know what Medium's main expense is? Is it the people? The infra?

Also would be very curious to know how much do they earn for advertising.

<comment><USER94> people's salaries is by far the biggest expense for most software startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Here's a medium alternative built by one guy: www.allthink.com.

</comment><comment><USER96> Medium.com and their propaganda can all go to hell.

This site was doomed from the moment they started taking money from politicians.</comment>


Anonymous releases internal data on another FBI contractor, ManTech - <AUTHOR> http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6571301-

<comment><AUTHOR> A quick perusal of the download shows this to be very much what it says: internal data. There are a bevy of contact information, employee files with resumes/photos, correspondance with NATO and other contractees, requisition forms and planning documents, presentation slides, and the like. I haven't seen anything particularly damning, although I'll keep digging.

Edit: this was far too good to pass up. By far the most damning thing I've found: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36733961/Funny%20Pictures.docx>

That's right. A bunch of 'funny' pictures, _pasted into a word document_ , and saved on the company server. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gents.

<comment><USER2> Slandering them with the tax dollars abuse is a bit premature. It may be a manager who's offering it for download to improve morale for example, or a myriad of other reasons.

<comment><USER3> LOL! Is it legal for anyone to download this and see? Won't they come knocking on your door even if you just download it?

<comment><USER3> Why have I been downmodded?

<comment><AUTHOR> "LOL"-type responses generally don't go over too well here. In fact, humour in general is strictly forbidden. It's kind of like smuggling drugs across the border: you have to hide it _really_ well.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for that bit of information. I was down voted a few months ago for a comment and now I finally know why.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries. It's not that humor is unappreciated, rather that people tend to come to HN for relevant information and insightful commentary (by internet standards, at least). Many early adopters of reddit came here as the SNR there dropped, and while we're politely asked not to say HN is becoming reddit, it's still a worry for many. Thus, when people see flippant comments that don't really add a huge amount to the conversation that couldn't be achieved with an upvote, they tend to downvote them. There's nothing wrong with that, as that's what the down arrow is there for, but it can take some time for a newcomer to learn the ropes and figure out what kinds of comments are or are not appreciated. Whenever I see someone who's plainly confused, I try to help out.

<comment><USER5> Really cool of you to do that.

FYI they are also adding this link for newbies in the header <http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html> that actually mentions the "LOL" comment thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, I think that should help keep the comment quality up while not driving away newbies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wonder if Anonymous and Lulz really have access to such a wide array of 0days or if NATO, FBI, etc are really extremely behind in their security systems.

<comment><USER6> This leak was the result of a phishing expedition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Though I dig how these guys are exposing gratuitous waste at the government level, I fear that the gov will respond not by fixing what's broken, but by imposing higher levels of control and monitoring of all internet users in general (in the US).

</comment><comment><USER8> Quoting from comment thread at TPB:

"hey, I was just looking at file

23223140 003.pdf

and it looks like someone is getting WAY over billed on the materials. is it just me or are they charging $500 for a $30 wrench?"

</comment><comment><USER9> The prosemof this note strikes me as somehow different from the previous. I can't really puot my finger on it, though.

<comment><USER10> Well, topiary was supposedly the one who wrote that distinctive prose, so if it's different now that would be a clue as to whether the feds have actually got him or not.

IMO this is definitely not written in the same voice as previous statements. I am confident that experts would confirm this, it seems obvious. There is a cursory nod to maintaining the same style, but the _voice_ just isn't there.

Now of course that's what we would expect if we believe topiary was arrested. However, the other possibility is apparently that he was not arrested and is in fact a swede pretending to be from the UK. In that case, the original voice was a very good imitation to start off with, so it would be trivial for him to drop it and sound more generic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting for hackers who like to use this type of information. Although almost six years old, I'm not sure exactly how useful it would be.

