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

261–270 of 382 posts

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#261

Post by zrobotics »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #246
brightball wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for one of those fully bootstrapped successful companies now and it really is fantastic how we can have real business conversations around ecosystem improvement that don’t revolve around money. Money is good, but not having everything dictated by it is good for the mission. EDIT: Sure there's still a financial incentive there but it's framed more in the "we need to turn a profit so that we can afford to contin…

Is there still a concern about the profit? I'm assuming you're working for a for-profit company, where one of the goals – if not the goal, ultimately – is to make cash. (I don't mean to insinuate any sharply-materialistic outlook on your company: I sincerely don't know how a company thinks about money.)

That will always be a concern, even for a nonprofit. You need to keep the lights on, and people need to be paid. However, the trouble with VC funding is the expectation of scale. A VC won't be happy with a small organization that makes enough to pay its employees and sustain a small amount of growth. Unfortunately, that business requires large successes. So the founders and the investors can easily have very different goals.

VC funding is required if you want to build something massive, but isn't a great idea if the founders just want to build a sustainable but small business.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#262

Post by Semaphor »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #251
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.

My solution was to use an extension – Make Medium Readable Again – that, as of its features, removes the intro fullscreen ad. It's available for Chrome and Firefox, as far as I'm aware.

It is available for both indeed. It makes it usable by removing all those horrible "features" and design choices.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#263

Post by notatoad »

scarface74 wrote: post #228

It looks like everyone is burying the lede: We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature. It was a service outage, they didn’t remove the API.

the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications being restricted doesn't explain why an existing application would be terminated though.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#264

Post by zrobotics »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #233
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…

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?

Look at how long pinterest results have ranked highly in image search, even though they're completely useless. I just don't think Google cares to remove them, since surely they have known that pinterest should be excluded from image search results.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#265

Post by bogomipz »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #251
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.

My solution was to use an extension – Make Medium Readable Again – that, as of its features, removes the intro fullscreen ad. It's available for Chrome and Firefox, as far as I'm aware.

I understand there are browser plugins available but when reading text content requires installing extra software to improve the experience my solution is just to go read content somewhere else.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#266

Post by scarface74 »

notatoad wrote: post #263
scarface74 wrote: post #228

It looks like everyone is burying the lede: We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature. It was a service outage, they didn’t remove the API.

the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications being restricted doesn't explain why an existing application would be terminated though.

If they were planning to disable the API permanently, why would they reenable it? Maybe their explanation wasn’t thorough but to attribute it to malice is premature.

How would it benefit Medium to not allow third party apps to publish to their platform? This isn’t like Twitter where they had an incentive not to allow users to use unofficial apps to force advertising on them.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#267

Post by aggrrrh »

sfarhat wrote: post #78

Secretly hated Medium for a long time. Didn't know everyone shared the sentiment. I'm reading this and smiling.

I hope more people will use open source self-hosted platforms like Ghost. We used medium before, but experience, including their api was just awful.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#268

Post by ozaark »

burger_moon wrote: post #94
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.

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.

I was going to disagree with you on the sites accessibility but after taking a closer look it is pretty bad, though for different reasons. Tables everywhere, missing alt tags, doc language missing, no form labels..

As far as aesthetics I actually like the current site. It serves its purpose well IMO. The real accessibility issues should be addressed per WCAG.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#269

Post by rdiddly »

rjain15 wrote: post #111
new_here wrote: post #56

Quora 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…

There's nothing wrong with making money, but I also don't owe them money. Or attention, or to say nice things.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#270

Post by callahanrts »

ollerac wrote: post #242
callahanrts wrote: post #237

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

Yes! This is something I've wanted for a while. Simple, easy writing experience with a button-push deploy to s3 — that would be out of this world! Also, image uploads baked in would be a huge plus (but totally not necessary out of the gate).

Awesome! I have images uploading to s3 at the moment. They get uploaded to /assets. I'm planning on some simple media management as well.

It also enables a cloudfront distribution with the bucket.

Post reply on HN