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

351–360 of 382 posts

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#351

Post by quantum_magpie »

mastazi wrote: post #347
vertex-four wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite unique - Reddit’s mobile experience is similarly full of misleading and redundant prompts to sign up.

Try old.reddit.com - it was originally created for users who want to revert to the old desktop layout but it has an additional, unintended feature: even on mobile, it maintains the desktop layout without switching to the mobile site (note: it is not responsive so you will have to zoom - but personally I prefer zooming compared to the nagware "features" of the mobile site).

You can use i.reddit.com on mobile, it's even better.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#352

Post by s17n »

taurath wrote: post #280
MarsAscendant wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Focusing on the 5% chance of massive success is the opposite of short term thinking.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#353

Post by techdragon »

dabockster wrote: post #300
DonHopkins wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Q: Can I provide my own wood? A: In most cases we can handle your wood.

That’s either impressive levels of deadpan, utter inability to notice the double entendre, or and impressive job of “leaning into the joke”.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#354

Post by astura »

briffle wrote: post #150
patrickg_zill wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office ar…

I remember seeing a news story back in 1995 about how content for the current Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXX) was being blocked by parental filters because it assumed 'XXX' was adult content.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#355

Post by astura »

techdragon wrote: post #353
dabockster wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: Can I provide my own wood? A: In most cases we can handle your wood.

That’s either impressive levels of deadpan, utter inability to notice the double entendre, or and impressive job of “leaning into the joke”.

The whole site's a joke, it doesn't actually sell pens.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#356

Post by astura »

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.

Im curious, can you give an example?

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#357

Post by manigandham »

s17n wrote: post #352
taurath wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Focusing on the 5% chance of massive success is the opposite of short term thinking.

It's about having a massive exit, the sooner the better. It's absolutely short-term thinking, with an upper bound around 10 years. Less for smaller investors. Nobody cares what happens after the exit.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#358

Post by alangibson »

dabockster wrote: post #304
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?

IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).

They stopped the free beer? No wonder they fizzled out.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#359

Post by richardhod »

astura wrote: post #354
briffle wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office ar…

I remember seeing a news story back in 1995 about how content for the current Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXX) was being blocked by parental filters because it assumed 'XXX' was adult content.

What kind of content could there have been then for the superbowl: Blinking tags and daily updated grey-background text? Are you sure parental filters really were a thing in 1995. I remember 1995. I was using mosaic.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#360

Post by potta_coffee »

dabockster wrote: post #310
potta_coffee wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are whole topics I can no longer search for on any engine because the results are so bad. The example I can think of is product reviews for just about anything - the results are almost always shitty "top ten" Amazon affiliate sites. If I want to find a legitimate opinion about certain kinds of products, it's nearly impossible to find via Google.

Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad copy of Quora with each answer reco…

Quora is another gross offender.
Post reply on HN