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Ending our Medium integration

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#251

Post by MarsAscendant »

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.

My solution was to use an extension – Make Medium Readable Again – that, as of its features, removes the intro fullscreen ad. It's available for Chrome and Firefox, as far as I'm aware.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#252

Post by cooperadymas »

Going back through Hacker News history to some of the earliest posts on Medium, and the earliest articles about it, it is evident that the community was somewhere between skeptical to downright antagonistic from the beginning. It makes sense, developers / IT people are most qualified to build and host their own websites, and more likely than the average person to understand the implications of allowing someone else to host their content.

So it seems that the HN crowd and the general programmer community are not the audience for Medium.

Despite this, it seems that a large percentage of development tutorials and articles I come across today are hosted there.

Personally, I will be happy to see better alternatives start popping up.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#253

Post by potta_coffee »

opportune wrote: post #249
potta_coffee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.

Facebook+Reddit+stack exchange I think is a more comprehensive group to blame. I think a lot of people who use facebook for hobby groups maybe never would have discovered forums but Reddit definitely could have. And stack exchange kind of absorbed basically all technical forums

That's true, I forgot about Reddit. I check some sub-reddits that I'm interested but in general the format and quality of discussion is much lower than that of the now-dead forums that I used to check for similar content. The internet is like a barren wasteland to me now.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#254

Post by cygaril »

StrictDabbler wrote: post #231
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…

Oh, that's what's going on. If I search, for example, "proton transfer balalaika" I get search results where the first few results are "Missing: balalaika | Must include: balalaika" but a result after these has all three search terms. I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do. That's frustrating. Low-volum…

The "must include" is a hyperlink. Click it and you'll get results that do include that word.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#255

Post by crooked-v »

I really wish I could find a service like this, with dead simple Markdown-based publishing and a minimalist interface, but that also supported anonymous paragraph-level commenting. It's something that would be perfect for the tabletop gaming community, which right now has a heavy bias towards Google Docs for public drafts almost entirely for the easy commenting on specific sections of text.

Medium used to seem like it could fill that role, but then they moved towards being as annoying as possible to logged-out users.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#256

Post by wlesieutre »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #244
wlesieutre wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to say that right now, but Microsoft hasn't owned it long enough to have any negative impact on the service. For all we know 5 years from now they'll pull a Sourceforge and start bundling malware into your downloads.

I know there's an awful lot of legacy hatred for Microsoft around HN, and I'm not claiming they'll never be a bad actor in any regard ever again -- but I'd expect if that happens for it to be a lot more subtle than "hey, let's make desperate deals with sleazy third-party companies to stuff shady crap in your downloads until we're inevitably caught at it."

Sure, it was just a convenient comparison to something that's already happened with what was effectively the previous github.

Github made it through the "We need to deliver 1000x gains for our investors" phase of their history, but all that means is they've moved into "We paid $7,500,000,000 for this, are we getting as much value as possible?"

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#257

Post by potta_coffee »

asark wrote: post #205
potta_coffee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.

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.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#258

Post by amenod »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #246
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…

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.)

Not GP, but in a similar position. No, no concern whatsoever. The owners are not greedy which makes all the difference in the world. Not that the profit is low - it is probably much higher this way, when the whole company pulls toward the goals. I have never worked in an environment with so low amount of office politics.

With the way things look right now for high-tech (or any software development) companies the margins are quite high. But of course, if you are a VC who invests in hundreds of businesses, and expect only a few of them to fly, then those few must fly pretty high to make it worth your while. Which means that being just very profitable is not enough - you need to be extremely profitable. And that comes with compromises (mostly for the workers at such startups).

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#259

Post by potta_coffee »

gamblor956 wrote: post #219
potta_coffee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the days when people had their own websites, blogs, whatever, and then there were forums. Facebook has killed forums and I hate them for it.

Spam killed forums. Facebook took since it wasn't plagued with spam.

Facebook content is now such low-quality that it might as well be spam (my opinion). Also, pointless, toxic conversations. It seems to bring out the worst in people. I know some people like it for keeping in touch. I refuse to use it anymore, not worth it for me.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#260

Post by notatoad »

cooperadymas wrote: post #252

Going back through Hacker News history to some of the earliest posts on Medium, and the earliest articles about it, it is evident that the community was somewhere between skeptical to downright antagonistic from the beginning. It makes sense, developers / IT people are most qualified to build and host their own websites, and more likely than the average person to understand the implications of allowing someone else t…

To be fair, "skeptical to downright antagonistic" could describe HN's reaction to almost anything.
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