The team behind the Transit public transit app writes about map design, real-time data, scooters, and bringing the app to new cities.
HN commenters link it for its posts on scooter aggregation and Nairobi matatus; no opinion on the blog itself appears in the comments.
As a writer who's made his living (more or less) via Medium over the past year, hopefully my experience can shed some insight.
The first blog post I wrote on Medium [0] got there by accident: I planned on publishing it on a popular local blog. While I'd used WordPress before, I didn't have a personal blog, so I wrote everything in Microsoft Word.
The piece contained a lot of images—so many that Word kept crashing. The deadline was approaching, so I decided to finish things in Medium and sent the link to my editor. (I probably could have used Google Docs, too.)
When it came time to publication—keep in mind, the editor and I hadn't signed any exclusivity agreements—the editor had not only published my piece with uninvited edits, but the image formating on their website was super unappealing. I decided that when promoting my piece, I'd link to my Medium version instead, since it looked better, didn't contain the edits, and the Medium.com URL carried no less weight than a URL from RandomMontrealPublication.com.
My hunch was correct. The Medium piece outperformed the piece on the "popular" Montreal blog I submitted to (it still did pretty well there, despite the editorial team not doing a great job of pushing it themselves). When local press began to pickup the story, all of the backlinks were going to the Medium version, rather than the RandomMTL version. One of the reasons it did so well on Medium was that it was selected as a Staff Pick (which put it in the newsfeeds for…
Migo doesn’t seem to have Bird. Transit has all three: https://medium.com/@transitapp/welcome-to-scootopia-we-now-aggregate-all-electric-scooters-c31c7337d5e6
Reminds me of the Nairobi matatus, too: https://medium.com/@transitapp/hello-nairobi-cc27bb5a73b7