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If Simily Fails, It’s Because Of Its Tech Stack
Part of me thinks, it’s inevitably doomed, but the software engineer in me is intrigued, so I joined anyway.
What’s incredibly intriguing to me whenever a new platform shows up is either of two things: the unique features it brings or the technology it’s built on. For me, Simily falls into the latter category. For all intents and purposes, it’s a Medium clone with a few features that are neither special nor innovative. If anything, they’re probably an overkill and a resource-hog at this point. Thinking here of forum and direct messaging.
What caught my attention wasn’t any of this, or even the fact that for the time being it pays 2 cents a view. I mean, when you have less than 3000 users, the total it can generate is $60/story, and Google doesn’t rank it well enough yet to matter much when outsiders view stories. What raised my left eyebrow, then the right, was the fact that it’s a “Medium clone” built on top of WordPress. As a software engineer and web developer who used to swear by WordPress only to gradually give up on it, to see a platform intending to take on a thriving giant on that same technology I gave up on, raised a few questions and thoughts in my mind.