Hacker News Reader

Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

I hope this doesn't come off as negative, I'm honestly curious: Why are there so many Medium stories on HN? There seems to be at least one story a day on the front page if not more. They usually have very few comments and the content often seems a little bit of a mismatch from what normally gets on the front page.

I'm happy to ignore the stories and skip over them but to me that's not the point. Is someone gaming the system? Is Medium a HN subsidiary of some sort? Has anyone done an analysis of how these types of stories get onto HN in the first place? Are Medium stories really that interesting that there's at least one Medium story worth posting on the front page of HN a day?

View on HN

medium.com stories are penalized by default on HN, as are most sites that produce solid articles amid a lot of fluff. (If it were only fluff, we'd ban the site.) The penalty can get lifted by moderators or by software.

You may be underestimating the sheer quantity of articles people post from there (dozens a day), as well as the diversity of topics in them. I took a quick look and the 6 most successful medium.com posts from yesterday were all technical. (You can check this for yourself by clicking on the domain name next to the story title, which shows you all the posts from that domain.)

Have you considered expanding the penalization software for content aggregators (such as Medium), so that it would treat a combination of the user and the domain as the key, rather than the domain name alone?

Yes. We haven't had a chance to think through the implications yet, but it would be good for the more substantive publications that put out articles on medium.com.

I don't think there has to be a conspiracy, Medium hosts a lot of high quality long form content which is a natural fit for the demographic here is all.

I like a lot of the medium stuff that's posted and it's one of the nicest in browser reading experiences around.

> Why are there so many Medium stories on HN?

I once tried writing a story on Medium, and their editor is pretty amazing. In addition, stories on Medium do look nice and better than a significant share of Wordpress and friends themes. I'd assume that some people also publish on Medium hoping for some extra traffic driven by Medium.

So Medium could be just summed up as 'it just works'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com