Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ending our Medium integration

write.as

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 382 posts

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#231

Post by StrictDabbler »

asark wrote: post #205
potta_coffee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just Facebook. Any site without attention paid to on-site SEO is basically impossible to find since Google gave up fighting the spammers and (effectively) stopped trying to provide access to a bunch of the web. That was back in, like, '08 or '09. The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1) heavily pena…

Oh, that's what's going on. If I search, for example, "proton transfer balalaika" I get search results where the first few results are "Missing: balalaika | Must include: balalaika" but a result after these has all three search terms.

I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do.

That's frustrating. Low-volume sites represent a significant portion of the web results I need.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#232

Post by CM30 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #86
bena wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User-generated content. It's basically a crapshoot as to whether the person is a blowhard or knows what they're talking about.

My 16-year old son has a classmate who has made about $50 or so writing spam questions for Quora. Some of these questions were astonishingly stupid, the kind of writing that I would have fired a spam writer back in the day that I hired spam writers. It wasn't clear if he was working for Quora or working for somebody who wanted to spam Quora, but the damage is done.

Honestly, if you 'incentivise' someone to post on a community site (whether via money, exchanges or free stuff in general), the quality of their work will usually be terrible. What do you expect when you ask non experts to post reams of topics about things they haven't got the slightest clue about?

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#233

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

borplk wrote: post #93
richardhod wrote: post #77

Earlier 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…

The real question is why does Google still put them on the first page? They've dispatched other nuisance sites but Quora still seems to get special treatment. Quora can't possibly have many inbound links to their content so why the high page rank?

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#234

Post by moorhosj »

criddell wrote: post #193
moorhosj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes? I would bet many of the investors were making a bet on Ev Williams as much as they were on Medium. Medium's business model has always felt a bit exploitative. If they truly are focusing on quality rather than quantity, maybe that will change.

To clarify, my point was specific to businesses like Quora and Medium that rely on high-quality content and engagement. These companies would have likely been better off as niche businesses with $10m-$50m annual revenue. Taking a large VC investment basically closes off that avenue.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#235

Post by wlesieutre »

jahewson wrote: post #218
wlesieutre wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to say that right now, but Microsoft hasn't owned it long enough to have any negative impact on the service. For all we know 5 years from now they'll pull a Sourceforge and start bundling malware into your downloads.

I know: they won’t.

A few years ago I'd have told you "Surely Microsoft won't start automatically installing Candy Crush games on my licensed copy of Windows Professional" but here we are.

A few years from now, some brilliant manager realizes they can "add value for customers" by helpfully including third party software offers with github release downloads, just like Sourceforge did. Who knows?

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#236

Post by bogomipz »

tzs wrote: post #189
bogomipz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.

I don't understand the level of complaints on HN about that sign up overlay. Are they testing multiple nag screens and I got lucky and always get the minimally intrusive one, and the rest of you getting the terrible ones? Yes, it is slightly annoying, but it is extremely easy to dismiss. Unlike the nag screens at many sites you don't have to find and click an 'x' in some weird location. It goes away if you click anyw…

The "pardon the interruption" modal is the only one that I have ever seen.

And it's not immediate, there's time enough for your eyes to adjust to the content of interest before that modal pops up. It's as if it's designed for maximum obtrusiveness.

The experience is further degraded by a header and footer that not only take up significant screen real estate but also only seem to exist to also prompt me to sign up.

So that's three obtrusive prompts asking me to sign up - the modal, the header and the footer. This is unique in that the annoyance has a depth of redundancy.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#237

Post by callahanrts »

With all my frustrations with medium, I decided to build a desktop app--for myself, and maybe to monetize later. It's basically the medium WSYWYG editor combined with a static site generator that automatically hosts on S3. Out of curiosity, is that something that anyone else would be interested in?

EDIT: Here's a google form for anyone who wants to keep in touch https://goo.gl/forms/liv1JpAdKOjc4wJ23

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#239

Post by nordsieck »

criddell wrote: post #193
moorhosj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes? I would bet many of the investors were making a bet on Ev Williams as much as they were on Medium. Medium's business model has always felt a bit exploitative. If they truly are focusing on quality rather than quantity, maybe that will change.

> So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes?

Think of it more as forcing them to make a high variance bet.

The VC business model assumes that about 1/3 of the companies invested in will go to zero, and another 1/3 will make a below market return on investment. They need the Googles and Microsofts to pay for everyone else, so they just push all of their portfolio into trying to become billion dollar businesses.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#240

Post by andrew_ »

If you haven't given write.as or WriteFreely a look recently, do make a point to. Great folks working on that project and a great platform. I happily donated in the form of a pro account to help their efforts.
Post reply on HN