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Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

theregister.co.uk

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#21
"After seizing a shipment of Stanley's Snake Oil in 1917 [Medium blog posts in 2017], federal investigators found that it primarily contained mineral oil, a fatty oil believed to be beef fat, red pepper and turpentine. That's right — Stanley's [Medium's] signature product did not contain a drop of actual snake oil [novelty], and hundreds of consumers discovered they had been had."

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/...

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#22
The game plan is easy to decipher. Bring them all in and have them appreciate the features we have, then start charging to ween off the non-serious bloggers. So ultimately, they are streamlining the user base of their platform.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#23
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a blogging platform. Why posts hosted there should be any less interesting than posts hosted on any other platform?

While I don't feel as strongly about Medium as the parent comment, I'm also less inclined to read an article when it is posted on Medium. No real reason, really, just a personal bias from myself because I'm finding a lot of "thought-leader-pieces" articles over there, and technical content over there are not as well formatted as the ones on someone's personal blog that are well designed for code snippets and such in…

> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs.

This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#24
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some odd reason medium attracts the worst content. All those super optimistic shallow nonsense. Urgh.

Why do you think that is? Is it something about our times, people in general, or having nothing better to say?

There's an entire subculture of fake "you can do anything" motivational stuff on the web. The purveyors are direct descendants of Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie and whoever was selling that stuff before him.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#26
post #9

The problem is that they are trying to fix something which dont need fixing. Media is not broken, its exactly as good as it can be when so many people have access to writing whatever they want. The search for a large scale business model in media is never going to turn anything out, its not the content thats valuable but distribution.

This. Medium and most other sites-in-search-of-a-business-model (including the Register) think that content is king, and that by producing 'better' content will create more revenue. In fact, distribution is king, and getting more distribution -- independent of the content -- is the key to success. Consider a site with high distribution and crap content: It's already making money and can always improve the content. A…

I'd hesitate to include the Register among "sites in search of a business model", when they've been doing business without interruption since before the first Silicon Valley bubble.

Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#29
post #19
post #3

When I see a nice Headline on HN: "Oh cool, I would love to read that", then I look at the domain: "Oh it's on medium. Never mind then." I'd never pay for that shit show.

Facts: Hacker News gets a ton of articles posted from Medium, but very few of them get to the front page. Last time I measured there had been 4,108 posts from medium.com in 2017 (largest source of news for HN), but less than 3% of them got some upvote traction. So you seem to be sharing a similar sentiment towards Medium than the rest of the HN readers. (Even posting tweets to HN gets them double the attention than a…

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Re: Medium asks $5 a month for nothing

#30
post #23
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't feel as strongly about Medium as the parent comment, I'm also less inclined to read an article when it is posted on Medium. No real reason, really, just a personal bias from myself because I'm finding a lot of "thought-leader-pieces" articles over there, and technical content over there are not as well formatted as the ones on someone's personal blog that are well designed for code snippets and such in…

> it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can't be bothered to set up their own blogs. This is it for me. If you want to write about tech, or the tech scene, and especially web tech, why can't you just build a site? I've built a few and I don't even do web development for a living so I had to teach myself some stuff.

Because it is difficult, a lot of work and potentially very expensive (when you have traffic) to build your own.

If you are in tech, you should understand to use the right tool for the job.

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