Completely lame for anybody outside the hacker culture. We're all looking for the juicy stuff, not lists of email addresses. I give this one a 7.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the idea is not so much, "look at the bombshell we uncovered", as "your security is a joke, and you're the people providing security services to the government".

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_coup>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just SQL dumps they say? And how about the prose _this_ time?

</comment><comment><USER14> For the fucking win.</comment>


Ask HN: What problems does blockchain solve? - <AUTHOR> People seem to be raving about blockchain technologies and new startups are popping up to apply it to new industries every week. How does blockchain actually help a sector like healthcare, finance, retail, etc? Are there examples of where having a decentralized data store solved major pain points? <comment><USER3> The blockchain keeps track of who owns what, even as those things change hands, without requiring some central body to keep track of it all. The easiest way to think of it is an instant, incorruptible market that somehow magically just works.

To know why that matters you have to understand the problem(s) it's solving - it's something people have been working on since the beginning of money, but there are so many edge cases we usually ended up just going back to a centralized authority. In the past you've needed something like a bank or a government or a company to have the authority to declare, with authority, "Person x owns the title to that house."

There are a few problems with that: They could do things to screw everything up (a government printing currency and causing inflation), be corrupt (countless examples), or perhaps not even exist because it's too much effort to create, set up, and monitor some body.

With the blockchain, the software everyone runs keeps track for everyone else in an incorruptible way (yes this is a simplification), so you're free to make changes (or transact) without having someone in the middle to wait for, and with no one that can really screw things up. Just boom, instant marketplace.

The most obvious thing you'd trade on a blockchain is some kind of asset - <USER2> cryptocurrency is the main example, or titles or stocks or something valuable.

Say, for example, I have some loans that people owe me on. I can throw those loans on the blockchain, and without a clearing house somebody else can buy them, and when the loan payment comes due you can easily see who owns the right to be paid.

It seems trivial, but allowing people to seamlessly make transactions of any kind without the overhead of a bank or clearing house is a _big_ deal, and has a ton of applications.

<comment><USER4> Care to enlighten me on how you place a 'loan' on the blockchain? Isn't a loan issued from a bank -> borrower? My assumption in this case would be that the ETH contract would be written to change the legal owner of the loan? How is that then reflected in the real world?

<comment><USER5> Quoting myself from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14775416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14775416) :

 _Cutting through all the [templated] legalese, we can say: "Contract A, between parties K and L, concerning transaction T: T shall be considered done and legally binding once Coloured Coin X has been paid from address [foo] to address [bar], and has been verified by no less than 20 subsequent blocks."_

The idea of a Coloured Coins is that you use something uniquely identifiable to make a transaction in globally verifiable transaction log. (Iow: blockchain.) Real-world contracts can reference the binary result of "has this transaction happened?" to verify that a contract has been completed and an off-blockchain transaction is valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The blockchain really only solves one problem:

How to trust a single entity by using a magnitude of peers to establish an agreement. In the case of Bitcoin it's a monetary transaction.

One example would be file digesting. When you consider malware: if files were signed and digested on ablockchain we would have better oversight of the authenticity of a download. A file could be confirmed against the blockchain to detect if it matches the certification. Since the source alone cannot be trusted, the confirmation of many adds that layer of trust.

Anything beyond the issue of trust is not suitable for a blockchain as there are more efficient technologies.

<comment><USER7> i smell an ICO

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> PREDICTION: all examples in this thread will be hypothetical. If a real-world example is linked, it will be a pilot programme, probably one IBM is writing press releases about.

I have a book coming out next week (!) on the subject. [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/) I have a whole chapter on business blockchains, and I looked _hard_ for a real-world example of one in use. There actually aren't any.

The closest we have is .. git! Transaction ledgers, each with a tamper-evident hash, in trees and chains of hashes. Devs routinely throw entire ledgers/repos around, identified by hash. It definitely counts as a "distributed ledger technology", and it's hugely successful. The only thing it doesn't have is a consensus mechanism - it's "here is my tree" or "here is this repo, this is the hash".

