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Ending our Medium integration

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#161

Post by AJ007 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #62
kuhhk wrote: post #4

Personally, 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?

To me it looked like a scam right away. Medium tried to act as if it were something a little bit better than the rest of the web and it quickly became something just a little bit worse. Why? If you are running a tiny service you can get together a community of people who are two or three standard deviations better than the mean. If that service grows, it is going to tap a wider pool of lesser talent and the quality o…

Be suspect of any centralized, closed service attempting to replace an open, working, eco-system of decentralized platforms.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#162

Post by DonHopkins »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #107
borplk wrote: post #93

Earlier 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...

You used to be able to discretely order high quality low cost ink writing implements from a piece of land surrounded by water at "PenIsland".

Edit: I'm glad to see they're still up and working hard to service customers at: http://www.penisland.net (totally safe for work, trust me)

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#163

Post by chrisdsaldivar »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #133
rhizome wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You’d be surprised.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#164

Post by jamiek88 »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #133
rhizome wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Liberal arts kids doing the mandatory math classes? Sure.

CS major in first year who has been interested in math and science as a kid? Probably not.

First year college in the USA is very broad. It’s not like university in Europe / UK where you specialize in one subject only for your bachelors.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#165

Post by bloopernova »

duxup wrote: post #96
thefz wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

> trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning. Often feel like resume padding is the underlying motivator too.

This is true. There's a certain subtle pressure in the dev and IT community to be like those prolific open source contributors, stackoverflow gurus, and insightful bloggers with thousands of twitter followers.

I imagine that there's a whole slew of different causes and neuroses mixed in with feeling that pressure, including the ever-present and insidious imposter syndrome. It's very difficult to feel "good enough" when you're comparing yourself to those hugely popular open source developers. It's probably tied up in the same bundle as people with an Instagram account trying to compare themselves to the models with tens of millions of followers.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#166

Post by tonystubblebine »

criddell wrote: post #126
tonystubblebine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a publication on Medium, Better Humans. My understanding is that the pivot to be a place where most writing is paid for was specifically to crowd out content marketing. The content marketing is, as the two of you say, basically Wikipedia summaries and people selling themselves. It's part of the style guide for their Membership program that writers can't have calls to action (with a few exceptions, like if it's…

Why stay on Medium? Why not take total ownership and move to your own space?

It's a good partnership for us.

- they handle distribution and are better at it than us.

- they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services.

- it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business.

We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#167

Post by jamiek88 »

Will_Parker wrote: post #143
pjc50 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. This is amazing - this is the thing that people demand of Youtube, in order that the algorithm stops promoting anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers.

Dilemas are, who gatekeeps the gatekeepers, and how much do they want to act like a publisher vs a town square. If too much, maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish.

>maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish

And therein you have found the crux.

Take away the massive human resource cost of moderating this they still run the risk of implying approval/endorsement of things they do not manually kill that the algo throws up.

Personally I think you could just consider that training for the AI.

They will have to so something eventually, I can’t see the EU whose member nations do have hate speech laws letting this rabbit hole continue for much longer.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#168

Post by moorhosj »

criddell wrote: post #120
moorhosj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said there is anything wrong with making money, that’s a straw man. The reality is that taking venture funding has forced these companies to compromise what made them useful in order to chase revenue for investors.

The venture funding doesn't really have anything to do with it, does it? Even if they were entirely self funded, they still need to generate enough revenue to cover their costs. It feels like Medium is circling the drain.

Sure it does, venture funding comes with investors seeking to make a large return in a specific timeframe. If they were entirely self-funded, they could slowly ramp revenue streams and build on a sustainable base.

Getting a large influx of funding forces a company to search for faster growth to justify the valuation and deliver projected future growth. In 2017, Medium laid-off 1/3 of their workforce because their advertising model wasn't working [1]. The implication is that they hired a bunch of people to sell something that nobody wanted. A self-funded company, would have likely never hired those people in the first place. That company would be on firmer footing now, but would have gotten less HN/TechCrunch coverage in the process.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2017/01/04/medium-la...

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#169

Post by UncleMeat »

mrzool wrote: post #39
dhh2106 wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

> The UI isn't beautiful. I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.

Tiny buttons that are hard to click on mobile.

Markdown that drives people to use block quotes when it isn't needed and make reading quotes a nightmare on mobile.

Clicking the back button after replying doesn't show your post.

Low contrast difference between background and thread title.

The list goes on.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#170

Post by jamiek88 »

jerrytsai wrote: post #110
smacktoward wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On mobile, try using https://hackerweb.app/ A much nicer mobile interface for consuming HN, but you'll have to go direct to the site to interact with it.

Still just okay imo.

Sure it looks new and mobiley but all I really want (not OP btw) is the same site but with bigger buttons on mobile.

I have it set up on iOS to auto zoom and to raise the font size a couple clicks but the action buttons are still hard to click on and at least once a day I flag or downvote something I have to then undo.

Unless you have perfect eyesight and dexterity it’s a chore.

I might make what i seek actually. At least then I’ve scratched my own itch.

Maybe an extension?

Can that even be done with the current apis?

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