On Beto’s new blog and selling his power ardisson.org
In which I riff on the thoughts and writings of @manton, @schuth, and @fiona in the context of Beto O’Rourke’s new blog: On Beto’s new blog and selling his power
(Also hat tip @adders for linking earlier this month to that awesome takedown of Medium’s reader-hostile UI.)
@smokey I find myself thinking about samizdat often. For its vulnerability & inefficiency as a medium, it proved very effective at engaging people in a discourse of ideas, precisely because it made them not just readers, but publishers & distributors. Despite the Internet's promise, sharing has been greatly devalued (by billions of worthless RTs) & publishing siloed by Web 2.0 media companies that scrape all the value from users’/writers' work. Beto has the visibility to swim against that current; it's disappointing an advisor or communications director isn't helping channel his message in a way that draws folks to a place where they can learn more about Beto & his ideas, rather than move on to some clickbait Medium post in a sidebar.
@smokey And of course, Beto already has his own domain name! I can see the appeal of wanting a more personal blog, separate from the campaign, until he figures out what to do. I'm still disappointed in Medium's approach more than anything.
@schuth I found it even odder when I read that he had at one point put out an online and print newspaper in the style of the Village Voice. But maybe it is because he is too much a part of the tech world that he can’t see Medium for what it is? Dunno. Still, as you say, it’s disappointing he apparently had no one to suggest a better way.
@manton I checked a few random domain names while writing the article, on the thought he might want it to be something separate/more personal, and was going to suggest beto.blog, but the registry was asking 3 figures for it!
I’ve never been a fan of Medium—something has always felt wrong about it to me, though what I can’t articulate—but I agree that it was generally a reasonable option before they discontinued domain support.
@smokey I'm sure his campaign can afford it, but yeah, the variable pricing for .blog can be annoying. (On the other hand it probably prevents people from squatting on good domains.)
@smokey Ditto!
I’ve never been a fan of Medium—something has always felt wrong about it to me, though what I can’t articulate—but I agree that it was generally a reasonable option before they discontinued domain support.
I really wanted to like Medium, and what they were doing, but the white picket fence felt a little too tall in the end.
@pauljacobson Your “white picket fence” seems apt, because part of what I felt about Medium is that they were trying to capture (fence in/fence off) writing, whereas I never got the same feeling from other blogging/blog-hosting services.
@manton I hadn’t thought about the squatting problem; I bet you’re right about that, although it seems a shame that with all of these new TLDs coming online, domains are becoming more expensive for the average person rather than less.
@smokey Yup, it very much seems to be the idea of a friendlier Facebook for writers, with great UI, and short-lived ideas for innovative revenue models.
@manton in an ideal world, every newborn should get a free domain name at birth, next to it’s social security number. In the meantime, parents already are taking matters in their own hands, picking their baby’s names based on available domain names.
@manton. At least this sentence should sound like music to your ears: “Some parents (37 percent) believe personal websites will take the place of social media, and created a website with this in mind.” First comes baby, then comes baby’s personalized domain name
@ArnoldHoogerwerf It's funny, I reserved some good Twitter usernames for my kids 10 years ago but they didn't use them. I should've focused more on domain names. (We've long had a family blog, though.)
@smokey For those not aware, there’s a terrific Javascript snippet available, called Kill Sticky, that does a marvelous job of killing the Medium crap. Works well in other sites as well. I don’t recall the URL, but it should be easy to find with a search. I read about it at @gruber’s site a couple years ago.
@manton I have the domains for both my kids. Of course if Lucy decides not to keep her name if she gets married, then she's on her own... :)
@dejus I sincerely wish I had taken my wife’s last name. Trozelle is infinitely more interesting than Hays.
@cheesemaker You didn’t buy a domain with her future last name as well?? 😆😆 “you can marry anyone, as long as their last name is X” 😆😆 a new type of arranged marriage, I guess?
@cheesemaker Did you get .com domains? That’s one tricky thing nowadays. Do you get kids .com or other ones like .me?
@EddieHinkle yeah somehow I was able to get .com domains. I guess that’s the result of giving them somewhat unique names. For me, I have to have .me domains.
@manton I got both of my kids domain names as soon as we had names picked out! Hopefully they’ll appreciate it down the road.
@tmj Yep, I wrote my own iOS bookmarklet installer metabookmarklet solely for the purpose of getting Kill Sticky Headers installed ;-) (I then published the code because it seemed it could be useful to the wider world….)
These days I mostly resort to Reader mode for pages that are actual articles, but for other types of sites I still use KSH.
@manton The article of yours I linked to in my post has gone AWOL behind the “still being published” message (and the Internet Archive doesn’t have a copy, either).
@smokey While testing an import feature earlier this year, I managed to break a bunch of my old posts. I've fixed most of them but still need to update that one and probably some others.
@manton Ah. The perils of being your own guinea pig ;-) I did find it in Google Cache, so I could read it again (and FWIW the post you link to in that post is also one of the ones still broken).