As we're seeing here today, _most_ claims for business blockchain are literally the airiest hypotheticals regarding Bitcoin, with the buzzword changed.

The usual concrete posited use cases are interoperability (that it will magically clean up your data and formats) and that it will magically resolve real-world human-level disputation. Neither of these is likely to work out that way.

<comment><USER9> Not entirely hypothetical example (although still "beta"): [http://www.coindesk.com/asx-completes-first-distributed- ledg...](http://www.coindesk.com/asx-completes-first-distributed-ledger- prototype/)

"The decision of whether to use the technology as an commercial-grade replacement [of ASX's existing settlement system] will be made in fiscal year 2018."

<comment><USER8> yeah, I actually cover that one in passing. Digital Asset Holdings (Blythe Masters/Hyperledger) sold the previous CEO a pile of blockchain bafflegab that wasn't realisable with any extant blockchain (and certainly not Hyperledger). Said previous CEO had to resign after a bribery allegation, and the new guy isn't very keen on the plan. The main thing driving it is that their old system is creaky as hell.

The thing is, though, that blockchains promise replacement by magic, and there's no magic there - it's just as much work as any major system replacement. Also, other stakeholders are already unhappy this doesn't interface a lot like the old system did.

If this pilot works out at all, I suspect the first thing they'll do is rip out the blockchain and replace it with a conventional centralised database. Because this is for dealing with the ASX, and centralisation is obviously the correct thing and "permissioned blockchain" is another word for "the world's most inefficient centrally-administered clustered database".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> None of the responses in this thread so far give a specific real-world example of _how_ blockchains solve a problem. Just repeating the mantra that a decentralised ledger is great for payments or trade settlements or whatever. Yes but how?

The only use case I know, beyond proof of ownership of coins/tokens (and, again, how can that be applied to a real world problem), is proof of document state at a certain point in time (via storing document hashes in the blockchain) which clearly has some uses in law for example, but apart from that I am stumped.

<comment><USER11> The additional problem is everyone forgets a real world problem called "negotiations". If one were to accept the fact that loans or bonds can be put on blockchain for clear ownership, what happens in case there is a need for haircuts or re-negotiating the loan/bond? In a real world, I can talk to a person at the bank and re-negotiate the terms but given the nature of blockchain transactions, how will that work?

Edit: Not to mention, immutability means human errors cannot be recovered from - a wrongly worded contract cannot be restored.

<comment><USER12> > Edit: Not to mention, immutability means human errors cannot be recovered > from - a wrongly worded contract cannot be restored.

I can't speak for the blockchain stuff but typically in financial software data is treated as immutable as well and errors are accommodated for by adding an additional correction record. I assume blockchain would enforce this practice, but then again, I don't know how it would distribute the amended contract.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't it depend on the data? Sure, the actual money transaction cannot be changed. Only journal entries can be passed to correct the amount.

But can't things like name of the person taking the loan can be changed? Obviously there is still a journaling entry recorded to track who and what changes were done. This is specially important because wrong names can and do affect credit ratings etc.

<comment><USER12> That will depend heavily on the particular domain for what can and can't change. Changing names might be fine in some areas of finance but not others. I know in some medical stuff you can't change names, even when a person gets married and changes their name. When you view an old script for instance, it has to display their name as it was (and as it was printed) at the time the script was created.

Nailing down this stuff is where you really appreciate a good architect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's room for blockchain in every place where: 1\. there's a central authority involved 2\. the central authority is prone to error, bias and hostility

=> Most used application is money-based transactions. Banks are central authority and are affiliated with governments, which makes them charge of your money. Use blockchain (Bitcoin).

=> Supply chains are inefficient due to checks and sign offs by so many people. Use blockchain (Hyperledger)

=> People don't agree on terms, and they end up in a feud or a lawsuit which is costly. Use blockchain (Ethereum)

Blockchain, and decentralization on whole is seen to be as future. Many want to tap it before others. Of course, large number of startups will fail, but it doesn't say anything about the potential this technology holds.

