291–300 of 382 posts
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.
Does 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.
If that was planned, nice way to get some attention ;)
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It's not just "morals", it is "brand equity." If people believe in your brand, you have something. If they don't believe in your brand, you have nothing.
Price or features trump brand value most of the time. Just ask Spirit Airlines, Facebook, or Uber.
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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.
Somewhat 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…
Shameless plug: write your post from the comfort of your Emacs and automatically upload it to write.as or any other writefreely instance:
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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.
Most complaints seem to be focused on mobile. Eh, on mobile I only consume content, so I don't really care if it's hard to post a comment or vote on mobile. Desktop computing is my jam.
And any complaints about its appearance on desktop are easy to tune to user preferences using a userscript. I have a simple userscript that changes the color scheme to a dark theme I quickly concocted. (Part of why I don't even bother to contribute on mobile is because mobile platforms are so constrained that a quick and dirty userscript isn't particularly easy to use.)
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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.)
Platform quality is long term money, platform monetization is short term money. With VCs who only care that the growth curve is exponential, they go for short term money every time, because yeah you might crash the company, but you've got a 5% chance of becoming a big evil corp.
If you start a platform around paying customers you make it one way, if you start it around getting as many users as you can and then monetize the popularity, then you are selling your users, and that's another way entirely.
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.
Quora is nothing but spammers self marketing. There is no moderation whatsoever.
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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?
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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)
A: In most cases we can handle your wood.