Posts from Medium's own team about the product, its publishing tools, business model, and engineering, including sign-in design and Bloom filters.
HN links it to explain how Medium differs from Blogger and how its email sign-in works; commenters discuss the ideas and the account-recovery gaps.
I think Ev is pretty clear about how this is different than Blogger. You may not buy it, but I appreciate his thinking, and find it very interesting. From https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool-4c3c63fa41d2:
> Understanding Blogger as we did at the time — as a software tool for creating and publishing web sites — we found ourselves in the race many software makers know well: Add features, get more users. Competitor adds more features, lose users. (Marketing and others factors have some effect, depending on the market. In blogging, that was minimal.)
(skipping a few paragraphs)
> Chris Dixon had a great post a while back — Come for the tool, stay for the network — describing how, unlike Twitter, some platforms started out with tool value and transitioned into network value (which, ultimately, became a much bigger part of the equation, such is the case with Instagram). We had an inkling of this and were just getting started on the network piece of Blogger when I left 10+ years ago. It’s not that Blogger immediately suffered. Its ease-of-use continued to attract users in the tens of millions for many years. (According to Compete, blogspot.com had 63M visitors just this March.) But it was a pretty big missed opportunity for Google. (Don’t worry, they’ve done fine.)
> It will not surprise you that these observations reveal a lot about what we’re trying to do with Medium. We started out by building a great tool for writing. And it’s not even the editor…
> If you don't require privileged elevation
What do you mean by privileged elevation (I'm talking in the context of a web app)?
> just using an email address and send "magic links" + persistent (but expiring) sessions
Do you mean something similar to what Medium does?
https://medium.com/the-story/signing-in-to-medium-by-email-aacc21134fcd
I like it too. But what about delays in receiving emails (when I suggested this approach to some customers, they were worried about that)?
> You can also use a delegated auth system
Yes, outsourcing the authentication is another solution, but some (most?) users are not comfortable with giving so much power to Google/Twitter/GitHub/etc. (as you wrote in your comment).
That's an interesting point indeed. When you are fired from your job, you don't often have the time to connect to all our accounts based on your email address to change it.
Just checked their FAQ[1] but this does not seems to be covered.
Any clue someone?
[1] at the bottom of this page: https://medium.com/the-story/signing-in-to-medium-by-email-aacc21134fcd
By not storing them https://medium.com/the-story/signing-in-to-medium-by-email-aacc21134fcd#.fkttu9kdh