<comment><USER14> Let's take first example. As a bank - why it is in your interest to release that authority to blockchain when you are authority and existing infrastructure exists?

<comment><USER15> Even banks can be victims of inefficacy or corruption due to too many middle men. Furthermore, they can also have disputes about ownership of loans, property or money. In my country, there is a bank that is actively embracing and supporting blockchain: [https://www.abnamro.com/en/about- abnamro/innovation/blockcha...](https://www.abnamro.com/en/about- abnamro/innovation/blockchain/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I heard Maersk were using it for container shipping forms.

Because a shipping form gives you global ownership of a container and because corruption, the security required to handle shipping forms pre block chains meant it was more expensive to ship the form than the container, and still it wasn't completely secure.

The block chain shipping form solved this issue completely because you can never fake forms or hide when ownership of a container changes hands.

You could frankly do something similar for public records of landownership, which might not be important in the west where corruption is low, but could revolutionize the third world.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you heard.

This is in early days in Maersk, who are an early adopter in shipping. Most in shipping have never heard of blockchains, and international standards like ICP600 have yet to mention it, banking trade departments not touching it yet (for things like LCs); Maersk are using internally and on small scale.

Very early ground. But a good starting point. Blockchains for shipping are pre-beta, but that doesn't mean testing isn't happing, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try this for a start: [https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most- importan...](https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important- invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169)

Actually, this is better: [http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html](http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html)

My attempt at trying to explain it in one sentence: blockchain provides the technology to connect the double entry ledgers of two (or more) parties by recording the transactions between them, in a way that makes it possible to _prove_ the existence and validity of the transaction independently, without relying on either party's ledger.

</comment><comment><USER18> Right now, it seems like the number one problem solved with blockchain is "how do we convince investors our startup is an unicorn in the making".

It's like XML in the 90s or Web 2.0 in the 00s. Gotta use the technology to get the funding, regardless of actual suitability to task.

</comment><comment><USER19> For the industry, I don't think they actually want a decentralized data store... nor do they want anonymity, or any of the stuff typically talked about in BTC or cryptocurrency circles.

I think for most businesses, the real applicable portion of the blockchain was cryptographic signatures to solidify public ledger. That's about it. Kind of simple, but I think that's what people are paying attention to.

In effect, its less about the technology that BTC and/or cryptominers care about... and more about the boring part that seems to get people excited.

A lot of "blockchain" companies seem to be enabling peer-to-peer transactions for example. By centralizing all transactions to a particular server. There's this one company (I forget the name) which claims to be using Blockchain for exchanging Solar-credits between neighbors.

Having a ledger that is cryptographically reliable, even if centralized, is the main benefit. Also, one that can be fully automated is a big deal. I mean, that's all Visa or Mastercard really are: systems that describe when and where transactions have occurred around a centralized source of trust.

\</comment><comment>---

EDIT: And yes, I know what a blockchain is in BTC circles. But I don't think a "Bitcoin Blockchain" is what people are talking about on typical marketing material. Just like "the cloud" has evolved to mean something new... "blockchain" seems to have been picked up by managers and/or venture capitalists to mean something totally different.

<comment><USER20> The business case for a blockchain is when the alternative is creating some neutral organization to act as an intermediary. Depository Trust Corporation, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are examples of such intermediaries. Such organizations tend to become centers of power in their own right, and start acting like they own the thing for which they keep records.

<comment><USER19> And so... how does blockchain make money?

Because you just described how a bunch of businesses can make money in a way "Blockchain" cannot. From a financial feasibility perspective, it only demonstrates that a decentralized store of information is going to be innately unprofitable.

