Svbtle vs. Medium ⇥ thetypist.com

“The Typist”:

Svbtle is an online publishing platform: Like WordPress.com and Blogger and unlike Medium, it’s decentralized, giving writers the option to have their own domain and logo, and though style customizations are limited to colors and avatars, Curtis explains in today’s announcement that more options are to be presented soon.

There are more customization options available on Svbtle, but there is a distinct “Svbtle style” — there’s a Svbtle theme for WordPress, after all. Svbtle also runs a curated “Magazine” selection. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to compare the two, much in the same way as it’s reasonable to compare them both to starting a self-hosted WordPress blog: they’re all tools for putting your writing online.

What “The Typist” articulates well is what Medium does especially differently. In a tweet to me earlier today, he pointed out that:

Medium essentially outsources content in return [for] the exposure jackpot. But writing there isn’t any different than guest-blogging

I think that’s what makes Medium unique and, perhaps, sleazier. Maybe some of the $25 million they raised today will go towards paying writers.