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Ending our Medium integration

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#181

Post by tomovo »

borplk wrote: post #93
richardhod wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.

Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account. "Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..." "In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 ce…

bullshit.ly - Libya - Domain Available

OK just give me a second..

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#182

Post by treis »

realityking wrote: post #174

Medium has a great low barrier to entry but if you're a developer looking to post your own content or are setting up a site for someone I seriously recommend looking into a static site set up. With services like GitHub and Netlify (for hosting) and Contentful (as a content editing GUI) the day-to-day experience is seamless, you don't have to worry about security issues like you have with a traditional CMS, and you ca…

Takes some cajones to post a stealth promotional post in a thread of people complaining about just that.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#183

Post by tonystubblebine »

criddell wrote: post #175
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'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be around for a long time. One question though - what do you mean by distribution?

Re: sticking around.

They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be.

Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#184

Post by reading-at-work »

Reedx wrote: post #177
artursapek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine if Stackoverflow did this? The tech world would grind to a halt.

I don't know, in the case of StackOverflow I think it's worth the registration vs going back to pounding your head against the desk.

Don't give them any ideas!

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#185

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

Aunche wrote: post #114
borplk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account. "Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..." "In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 ce…

> Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content. I remember I used to have to log in to read content back in 2013ish, but I don't have to do so right now.

Only if you come from Google.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#186

Post by Reedx »

new_here wrote: post #56

Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.

> Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though...

That's the pure growth first strategy. At first it's all roses. Completely free, even ad-free. So there's none of the friction that comes with monetization. But eventually it comes into the picture.

Either a service is monetized from the start or it comes later.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#187

Post by neerkumar »

richardhod wrote: post #77
new_here wrote: post #56

Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns. Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.

Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.

They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.

I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.

But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.

Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.

Low level/high volume content took over Quora.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#188

Post by mamurphy »

m-p-3 wrote: post #34
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?

The popup asking you to sign in everytime I'm logged out is do incredibly annoying that I just send the page to Pocket or Outline if I think I might read it later.

I've never had a Medium account and don't want one. I stopped reading Medium articles because of the annoying popup begging me to "make this relationship more serious" or whatever and get an account.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#189

Post by tzs »

bogomipz wrote: post #179
stochastic_monk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the extra features interfering with my reading experience didn’t help, either. I just don’t read articles on Medium.

Indeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.

I don't understand the level of complaints on HN about that sign up overlay. Are they testing multiple nag screens and I got lucky and always get the minimally intrusive one, and the rest of you getting the terrible ones?

Yes, it is slightly annoying, but it is extremely easy to dismiss. Unlike the nag screens at many sites you don't have to find and click an 'x' in some weird location. It goes away if you click anywhere on the page outside the nag screen.

It also goes away if you hit ESC on the keyboard. (I don't know if other keys also dismiss it too. I've only tried ESC).

Furthermore, also unlike many other sites, it comes up right away rather than waiting for you to get into the article and then interrupting you. So it is click on a Medium link, get shown the nag screen immediately if it is going to be shown at all, and then hit ESC or click somewhere and it goes away.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#190

Post by TheGRS »

thebaer wrote: post #142

Author here -- just got a response from Medium, though it's still confusing: > We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature. This doesn't really explain why our 2-year-old integration suddenly stopped working (we didn't need to generate a new application). So I'm asking for more clarification.

> We recently experienced an interruption with API

It sounds like kind of an amateur deployment/test problem. The lack of explanation would have me worried too. Their platform is pretty large and widely used, so you'd think their API would have tests for such a thing.

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