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Do People Like Medium?

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Re: Do People Like Medium?

#21

Post by tonystubblebine »

codingdave wrote: post #20
tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this on us (I'm Medium's CEO)? We have control over our own recommendations, and they have gotten a lot better. But people seem to take the worst articles, post them over here, and the people here upvote them. That seems like a problem with HN.

Whether or not it is fair for it to be on you, it still is. Because it is your problem whether or not Medium succeeds, not ours. Even if you are 100% correct, and HN's attitude is completely incorrect and unfair... that don't hurt us none. It does hurt you. (If you care about us as a potential market segment.) So it is on you because you are the one who needs the brand to be viewed positively. Specifically, it is on…

Fwiw, I didn't say fair. I think we all have the same goal which is that we want the front page of Hacker News to have great links. I've been a community member here since 2007 (geez, that's a long time) and have checked it basically every single day other than the very rare days where I haven't had internet access.

The trope we use for bad articles that used to do well on Medium are "X is dead." They are always written by people who don't have nearly the life experience to call it. But they invite reactions. They do less well now on Medium because we redid our recommendations to have human curators in the loop. I would want the same thing to happen here and I honestly don't understand why a community that is generally so good at boosting high quality articles falls for them.

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#22

Post by tonystubblebine »

lbhdc wrote: post #18
tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this on us (I'm Medium's CEO)? We have control over our own recommendations, and they have gotten a lot better. But people seem to take the worst articles, post them over here, and the people here upvote them. That seems like a problem with HN.

Hey Tony, from my perspective, I think there are a couple things at play with peoples sentiment about Medium. I think part of it is how aggressive the monetization is. That isn't to say that your competitors, and a huge swathe of publishers aren't doing the same thing. It seems the value prop is getting rid of all the noise. That can be a difficult sell. Publishing is in a weird place. For writing about current event…

We definitely attract a lot of bad UGC. Not even just bad, a lot of it now is fraudulent AI generated trash. You got me interested in what the volume is of Medium links on HN. I think it's about 10 a day according to Algolia's HN search.

That doesn't seem so bad. So I'm wondering if there is some toxic overlap of what is bad on Medium also does well here, and what is good on Medium fails here.

For example, I saw that the 3.3 release of Dart got posted on Medium and then here yesterday. I think that's unambiguously good given that it's written by the creators of Dart. But, it's also kind of boring and specific to a small subset of developers.

Anyway, thanks for responding.

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#23

Post by tonystubblebine »

rishikeshs wrote: post #14
tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this on us (I'm Medium's CEO)? We have control over our own recommendations, and they have gotten a lot better. But people seem to take the worst articles, post them over here, and the people here upvote them. That seems like a problem with HN.

Hi Tony, I think the problem with medium is that there are a lot of low-quality no use for anything articles on the platform. May be you can do some sort of moderation to ensure good articles are present, not sure if it’s against your policies. Also, another reason which annoys me is the signin to read the article. Why do I have to sign in to read an article everytime? I think this trend overtime created a reflux suc…

Next time you see that sign-in, can you try dismissing it.

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#25

Post by cpach »

Repose0941 wrote: post #13
cpach wrote: post #7

Nah. I prefer regular blogs.

Do you have any recommendations? I like things on my RSS reader :3 I think it's nice to always read something I'm getting more into blogs so I'm a noob on it

Well, there are two “problems” with these kinds of blogs: a) They’re not that super easy to discover these days, and b) Writing high quality text takes time, and the authors tend to be quite busy people, so they are not updated frequently.

I guess that’s part of the appeal of Medium. They have a method for discoverability, and lots and lots of authors means lots of text to read. I’m not 100% sure exactly what my gripes with Medium are, but I guess that it feels a bit like a text factory. Personally, I prefer a more decentralized approach than what Medium offers.

However, I don’t use RSS at all. For me, finding blog posts via HN and Lobsters is sufficient – YMMV.

With that said, one of the best technical “blogs” I know of is actually a newsletter: Cryptography Dispatches.

It has a feed, I can warmly recommend it! https://words.filippo.io/rss/

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#26

Post by muzani »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #23
rishikeshs wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Tony, I think the problem with medium is that there are a lot of low-quality no use for anything articles on the platform. May be you can do some sort of moderation to ensure good articles are present, not sure if it’s against your policies. Also, another reason which annoys me is the signin to read the article. Why do I have to sign in to read an article everytime? I think this trend overtime created a reflux suc…

Next time you see that sign-in, can you try dismissing it.

I always just dismiss the article instead. Life's too short for dark patterns.

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#27

Post by Repose0941 »

cpach wrote: post #25
Repose0941 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any recommendations? I like things on my RSS reader :3 I think it's nice to always read something I'm getting more into blogs so I'm a noob on it

Well, there are two “problems” with these kinds of blogs: a) They’re not that super easy to discover these days, and b) Writing high quality text takes time, and the authors tend to be quite busy people, so they are not updated frequently. I guess that’s part of the appeal of Medium. They have a method for discoverability, and lots and lots of authors means lots of text to read. I’m not 100% sure exactly what my grip…

Ooh, that's really good, I'm not able to read from most of the blogs(the UI is not beauty), I'm silly so i prefer using RSS readers with cute and shine UI, you know lol :3 i understand the idea from medium but, it's not good now(many AI made content), i know AI can help a lot but they're using to make the entire article sometimes so i prefer not use for now... thanks for the recommendation, I'll read some soon s2

Re: Do People Like Medium?

#28

Post by nothercastle »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #11
ksherlock wrote: post #5

I like medium. When I see a link to medium on hacker news or ddg, etc, I know right away that it's low quality garbage and I should skip over it. They're like a big smelly dump, that helps to keep the rest of the internet clean.

Why is this on us (I'm Medium's CEO)? We have control over our own recommendations, and they have gotten a lot better. But people seem to take the worst articles, post them over here, and the people here upvote them. That seems like a problem with HN.

It may be impossible to suppress the garbage but perhaps if you can push the good stuff to the top people would see value in medium articles
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