151–160 of 567 posts
Yup. I think a better question that everyone should be asking, is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow people to share information."
Wikipedia is not for profit, the incentives are incomparable.
Any "service" that offers money for content will fail eventually. Take most news portals: they fill their sites with "news" to favor search engines, to deploy ads or affiliate links. Take search engines itself: They lead to SEO which leads to "silly" and packed "WordPress" like websites whose only goal is to drop affiliate links. And so on....
Youtube? Tiktok? Twitch?
I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the…
This is just a cool-sounding wrapper on the much older concept of rent-seeking, which has a solid theoretical literature behind it. Doctorow seems to specialize in this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense
> never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs Isn’t the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People don’t want to pay and people don’t want ads. Where would you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?
Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…
We've gone through many cycles of publishing platforms/trends. What catches your eyes in this space today (in general)?
I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work. Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused, and afterwards, it meant…
Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.
This whole thing reminds me of this comment when Tumblr "died": "I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong. There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this: 1. Social media platform…
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo have quite a few charlatans selling a tech version of snake oil, and they don't care because they get 10% (or whatever their fees are).
I am not sure how much vetting you want the platform to do? If someone says they can synthesize gasoline from air for $.02/liter, should Kickstarter shut it down? Send a guy to investigate? Where does the arbitrary this-is-probably-wrong line land?