<comment><USER21> Isn't that the whole point of the Bitcoins themselves? Without that incentive, storing the public, distributed ledger would be a thankless, expensive task. By incorporating the Bitcoin "reward", the miners are incented to maintain the ledger. It certainly appears to be working, looking at the current value of Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you forget about blockchain for a moment, and just focus on your last question, then you can see that the internet itself is a type of "decentralized data store", which solves one major pain point of humanity, namely, access to information.

If you're old enough to remember the days before the internet, access to information beyond what your parents and peers could tell you was found in the public library. Books. I have always loved books for this very reason. They give me access to information beyond what my immediate community can (or will, when you think about it) tell me.

Of course, the problem with the internet (in its present form) is that the information is so unreliable. There are just too many conflicting interests. With the library, you at least have the librarian, who, being a sort-of gatekeeper, makes sure that the library contains only "good" books.

So, blockchain. What problem does it solve? It's a really good question. The blockchain is a distributed ledger, that is, basically, a key-value store. The keys are the bitcoin addresses, and the values are the bitcoins themselves. What is unique about it, and what makes it such an interesting program, is that the record of transactions is constantly being updated, because there is a bitcoin "reward" for running the program. So, even if everyone stopped trading bitcoins tomorrow, if they were just like, "nah, we're over it", the bitcoin network itself would still generate some new bitcoins, and the ledger would be updated. It's really a fantastic invention, when you think about it.

The value of a blockchain is that it adds a type of "reliability" on top of the internet. Because the ledger is public, anyone can inspect it. Because the network is distributed, all the miners running the program are, for want of a better phrase, "keeping eachother honest". When you look at a regular website (or book, or movie), it can be hard to tell if the information you're seeing is legitimate/honest. Whereas when you look at the record of the Bitcoin blockchain (for example), you can be _fairly_ confident that those keys (addresses) were assigned those values (bitcoins) at that time.

To sum up, the problem that a blockchain solves is storing a _reliable_ record of transactions, by harnessing the inherent self-interest of people to "make money" (ha ha).

</comment><comment><USER22> If you can't find investors it's a nice buzzword

</comment><comment><USER23> The blockchain is an accounting ledger that no one has global write-access to, so you don't have to worry about your bank/broker being hacked, going out of business, or freezing your accounts.

It solves the problem of financial intermediation. The whole financial world has been built on financial intermediaries (banks and stock exchanges) to verify that you actually own things. Now you can point to a public record (the blockchain) for that, and no one can take it away from you (without your private key).

</comment><comment><USER24> It'd be handy for tracking baggage in the travel industry. Your bags are handled by numerous different companies/parties at different points and through a ton of locations.

Blockchain would be excellent for verifying that a bag has been received and processed at a certain place.

Lots of the large GDSs such as Sabre/Amadeus/Travelport are actively looking into this.

<comment><USER10> why would blockchain be excellent for that? why not just a regular db?

<comment><USER24> Good question. I'm not an expert by any means, but would expect that the immutability of the record prevents a party passing the buck on who is responsible for the loss of luggage.

But I suppose a DB could do that too. Maybe it's all hype ^^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Capital flight from China: [https://www.ft.com/content/bad16a88-d6fd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6a...](https://www.ft.com/content/bad16a88-d6fd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e?mhq5j=e1)

</comment><comment><USER26> Best source for me understanding block chain at least a bit was here: [http://johnmathews.eu/blockchain- introduction.html](http://johnmathews.eu/blockchain-introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> In a nutshell I feel, blockchain can be used in places where you need robust place to store immutable events. In real world, I can give examples of, birth, death, transferring money, casting vote, owning an asset etc

</comment><comment><USER28> If there's a transactions that go through multiple companies (A->B->C->D->E) then you'll have 5 databases with data replication or you could have 1 shared database on the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER29> One of the main benefits is that data (financial transactions, healthcare records, etc) stored on the blockchain is immutable, decentralized, trustless, and cryptographically signed

<comment><USER30> [http://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/trustless)

How is the average person going to respond when they hear a new form of money is "trustless"? (I know what it really means in this context, but think about slope of adoption).

