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Ending our Medium integration

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#311

Post by dabockster »

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?

I stopped reading Medium after hearing that a guy I know was never paid for the articles he wrote for them back in 2014. I took a look again in 2017 after being out of college for a few months and it looked like a bunch of college sophomores trying to one up each other on how long they've been programming, going to hackathons, contributing to OSS, etc. So toxic.

Shameless plug for warisboring.com. Go support my friend's work. If anyone at Medium sees this, just pay him already.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#312

Post by dwaltrip »

lmm wrote: post #148
dwaltrip wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it. I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses. The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies... Sorry, just venting, not directed at you.

Deeply nested discussions get harder, much like on StackOverflow. I think it's a deliberate design decision and I'm not convinced it's a bad one; you do miss out on some deeper discussion, but it encourages people to work-up their responses into full-sized posts (and making a new post is very easy).

Fair enough, I get that it is non-trivial to design UI for nested discussions.

I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back").

I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#313

Post by tonystubblebine »

mprev wrote: post #294
tonystubblebine wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m curious as to what you mean by distribution. I can’t work out what that mean in the context of the web.

Re: distribution.

I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers.

They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers.

I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts.

I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#314

Post by taurath »

puranjay wrote: post #299
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google has some strange preferences. Forbes still dominates SERPs despite one of the worst user-experiences of any mainstream site. It's downright unusable without ad block

Forbes probably has an article for eeeeverything. It’s the e-how of news.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#315

Post by dabockster »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #225
peruvian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".

This is so toxic and tiring. It's worth paying for tutorials these days because not only are there thousands out there who want to promote themselves, they want to do so by pretending to be experts. Some are very convincing. If you're a junior or unfamiliar with a technology, you can find yourself reading some of the worst trash out there. I'm fortunate to have enough experience to tell the wheat from the chaff usual…

This is me and Angular. I tried to study it via YouTube tutorials. There were so many holes in the teaching patterns that I gave up on it.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#316

Post by 16th_hop »

To add onto this - I have had my entire account shadow-banned when I wrote a popular technical article about blockchain technology (also about my startup). It looked fine to me when I was logged in, but it showed up as a 404 to people who clicked on it. No notice. No explanation. I wrote about this Kafkaesque expereince here. Make sure to post in multiple places.

https://honest.cash/chicken/mediumcom-is-engaging-in-ongoing...

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#317

Post by FrankDixon »

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?

totally, I love most of the articles I‘ve read. But all the garbage medium needs to run. Really heavy pageload for a simple thing like blogging

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#318

Post by kpennell »

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

I use https://getpublii.com/ for this. Works really well.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#319

Post by dabockster »

PaulHoule wrote: post #49
raverbashing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TEDx Talks in text format

TEDx Talks have more words in them and better visuals too.

Still the same theme, though. Leads you through a story then either issues a call to action or tries to sell you something. The whole thing is built to affect you enough emotionally to perform whatever action the author wants.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#320

Post by mattlondon »

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?

+1 - if I am reading hackernews and see a link that is from medium I will skip it. 99% if the time it will be some thinly-vieled marketing. I am sure there is a lot of perfectly good content on there, but the bullshit marketing crap has turned me off of the whole domain. It is basically as bad as seeing a wordpress link, except you can guarantee that 99 times out of 100 it will be someone peddling their startup (at least wordpress had some slightly out-of-left-field stuff on it)

There is nothing wrong with self-hosted blogs. If you still want to "blog" then go for it on your own domain, please don't feel like you have to publish through some random third party that exists to monetise your content.

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