Medium
Medium | |
URL | https://medium.com[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] |
Status | Online! |
Archiving status | Not saved yet |
Archiving type | Unknown |
IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
Medium.com is a blogging website for people who'd like a Wordpress.com with more whitespace, less features, more barriers to access, more surveillance and more gambling their future.
As a VC-backed startup with no profitability in sight, it's likely to disappear suddenly and therefore it merits a permanent Deathwatch.
Timeline
Nieman Lab has compiled a very helpful timeline of Medium catastrophes (or "pivots", if you prefer VC terminology): https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/with-big-plans-to-staff-up-thinkprogress-is-leaving-medium-behind-update/
In March 2021, Medium leadership suggested that employees working for Medium publications take a "voluntary exit option" due an upcoming shift away from the publication model and towards a focus on individual writers.[1] As of 2021, Medium had 11 active publications: Human Parts, OneZero, Elemental, Forge, Gen, Marker, Modus, Heated, Zora, Level, and The Bold Italic.[2]
Archival
Medium is a walled garden, notoriously hostile to an open web, at times more than Quora. However, as of 2017 it was possible for the authors to export the content in a ZIP file and import it in a Wordpress site on Wordpress.com.
Websites run on Medium have also presented issues with archival even after abandoning it, see for instance ThinkProgress.
An increasing number of blogs and websites have relied on Medium as a backyard or garage sale site where to put articles too fancy for their usual social media channels but not serious enough for their main website. Therefore, despite not being clearly linked to or from a large part of the web, it can bring down with it a significant portion of history for other web properties.
URL discovery
https://medium.com/robots.txt links a standard https://medium.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml which provides lists of users (example), posts (example), lists (example).
Alternative frontends
Scribe and Freedium are alternative frontends to Medium that work without JavaScript. Some URLs on the web may link to them instead of the official Medium URLs.