Entirely unsurprisingly, the SV start-up / blog platform known as “Medium” is in a bit of a spot at the moment. They have nfi how to employ 150 people, they have no revenue stream to speak of, and their product is readily available elsewhere and without so much excess baggage.i They have “buzz”, sure, but that and $5 will buy you coffee.ii
Needless to say, link-rot is the quiet tragedy of our times. There really is nothing quite as disappointing as finding a gem of an article, maybe only two or three years old, but riddled with seemingly tempting hyperlinks to nowhere. It’s like finding the perfect watermelon at the market, only to flip it over and find it halfways infested with fruit fly larvae.
The solution is, of course, archiving. Leaving aside the single points of failure issues,iii there can be further issues with the quality and completeness of the archive. Seeing as Medium’s days are numbered, let’s run down this simple two-step recipe for saving their articles in their entirety :
1. Save link at archive.org or google cache
2. Save resulting link at archive.is
That’s it!iv The cake is baked and we now have one less SV start-up to rely on. Carrying on.
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- You don’t need “likes”-come-“hearts” to be a successful mass-market business. If anything, Twitter and now Medium have demonstrated that these feel-good buttons are a contraindication of success rather than a marker of it. Basically, if you’ve stooped to this point, there’s no saving you. ↩
- See Harlan Ellison for the seminal take on the “free publicity” scam. And no, don’t ask me why Taleb uses this godforsaken platform when he has his own website. There’s no waiting for him to come ’round. Here are his Medium articles, properly archived:
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority ↩
Commencement Address, American University in Beirut, 2016
How to legally own another person
We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We talk about Religion
The Intellectual Yet Idiot
Where You Cannot Generalize from Knowledge of Parts (continuation of the Minority Rule)
Foreword to Ed Thorp’s Memoirs (A Man for All Markets)
Strength Training is Learning from Tail Events
Syria and the Statistics of War
The Syrian War Condensed: A more Rigorous Way to Look at the Conflict
No, Jesus was not a “NonWhite” refugee who would have voted for …
Inequality and Skin in the Game
An Expert Called Lindy
Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
*This list will be continually updated* - Despite being the Republican standard, the Eastern European owner of archive.is is an individual shrouded in mystery and as yet outside the WoT. ↩
- Exclusively using archive.org results in links that are bounced straight back to Medium’s homepage, exclusively using archive.is results in pages with no pictures, and exclusively using google is little better than Medium.↩