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Why Medium Sucks

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Re: Why Medium Sucks

#51

Post by lmm »

duxup wrote: post #2

I know SEO and visibility is high on Medium. I'm still a bit amazed that so many people, many of them who aren't short on visibility, chose to host their content on that site. Most of it i would have rather read on someone's personal site as IMO that adds a lot of character and context.

Every personal site I've ever seen looks worse than Medium. I don't want the "character" of a slightly different UI every time, I want the interface to get out of my way so that I can get on with reading the actual content. Medium does that (yes, subject to logging in, but you can do that once and forget about it).

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#52

Post by jfengel »

ctvo wrote: post #15
overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

I may be one of the folks not part of the Medium community. I only visit Medium via direct links (on HN, shared on Twitter or shared directly to me by friends). I can't remember the times I've been on Medium's home page or opened up their app to browse. If those direct links sent me to somewhere else entirely tomorrow I wouldn't care.

But the ones who sent you those links would care. They want you to join the community, because of the network effects: having you there makes it more valuable to them. Each person there finds is more valuable because of the other people there, rather than just dropping by.

It's the same reason people have one Facebook page rather than thousands of small social networks. Even people who also participate in the smaller networks with a specific focus also have a Facebook page for their generic, lowest-common-denominator activity.

You may want to do nothing more with the Medium page than read it and leave, but they're going to keep pushing you do more than that. Despite the network effect there is still room for a few very broad social networks because they suit different communication styles. That's why Instagram exists. (It's also why Twitter exists; I can't figure out the merit there but its denizens seem to like it.)

Medium is one other such niche, for longer-form content. Or at least, they'd like it to be. It's not yet so big that the network effects are obvious, and that's why I don't have an account either. I was also very late to FB, and I still don't like it. But I'm there because the network effect of having all of my other friends there made it a thing I needed.

You can stay out of it forever, but you'll continue to get pressure to join until either it dies or you do.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#53

Post by jklepatch »

wuliwong wrote: post #32
overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

I was recently thinking about why I've made any posts on Medium. I'm also going to launch a product soon and have been kicking around whether to create our own blog, use Medium, or use some other option. I think there are two main reasons I'm interested in Medium: 1. It's easy. Any self-hosted solution will more be up-front work. 2. Because other companies use it as their blog platform, it should still allow us to se…

I am also interested in medium for similar reasons but i am hesitant for 2 reasons:

- No access to google analytics tools (search console and analytics) - emails capture is more difficult. You can still embed widget but user has to opt in.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#55

Post by rylandgold »

octosphere wrote: post #12

This is why I am a big fan of POSSE[0] which is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE Also worth reading: https://medium.com/@joe_wegner/why-i-dont-write-for-medium-c…

This is a very cool concept.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#56

Post by ryanmarsh »

overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Is there a city that doesn't suck? Do the most amazing cities in the world still suck? Maybe it's not possible to have something that attracts and sustains so many people connected to each other without sucking. I'm not sure if I whole necessarily agree with this or not. It's just a thought.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#57

Post by matart »

mft_ wrote: post #50

Can anyone explain how Medium got to be so big, despite its drawbacks? I mean, it wasn't launched that long ago, and it's not like blogging platforms were rare then. Was it the curation/discovery aspect? Or something else?

From what I remember it wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was a clean layout and easy to read. That has now been polluted with sign up modals and toolbars.

I assume from a content producing side it was easier to not deal with hosting, scaling, etc.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#59

Post by WhitneyLand »

overshard wrote: post #10

I feel like we are beating a dead horse here. Everyone I talk to knows Medium sucks. I personally hate the modal that comes up every time if I'm not logged in and how much of my screen is take up by fixed bars. Medium has a community though. Facebook sucks, but it has a community. Twitter sucks, but it has a community. You are going to get more people to see your post if you put it on Medium. You are going to get mor…

Finding a "non-suck' Medium is similar to some classic startup problems.

Medium's tech complexity and operating costs are low (relative to web apps with similar scale).

Totally agree the real problem is not technical, its reestablishing a community of significant size and quality, never an easy thing.

For things like this, I wonder if the HN community has the characteristics to be a rallying point to build the momentum/awareness needed for initiatives with enough interest.

I have no doubt HN folks could inspire (indeed, have inspired) enough to catalyze formidable technical initiatives.

But that's a different problem, tech can be willed into existence if a handful of the right people get interested. Harder to predict when it's possible for sheer force of will to give rise to a quality community.

Re: Why Medium Sucks

#60

Post by tonystubblebine »

Medium publisher here (I run three pubs behind the paywall). I'd love for people to just start considering Medium a paid service like Netflix or the NYTimes. Medium and the NYT offer monthly samples and Netflix doesn't. That's why you end up hitting the modal so often for NYT/Medium.

I think there's a bigger point though which is just "Does Medium have articles yet that are worth $5/month?"

It would be totally reasonable to answer no. But every month they spend more money on authors. And, you don't see this, they are also ramping up spending on editors.

On programming topics, a lot of articles are finally getting a stricter editorial curation and even going through copy edit. Even though I'm involved in editing some of these programming articles, I don't think it'll be enough editorial in the end. I think programming articles should also go through a tech review where the code actually gets tested.

I'm hopeful, based on the growth of the programming publication that we'll be able to afford tech reviewers at least by the end of the year. So maybe if it's not worth $5 now, it'll be worth $5 later.

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