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Ending our Medium integration

write.as

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Re: Ending our Medium integration

#301

Post by Pete_D »

zrobotics wrote: post #274
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other trouble is, once you have some experience there just aren't very many good tutorials. I was looking through tutorials for node, and most of the ones I found started off with how to open the developer console, and what a for loop is. I'd very much prefer if tutorial authors would just link to one of the many basic CS fundamentals tutorials, and then skip much of the basics. If I'm learning Javascript, I just…

A bit off topic, but in case you were still looking, may I suggest https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/? That site is my first port of call whenever I need to get a quick overview of a new language.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#302

Post by dabockster »

dgellow wrote: post #291
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.

Is there an easy way to find out these non-VC companies when looking for a new job? That’s quite specific but could be an interesting criteria

Not really. Even being bootstrapped, they'll still act like a startup (long hours, missing paychecks, etc) if they don't have their stuff together.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#303

Post by slashink »

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…

Realize this does not solve your problem, but for the writing and drafting part. I personally use Blot ( https://blot.im ). It's been really great, especially for actually getting content written. You just tie it to a dropbox or git repo and write markdown and it does the rest. You can self host or use the hosted service.

Can't recommend it enough. The developer is also super responsive on email which is great when figuring it out. Only thing to nitpick about is documentation could be a bit more clear. You can see the result here https://blog.jonasbengtson.se/

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#304

Post by dabockster »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #233
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…

The real question is why does Google still put them on the first page? They've dispatched other nuisance sites but Quora still seems to get special treatment. Quora can't possibly have many inbound links to their content so why the high page rank?

IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#305

Post by liquid153 »

puranjay wrote: post #298
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 is extremely awful now. I'd say its worse than Yahoo Answers of old. At least YA could be unintentionally funny. Quora is nothing but spammers self marketing. There is no moderation whatsoever.

Agree. I see lots of spammers posting stuff from wiki. Seems like it has become a resume builder to get points.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#306

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #133
rhizome wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because each of those is probably a homework problem in Stats 101, and every college kid is going to be googling for the answer to the variation from their edition of the textbook.

College kids have to search for the answer to what the probability of getting a 5 or higher in a die roll is?

There are still people that think that buying multiple lottery tickets actually lowers your chances of winning.

I tried to argue against someone with this. I even tried scaling the problem down to being two balls drawn from a pool of four, and showing how if you buy multiple tickets, your chances of winning greatly increased. And they accepted what I was saying, but just insisted that the math "doesn't scale" and it doesn't work the same when it's 5 balls drawn from a pool of 69.

Even worse, she tried to say something like "You're really good at math. You should know this!"

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#307

Post by colemickens »

colemickens wrote: post #212
tzs wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyw…

I really don't want to live in a dystopia where basic text content from random companies, startups, blogs, etc can't be read without being subjected to a startup's conversion flow. I can't believe that I could get free cPanel/PHP/wordpress hosting when I was a teenager, and people will live with a fullscreen nag ad for their company blog 17 years later.

As always, silent downvotes for pointing out illogical group-think behavior. Never change. Heh, maybe it's startup hustler types that think intentionally-delayed, fullscreen ads are the pinnacle of innovation and hacker culture. Anything to make a buck.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#308

Post by goobynight »

artursapek wrote: post #157
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time one didn't need to login to read Quora stuff.

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

Naw. Not signing up for Quora means you won't get to essentially entertain yourself.

People would immediately sign up for SO if it were tied to their productivity.

That is, unless answer providers have no interest in using the site for anything else. That's true in some cases.

Re: Ending our Medium integration

#310

Post by dabockster »

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.

Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad copy of Quora with each answer recommending the automotive equivalent of essential oils.
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