I just cancelled my Medium membership. This is a step too far and I no longer feel comfortable giving them money.
Was it easy to cancel?
Ending our Medium integration
131–140 of 382 posts
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#132I have a number of articles on Medium with thousands of claps and 100K+ hits. I'm already working on my Jekyll blog for my next articles.
The writing experience is still great, but the reading experience has become bad, specially on mobile.
I don't need the social features Medium offers. Most of the interesting discussions happen here on HN, Reddit, or Twitter anyway. I don't care about claps and such stuff either. I mostly write because I need to get something out of my system.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
Because each of those is probably a homework problem in Stats 101, and every college kid is going to be googling for the answer to the variation from their edition of the textbook.
College kids have to search for the answer to what the probability of getting a 5 or higher in a die roll is?
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Long ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...
I mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#135I don't have a Medium account so I'm not sure if this is still true, but there was once a button in the settings to export your content as a zipball. If you'd like to migrate to a self-hosted blog, I wrote a tool which will convert this zipball into a Jekyll blog: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify If you want, shoot me an email for free hosting, and I'll rig up builds.sr.ht to automate deployment for you, too:…
My favorite part:
# Remove the stupid footer
footer = soup.find("footer").extract()Re: Ending our Medium integration
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine, you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff. I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help c…
I'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic popup that interferes with me getting to the content. I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more disco…
I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#137Earlier 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.
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 round…
Freebase sold to Google for $100M+(?).
There's definitely value to be created, but the catch is focusing. Someone will pay for the best data on their problem. Very few people are interested in buying 100 dumpsters full of random text: I can't see general services like Quora ever being worth much.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#138Somewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were:
1. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check, and run through tools like Hemingway
2. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe missing some others.
3. Formatting the posts for each service is a PITA. Need images in different sizes and need to place them in the posts.
Ideally I'd like to be able to do all three using a single tool, connect my publishing platforms, click publish (maybe schedule them) and would have drafts in LinkedIn, Medium, Drip, etc.
This would save me so much time that I'd easily pay $50/m for this (and we're bootstrapped and cheap/"capital efficient"). Looks like write.as is heading somewhat in this direction but sadly doesn't hit the major platforms (yet?) Huge market, painful problem, selling to businesses, can build a great tool around content marketing workflow. Got the hallmarks of a great business.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#139Quora 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.
There is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine, you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff. I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help c…
I don't understand this mindset. In my worldview people deserve investment. VC funded corporations don't deserve any of my time to "make it as a better platform".
Companies should live or die by the market and if they piss customers off and lose marketshare, that's the market working for once.
Re: Ending our Medium integration
#140Somewhat related - I think write.as has a huge opportunity here to sell to businesses. When I've done content marketing my core problems were: 1. I want to write a draft, solicit comments to improve, edit, spell check, and run through tools like Hemingway 2. I want to publish to different platforms like LinkedIn, a blog (static site using markdown or Wordpress), an email tool like Drip, and Medium. Maybe missing some…
The post shows the risk in such a move. The 3rd party integrations can be turned off without warning (such as this case). What do you tell your paying customers?