<comment><USER31> They'll probably respond in the same way they respond to hearing about TCP handshakes. They won't. The implementation details are unimportant to the end user.

Just like today you probably don't ask your doctor the details about how they securely store your health records, nor do you talk to your bank about how they clear transactions.

<comment><USER30> You don't need to know about TCP handshakes to use the Internet. You do need to be sold on the benefits of cryptocurrencies to start using one (other than that the price for them is going up).

<comment><USER31> This thread is about _blockchains_ not crypto-currencies. The fact the two are conflated as frequently as they are is quite unfortunate.

A great use case is in EHR. Your doctor, your insurance company, and all their BAAs participate in private block chain that controls access to your records. Any time a record is accessed, the chain is updated.

<comment><USER32> That's actually a horrible use case, becayse, while it is essential that covered entities track and be accountable for access to a record, the details of that access itself leak information to which access should be minimized, but instead it unnecessarily leaks across organizational boundaries to people who have no legitimate need for it.

<comment><USER31> Not all parties have the access to the plaintext of all messages on the chain. An example of such a permissioned blockchain is JP Morgan's Quorum.

Nodes can participate in establishing consensus without having the ability to decrypt the record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nothing blockchain is a fail concept and it can't scale plus the expensive fees

<comment><USER34> Storing immutable data without the need of a notary costs money, true. Blockchain is the first concept to bring a decentralized trustless database to the table. Imho it's a bad thing that Bitcoin as a monetary ledger was its first application, but however: A few days ago, someone here came up with an easy to understand implementation of a blockchain-free idea of such a decentralized ledger: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354)

So, we will see many concepts around trustless transaction verification in future, in the same way Napster has not been the final solution for P2P data share, but eventually led to BitTorrent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> First employee and architect of a major cryptocurrency exchange here. (Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician.)

IMHO the term "blockchain", in current and common use, actually means Merkle trees applied to time-series information that is shared between multiple computers over the internet, hence 'distributed database'.

Merkle trees are basically a way of saying "this precise set of information was used to generate this new precise set of information". Applied to successive timestamped data in a blockchain, this means that participants within a network can provide strong evidence for past state and state change - ie. they establish relative trust in the fundamental integrity of a shared and evolving database (the blockchain) based upon mutually agreed rules.

What is the real world advantage? Frankly, in most cases, there isn't one, but there are definitely disadvantages. Distributed databases are not new, and _any_ other way of executing them is demonstrably more efficient, simple, etc.

The main _potential_ advantage is to remove the ability of a central authority (or small colluding group of bad actors) to "change the rules" by "rolling back" the state of the system, halting the system, seizing control, removing actors, etc.

This property is perhaps at its most potentially impressive when its implications with respect to the conventional business environment, government and politics are considered for large global industries with deep pockets. Simply speaking, right now most regulations are issued in airy-fairy lawyer speak and cost a lot of money to skew/change/interpret/argue/take to court. This is the case for government regulation, case law and non-governmental agreements (industry codes of conduct, informal protocols, MOUs, contracts, SLAs, etc.).

The potential advantage of distributed systems with mutual trust (note that blockchains are only one implementation of this concept) are that all of this overhead can be removed, since an adequately cross-border (ie. cross- jurisdiction, or government-independent) network of an adequate size will be essentially immune from direct state actor intervention, and the rules for all parties remain clear.

To summarize: save lawyer money, ignore regulators, save time/hassle, remove any means of effective government intervention.

The reality, however, is that most industries are not able to agree on a clear set of interactions and rules under which to formalize their activities, and even if they could it would probably not be feasible to do so in all cases, therefore this semi-utopian objective cannot be reached, and in my professional opinion few corporate blockchain projects to date are delivering anything more than an inefficient means of distributing simple time series transaction data.

The big exception (ie. winning example for your last question) is Bitcoin, IMHO because it was the first, and because it quickly enabled safer and more cost effective means of recreational drug distribution, which essentially provided the initial market which funded its growth (now tending to speculation).

