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Inside Medium's Meltdown

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Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#51

Post by knight17 »

kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades. - I read an interesting blog…

>> I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts

Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates.

It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts.

Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side.

Example: I am on this page (https://darcyhsu.blogspot.com/2015/09/outlining-with-excel.h...) and I can see all his posts without leaving the current page which I arrived from Google. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/9OjiVA5

[1]: Some have list pages which is great. It only requires one extra click

[2]: Not to mention the humongous page sizes

[3]: Evernote killed Clearly

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#52

Post by anamoulous »

whack wrote: post #3

Personally, I respect Ev more for his decision to put on the brakes, even when Medium seemed to be a financial success. We already have enough blogging platforms. We really don't need yet another one. Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Si…

If this comment is satire it is very good.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#53

Post by subpixel »

dpweb wrote: post #14

I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere. They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles. For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful fig…

"why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer"

Colin Powell on retainer will make Medium money how?

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#54

Post by stonogo »

mrwilhelm wrote: post #45
kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades. - I read an interesting blog…

>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.

I'm not changing my browsing habits because Medium's engineers suck at sending text.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#55

Post by inopinatus »

transfire wrote: post #26

As a blogging platform I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a month, but no more. I look at other platforms like Ghost, who want $20/mo, and I wonder who in their right mind signs up for it. You can host your own site for far less.

That rather depends how you value your time w.r.t the opportunity cost of doing other things. Valuing my marginal time with a purely internal cost metric of $500ph, that $20 equates to a tipping point of 2.5 minutes a month on the complete hosting setup & management. Since it will invariably take more than that even amortized over a year it's a no-brainer: I'm okay with paying for blog hosting, assuming it's a service offering the same capabilities and quality level I'd build for myself.

NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing, monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#57

Post by chris_wot »

coldtea wrote: post #2

> They were shocked. Their adored boss, billionaire CEO Ev Williams, best known as the cofounder of Twitter, seemed to care so deeply for each of them. LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.

Yeah, but you tell the employees about layoffs at least a day ahead of plublishing a blog piece. Only a complete turd would announce mass layoffs on a blog post before telling employees directly through their manager.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#58

Post by Baeocystin »

epberry wrote: post #11

I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and t…

Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#59

Post by paulcole »

pryelluw wrote: post #48

I feel medium would have a chance if they allowed video and audio content to be published there. They already have the users that produce such content. Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults (I don't mean pornographic content). They could then sell many products and services around it.

>Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults

You might be on to something here.

>(I don't mean pornographic content)

Oh, never mind.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#60

Post by a3n »

subpixel wrote: post #53
dpweb wrote: post #14

I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere. They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles. For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful fig…

"why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer" Colin Powell on retainer will make Medium money how?

As it is, I never go directly to Medium, I only read their articles when an aggregator like HN links to it. If Powell wrote for them, then some percentage of those random visits I'd go "huh. Colin Powell."
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