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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text...

Or maybe it's just me?

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Woah, it was literally your post that just made me realize what medium.com actually is.

I've only ever accessed it via hackernews links and they were all to very substantial and well written articles.

If only more folks realized that TED is basically exactly the same thing but with videos of presentations.

I changed my opinion when I checked out their homepage, usually if you go from HN or reddit it's a higher quality post but when you go from the homepage you can get a glimpse of the average post. It just lost that kind of credibility feeling for me.

Funny, after reading the first half dozen or so Medium articles I felt exactly the opposite. It was junk and now I expect junk from Medium and was a bit surprised to read a good article a couple of weeks ago. Since then it's been junk again and unless I'm really really bored or the subject matter is fascinating seeing "Medium" in a HN post means I skip the article altogether.

Ditto. Medium to me always seems like people trying to add credibility to their livejournal posts.

I think they've just managed a good design - mostly by resisting the temptation to show off as so many designers do. It's very minimal - if anything it looks similar to the hand-written no-styles websites that academics often write (that look like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ )

Actually more like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

:-)

Sure, but the Google Analytics loader code on either of those is larger than all of the HTML boilerplate and CSS combined. At least the first one has snarky HTML comments!

But most people either have that code cached or blocked.

First thing on loading that link was "yuck, the contrast is fucked", and sure enough, item #2 is "less contrast is good".

About the only good point on the list in that link is line width. But all the items about formatting text combine to make it so that there is so much less information on the screen. I'd much prefer to read the other website.

No, medium isn't quite so horribly narrow as that one, and most academic sites didn't do the narrow thing at all.

Now can we have bettermotherfuckinghackernews.com too? Which behaves sanely on Android?

Simplicity! I'm in love. Thanks.

Actually, your simple design is not the only one to make my day. I have finally found a guy who puts all the HTML5 etc. on the one page. He's a physics lecturer. He has dead easy html files that illustrate Newton's Cannon, using canvas and javascript. Finally, I am "getting" it. See http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/html5/. (And the bonus was to see that, with uniform circular motion, the acceleration is towards the centre of rotation. I mean I really need things explained simply without any extras getting in the way.) Of course, I had to play with it to understand it. But the beauty was that, with the source code all there on the one page, I could easily make changes and see the effect immediately. Thanks Dan Schroeder.

PS I need to remind myself that posting pdf files is another straightforward way to get information online.

Oh this isn't my design, though I do like it!

The guy who made it is: https://twitter.com/drew_mc

That site made my night! Sometimes new is not better. I wonder if I'll ever see bloated websites slimmed down?

Not just you. Before I found out what Medium was, I thought it was some new journalism franchise with a lot of amateur contributors.

(I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)

I would have to admit this was the case for me as well I didn't really pay much attention to it always thought it was the "print" version of VICE or something similar (and yes I know VICE is technically one or well at least started as a magazine). I actually thought that Medium was part of VICE media for some time mostly because anytime I got content linked from it was from Motherboard or something else affiliated with them.

Same. They managed to fake me out for quite a while.

Then again, I only interacted with the site by following links on sites like this, reading the linked item, then closing the tab. My entire impression came from the quality of those posts (took time to see bad ones make it to the front page of HN, for example) and the post page design. If I'd ever clicked around the site or visited the homepage I might have figured it out faster.

These days I expect a level of quality slightly better than Tumblr when I see the medium.com domain name in a link, and am occasionally pleasantly surprised. The image/marketing only went so far.

I'm in the opposite camp - having medium.com in the url substantially decreases the article's chances of ever being read by me.

Dang, guess you gotta pay attention to the actual ideas written on it instead of judging them by their presentation. Bummer.

Like others who have posted in this thread, medium.com in the URL is a signal to me that the author is more likely to not be credible.

Self-hosted blogging still has a place in this ecosystem!

I think it might be you. I treat it like I would Wordpress.com

This calls for an experiment

You do the experiment, and blog about it on Medium. I will probably believe anything you put up there.

My first run-in with Medium was with actual journalists (see: War is Boring whom have left Medium to their own site now). So while I understood there were many one-off blogs like mine that shouldn't be considered professional, many were and that lent any blog on the site some level of credibility.

Of course - all of that credibility was lost when a few bloggers were censored and kicked from the platform for wrongthink. I don't use Medium anymore.

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