Wasn't Medium founded by ex-Twitter people, and didn't Twitter do exactly the same thing to third party developers?
Ending our Medium integration
91–100 of 382 posts
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel similarly about Medium: waning enthusiasm. I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to. I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising po…
I'm with medium, but I didn't start there until they allowed for you to use your own domain. If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice. Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
> f I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose
Didn't they block it? I read a post here about it some time back. I doubt medium would make you leave it easy.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#93Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content.
Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account.
"Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..."
"In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 cents."
And they are getting more sophisticated so it's not always so easy to spot.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.
Hard disagree. It's barely acceptable on desktop, but on a mobile device it's awful. All the links and buttons are tiny , and they're all so crowded together I frequently end up doing dumb things like tapping "flag" when I meant to tap "discuss." With just a little bit of work HN's UI could be so much better.
Seriously I get that they want the 'shit plain look to scare off normal people' schtick but it's also terrible for accessibility.
For being a company that beats the inclusive and equality drum they seem to go out of their way to make it impossible for people who don't have incredible dexterity or eyesight to use this site.
I love the simple layout but make it accessible to everyone.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account. "Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..." "In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 ce…
Dead on, though I can't remember when experts-exchange wasn't garbage, even before they added the hyphen (haha).
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#96Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
> trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
Often feel like resume padding is the underlying motivator too.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#97Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
Same. The header and footer give me visual claustrophobia. If the article is something I really want to read, I right-click on each and do Inspect > Delete.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#98Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
Knowledge services make for horrible VC businesses.
The exception to that rule is Stack Exchange, because they have a business model that is unique to the space and impossible to replicate for a site like Quora (Genius, Answers.com, wikiHow, et al.).
Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential, to avoid the dreaded down rounds and eventual drift toward forced sale. There's only so much legitimate high quality content for a site like Quora and it's nowhere near enough to validate a $2 billion valuation (much less higher).
Consider for a moment that Yelp - which is a real business in a highly monetizable segment, that is also profitable and will hit an annual billion dollars in sales soon - is worth $3 billion. So if you get a $2 billion valuation as Quora, where are you going from there? It's obvious.
Genius is facing the same exact fundamental problem that Quora is. Take a lot of money from VCs, get a big valuation, find it impossible to live up to it. Turns out normal people don't want to annotate everything and could mostly care less unless it's a more narrow passion segment (music).
There are only two paths for knowledge services. Stay small and very lean, aggressively limit costs, and use an ad model - that's wikiHow. Or go the Wikipedia route. Anything involving VCs will end in disaster and or forced sales. Knowledge services properly have to think very, very long-term (if they're actually trying to fulfill a knowledge mission and aren't just traffic fronts), they need a decade outlook or more. VCs think short-term, they look at ~5-10 year type exit outcomes. High quality, long-lived knowledge services are fundamentally opposed to a focus on exits in any manner, as they have a higher calling than looking for an exit for a VC - and any deviation from that must inherently destroy the community.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".
>a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence"
As someone learning programming this hurts so much. I've read so many medium articles that are sort of correct .... but also not and imply things that are straight wrong.
They clearly aren't that many steps beyond my ability and their writing implies they are ... but their work way not.
Really frustrating when you see an obvious template or pattern that is just a bit "off" used in medium post after after post and the code works, but is way not handy to use as you can't really build much off of it / alter it with ease.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#100Does anyone here use Write.as for blogging? This is the first time I've seen them and the simplicity look appealing to me. For the record I was really excited when Medium came out and loved the simple, open, no-clutter style it had. But fast-forward to today and it's now very different.
I'd love to try Write.as, but it seems that their free plan is no longer available? Not to me at least. The cheapest plan I can choose is 12USD/year.