My prediction is that we will see a rise in smaller, private systems and asset types providing transaction services with different properties to present era cryptocurrencies and a smart layer will emerge to evaluate and utilize these based upon their objective properties and per-transaction requirements / risk models. Many of these systems will not be based on blockchain at all. Instead of de-facto bank or card systems, we will have a broad range of settlement mechanisms available. Instead of stock exchanges or large VCs, we will have a broad range of funding sources available. Access to capital will improve, business transparency will improve, government regulators and established financial services monopolies will slowly be disempowered.

Further reading - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_database) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_network) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money) \+ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function)

<comment><USER8> > IMHO the term "blockchain", in current and common use, actually means Merkle > trees applied to time-series information that is shared between multiple > computers over the internet, hence 'distributed database'.

As I note elsewhere in this thread, you literally get that with Git, which was released in 2005 and based on previous work in DVCSes back to the late 1990s. And Merkle trees were invented in 1979.

The new thing in blockchains is the consensus mechanism. The best-known example uses as much electricity as Ireland.

One could _call_ Git a "blockchain", but it'd pretty clearly be trying to synthesise a history for a neologism ...

I suspect "blockchain" products that survive will be tamper-evident transaction ledgers, and I already had one dev admit to me that his company's "distributed ledger technology" product was basically a simplified Git ...

<comment><USER35> Good and valid point. To explore further, git has no _need_ to march forward time for a given node, however, and presupposes human intelligence behind all decisions. By contrast, to function at all Bitcoin absolutely requires new blocks to be agreed upon automatically. I feel this is a key distinction. Also, tamper-resistance is not black and white, and is effectively an emergent property with scaling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's a public database. That's it. Anybody can write to the database and anybody can read from it.

The problem is that whenever you have a public _anything_ there will be spam. People will come along and they will fill the space up with scam ads and porn and hate speech. See: the internet.

To prevent the database from filling up with spam you need to find a way to make people "pay" for writing to the blockchain. Nothing is free and if you're going to consume resources (storage and cpu) from other's computers then they ought to get something in return. That's what "transaction fees" are and that's why they're measured in costs per byte -- the people who are writing to this public, decentralized, highly resilient database are being charged storage fees.

So blockchains are the solution to spam. And unlike pre-existing spam solutions a blockchain doesn't require storage/delivery nodes to "whitelist" certain certificates or for certificate authorities and CRLs and all that wackiness. This is kinda remarkable.

This innovation enables all sorts of new models of collaboration (read: business models). Just today I saw a very interesting proposal for an Uber- like system built on a blockchain. Everything -- requests for transport, driver availability, driver fees, driver certification, passenger and driver ratings -- gets stored in the blockchain. Anybody can read, anybody can write. Here's the database, here's the type of "transactions" (records) -- go crazy. The interesting thing about this system is that it doesn't rely on huge bureaucracy to protect the database. (And what are many business firms but database maintainers and protectors?) Write whatever you want -- write pics of your cats if you like -- but it's going to cost you.

(There's another element of what's commonly called blockchain which is "block verification." The problem here is that when everybody has a copy of the database how do you decide whose copy of the database is authoritative? This is the concept of consensus and note that it's only a problem if the peers in the database don't trust one another. It's actually not so interesting but it is largely an implementation detail of public blockchains with different strategies proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, electoral-validation etc.)</comment>


Electronic Loneliness (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mediamatic.net/5909/en/electronic-loneliness <comment><USER2> Interesting how prescient the final comment would come to be some 20 years later. A pretty decent summation of the modern critique of social media's 'like' mechanics and their lack of ability to create change:

"The Net as ideal treadmill for self-styled identities will create no revolutionary situations, nor bring the world to an end. Cybernetic emptiness need not be filled, nor will it ever be full (of desire, abhorrence or unrest). Until telematic energy finally disappears into the flatland of silence in the face of blinking commands."

