dev.to has been called the "Medium for Developers" by many people I know. Does that align with your vision or do you see dev.to as evolving to something more than a content platform?
Step 0 has been to provide a lot of the value that people find with Medium, but I've always thought of this as a starting point of what it can be. Medium is constrained by its need to be all things to all publishers. I really think serving developers specifically allows us to be a "progressively enhanced" version of Medium.
I'm not the kind of person to try hard to correct people because it's not my platform, it's theirs. If they have a different thought about it, I take that description seriously and go back to the drawing board with the intel.
So that's a good way to describe it but it's not how I/we think of it because we're thinking towards the future where we've built on top of our core primitives to provide more value than just Medium for devs.
Agree wholeheartedly. I think the "Medium" analogy is primarily in the sense that this encourages well-crafted long form narratives (vs. short tweets or social network posts). And in that sense it provides a basis for starting.
The biggest value/difference I have seen though is that dev.to seems driven more by conversation (2-way community interactions and collaboration) than publication (1-way content sharing). It fosters a better sense of "belonging" and a lot of credit for that goes to way all of you at TPD/dev.to have embraced experimentation and feedback. Thank you all.
The biggest value proposition we can offer over Medium is that we really care about the experience for developers, and we have ideology specifically focused on improving the developer community. Any positive effects that Medium provides in this since are purely coincidental.
Medium has raised $132M and was founded by a publishing platform celebrity, so I won't be so bold as to say we're just better, but we have a lot of leverage in our capacity to go vertical and focus on this community.
As an aside, before I moved to the states to try this wacky tech-venturing thing I'm doing, I was working on a Medium-esque platform and consulting some investors to see if I should pursue this. This was before Medium had launched, but I was given the advice to not bother competing since they'd crush me. This was probably okay advice at the time, but I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that, and I feel like I have my own private rivalry with Medium. I'm not one to care much about the "competition", but I go back to that conversation a lot for motivation.
dev.to has been called the "Medium for Developers" by many people I know. Does that align with your vision or do you see dev.to as evolving to something more than a content platform?
Step 0 has been to provide a lot of the value that people find with Medium, but I've always thought of this as a starting point of what it can be. Medium is constrained by its need to be all things to all publishers. I really think serving developers specifically allows us to be a "progressively enhanced" version of Medium.
I'm not the kind of person to try hard to correct people because it's not my platform, it's theirs. If they have a different thought about it, I take that description seriously and go back to the drawing board with the intel.
So that's a good way to describe it but it's not how I/we think of it because we're thinking towards the future where we've built on top of our core primitives to provide more value than just Medium for devs.
Agree wholeheartedly. I think the "Medium" analogy is primarily in the sense that this encourages well-crafted long form narratives (vs. short tweets or social network posts). And in that sense it provides a basis for starting.
The biggest value/difference I have seen though is that dev.to seems driven more by conversation (2-way community interactions and collaboration) than publication (1-way content sharing). It fosters a better sense of "belonging" and a lot of credit for that goes to way all of you at TPD/dev.to have embraced experimentation and feedback. Thank you all.
The biggest value proposition we can offer over Medium is that we really care about the experience for developers, and we have ideology specifically focused on improving the developer community. Any positive effects that Medium provides in this since are purely coincidental.
Medium has raised $132M and was founded by a publishing platform celebrity, so I won't be so bold as to say we're just better, but we have a lot of leverage in our capacity to go vertical and focus on this community.
As an aside, before I moved to the states to try this wacky tech-venturing thing I'm doing, I was working on a Medium-esque platform and consulting some investors to see if I should pursue this. This was before Medium had launched, but I was given the advice to not bother competing since they'd crush me. This was probably okay advice at the time, but I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that, and I feel like I have my own private rivalry with Medium. I'm not one to care much about the "competition", but I go back to that conversation a lot for motivation.
And you have real markdown, not that weird
crapthing medium does 💗Yeah man!