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Ending our Medium integration

write.as

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#361

Post by b123400 »

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?

It's especially bad on mobile. On my iPhone SE, the top is a banner promoting their native app, then a top navigation bar and their logo. The bottom is an ad for the paid membership, a dialog for Do Not Track info. The tiny space that's visible behind all these craps is.... the irrelevant hero image. I can't even read the title!

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#362

Post by owens99 »

Medium is blocked in China. So anyone writing on Medium is preventing 1.5B people from being able to access your information. I am not sure about write.as, this is the first time I am hearing about it. But generally the best way for access is to host your own content.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#363

Post by NicoJuicy »

artursapek wrote: post #215
wongarsu wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying you're not upvoting useful answers on StackOverflow? Upvoting alone is enough to make me sign in to SO when I'm mysteriously logged out. SO saves me enough hours to justify that small curtesy.

I actually am signed in, but I know a lot of their traffic is anonymous users.

Which is better for caching, so it has advantages

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#364

Post by mirimir »

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.

If it's "clean [and] free of parasites".

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#366

Post by makomk »

potta_coffee wrote: post #257
asark wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yeah, and the EU is basically taking legal action against Google right now to force them to do an even worse job of removing that kind of spam, under the pretense that it hurts competition.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#367

Post by bigmit37 »

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…

Is it really that bad? I’ve been reading some of the deep learning stuff and there are some pretty detailed ,lengthy explanations. One time I did notice that An author copied/pasted most of their content from an obscure blog (90%) and I was going to call them out but they did list the blog in their reference.

However I am still a beginner in programming as well as deep learning so maybe I lack the the ability to distinguish between real and fake experts.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#368

Post by moeamaya »

kvz wrote: post #330
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…

I have the same experience at transloadit. 10 years of slow growth, but likely we can enjoy another 10 of those optimizing for fun/honest work instead of getting someone their 5x roi already.

As a fellow bootstrapper, I loved being a transloadit customer back in the day (old product we ran). Amazing video encoding product and awesome customer support over Skype. Thanks for slogging through the grind!

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#369

Post by da_chicken »

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.

Yup.

And stock investors often aren't much better.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#370

Post by kareemm »

thebaer wrote: post #333
kareemm wrote: post #138

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…

That's definitely good to know -- I appreciate the insight! We were indeed headed down this route in the early days with these integrations. In another life, I might do this. Particularly, having a simple format (like plain text / Markdown) that could then be interpreted in its own ways by all these platforms was the original dream. But the consumer space is our sweet spot. I can genuinely talk about why I care about…

Thanks for the response. TBH I was a little confused about whether you were trying to serve personal customers or business customers. From your response above it's still not clear =) It sounds like you don't care much about the business customers (great! focus is good!) But then you say:

> And we have plenty of avenues to business customers, from support [0], to more API access, to larger community hosting [1]

I think the fact that you mention both groups on your pricing page had my hopes up. In general if you're going to focus on consumers that's great, but you might not be doing yourself a favour from a marketing or resource-allocation perspective by talking about business customers.

Just my 2c!

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