Communication!
After 15 years, WYSIWYG that doesn’t suck
I’m building a startup called Gittip, a weekly gift exchange. A year in, we have about 1,000 people exchanging about $3,000 per week in small cash gifts.
I’m running Gittip as openly as possible, and in fact I like to say that I’m not building Gittip, I’m building a community that’s building Gittip. Communicating with this community is a big bottleneck. What are the best tools for the job? Twitter and GitHub and chat are great for fine-grained communication, and Google Hangouts are great for face-to-face deep dives, but I need a text publishing platform for bigger-picture content and conversation.
I got my start in open source over a decade ago with the content management system Plone, and I’ve been looking ever since for a web-based content editor that doesn’t suck. I mean the actual editing interface, the WYSIWYG component. It’s the Achilles’ heel of every CMS and blogging platform. Blogger’s sucks. Tumblr’s sucks. The editor in email products like Campaign Monitor and MailChimp really sucks. I wanted TinyLetter to not suck, but it also sucks. With all of those platforms, I end up clicking that little “HTML” button and pulling my hair out trying to clean everything up.
Medium doesn’t have an “HTML” button because it doesn’t need one. The editing experience is that good. Instead, I can just communicate. What a refreshing change! I love it!
Of course, the power of abstraction comes at the cost of choice. My personal blog is in raw HTML, and it’s nice to be able to include a table or a script from time to time. I won’t be able to do that here. I’m also not seeing custom domains (yet?). But while Medium’s content editor is reason enough to try it out, the “notes” feature puts Medium over the top. First, sign in to Medium with Twitter. Then, when you’re back here, highlight this phrase, and click the “note” icon. Isn’t that awesome? What a delightful user experience!
Svbtle may very well have nailed content publishing, too, but they’re too closed for me to find out. Medium is in closed beta, but they’ve got a long-term story of openness rather than one of exclusivity. They’ve also got a way for me to let you in: leave a note on this post before it’s published. When I publish this post, you should get access to post on Medium yourself. I think you’ll like it.
Using a product as well-executed as Medium inspires me: can we build Gittip to the same high standard?