<comment><USER3> Until/Unless digital opinion mechanics (likes, etc) are given the weight of real world consequences, they will continue to be empty gestures. The only way to move past this era of "like this post to help stop a dictator" is to implement Internet voting or something similar.

I'm not necessarily advocating for internet voting, just saying until some legitimate public outcome is driven by internet-enabled decision-making, all current social media/internet group-decisions will be empty of meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could someone translate that into ordinary English? It's hard to get even a feel for the core idea here.

<comment><USER5> The one line version is: the internet creates isolation (by removing our need to leave the home, even for work) and therefore loneliness. It's anti- computers (called home terminals in the article) because it disturbs the home as a refuge from work--a place for leisure (in front of a TV-- not the work- like home terminals).

Keep in mind, this is when most people were still not connected (or even had a computer), there were maybe 20,000 websites worldwide.

So this is a pro-status-quo position... arguing against the change that was beginning to occur from computers becoming widely available.

I think it's hard to read because it's a translation of this: [https://www.mediamatic.net/en/media/inline/2016/12/14/8_2_am...](https://www.mediamatic.net/en/media/inline/2016/12/14/8_2_amp.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Interesting prefigure of Tinder in there, too, I thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there are some interesting points in here but I am having a lot of trouble with the language. A lot of the time I cannot be certain what a given sentence is actually saying.

I'm continually confused by how the word "psychic" is used, for instance. Unfortunately, writing of this sort makes me skeptical of the value of the article, as it signals an odd mental model I can't properly connect to.

I.e.:

> Telework is not an institution, but a constitution, a mental frame in which > the new work effort can move. Psychic, to begin with: what used to be called > immobility is now the point of departure for delivering labour performance.

Eh? Is this just a weird way of saying "work at distance"? So telework is telework?

> An axiom of self-realisation has been slapped onto telework in passing: > you're only someone if you're in business. No activity, no identity. Pepped > up, in shape and evaluated for performance, the individualised mass must be > brought into a state of readiness for digital piecework.

This might be a criticism of a everyone-must-have-a-job-to-have-identity mentality, but I cannot be sure, and I'm not sure how it makes sense, since that mentality is definitely present right now in the US, but telework is not all that common still. But I might be misinterpreting that sentence.

> A feeling of urgency must be created, the feeling that unless we all do > something about it, everything will end posthaste in decadence, crime and > entropy. There is delight that the masses will once again have something to > do and can once again be kept on a leash. At home we are experiencing a > science-fiction invasion: the spaceship is ensconcing itself in the living > room and the feeling of being on a virtual trip through space imposes > itself.

I would say this is just plain nonsense. I don't think this sense of urgency is needed by anyone or ever was and I do not believe the article provides evidence for it. A lot of things are said, but nothing is proven.

I think isolation is caused by reduction of the value of religion and no corresponding social replacement for structures such as churches (see first/second/third place concepts). This in turn makes alternative means, which are currently digital, more popular. But not just them, I think Meetups perform a similar function. But, hey, saying things is easy, proving them is another matter.

What I generally find missing in articles like this is some... balance, I guess? It always smells of age-old criticisms of technology combined with criticisms of people who do not socialize as much as some in society believe is proper, and since that sect has always existed throughout history, it's hard to separate its inherent bias against what I would call "nerds" from good points.

The articles sound like they were written by people to whom the internet is of absolutely no use, so they do not really understand it, and can only see its shallow applications, and shallow applications (of which I consider Facebook a type) generally do not look great. So the entire field gets vilified and used as a scapegoat for society's problems, in this case as an evil force that weakens labor rights. Strangely enough, fields generally get worse as more people join them, not because the fields themselves are bad, but because all the worlds problems now get encoded in them as well.

McLuhan has a similar problem with being overly fatalistic but he's a lot more readable.

It would be more interesting to read a criticism of the internet by someone who uses it in more advanced ways.</comment>