Comment by i336_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by i336_ | Hacker News Reader

> "There are far, far, far too many advice articles on this site. It’s one thing to say ‘I lost my job and this is how it affected/changed me,’ that’s personal experience. But advice articles always contain the same implied subtext: you’re doing it wrong and I’m the genius who is going to show you how to do it the right way. Hence, how to fix your relationship, how to manage your spare time, ten things your boss does that you haven’t figured out, etc. etc."

I've seen this attitude in so many different situations IRL and online. It's so refreshing to read it so clearly and fearlessly stated like that.

It's unfortunate that Medium have attracted all the seagulls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3e0EkvIEM), because they've done so much awesome technical work on the platform, for example with editing (https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...).

How can platforms like Medium cultivate a culture that deprioritizes and devalues the types of spam content the article author is referring to?

EDIT: Accidentally pasted the quote twice, fixed (thanks yxlx)

> How can platforms like Medium cultivate a culture that deprioritizes and devalues the types of spam content the article author is referring to?

There's a lot of really well run subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians where the people who get the final say are usually the ones who have the best credentials.

For websites like medium, it's less about the credentials but more about how flashy your title can be. Just look at the top articles - it's usually titled something along the lines of "You're all missing the point of X" or "Elon Musk is Dangerous" or "How the Tech World Trashes Women". And these articles tend to be written by social justice warriors or "motivational speakers" who have never actually done anything but coach.

I remember Anil Rash being behind Medium, if I remember correctly that should give you an indication on why there is so much trash on it. You're not wrong, just missing why it is the way it is. It makes more sense now, doesn't it?

Please be clearer. Rather than these clever-clever allusions, tell us all: who's Anil Rash, what should we know about them?

I think they mean Anil Dash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Dash

Maybe so, though I don't see any link between Dash and Medium on the Wikipedia pages for either. Nor are the allusions made by seivan any clearer.

Reddit has built an incredible community of contributors and moderators that's (amazingly) largely self-sustaining.

You're right - in the large majority of situations, the person voted to the top often has the most qualifications. That's an example of a social model (upvoting/downvoting affecting visibility) that's a design win.

What I'm wonder about is how to explore building a publishing/content platform with a data/interaction model that promotes the highest quality and authoritative content in a similar sort of way. Medium's automatic recommendation system is too easy to play the SEO game with.

The title examples you give are spot on; I usually avoid everything on Medium that wasn't painstakingly discovered by a human and saved for later reference here or on some other site like Reddit.

(Your reference of people who do nothing but coach reminds me of how I see politicians: they're like the people in young children's books who have a fixed position ("policeman", "man walking down street with dog", "grocer", "bus driver", etc) and don't have a life outside that position.)

Really, certainly for technical articles which can gather interested readers by posting on HN or reddit, why use medium at all and not some other alternative? Because it looks nice?!

r/AskHistory has very well defined rules, and enforces those rules quite well. This ensures the quality is of the highest order, even if it limits growth.

What rules are there on Medium? It's the wild west, really- then again I don't really know, I don't browse Medium. Sometimes really smart people will use Medium as an essay writing tool, and when I see it through my social network I read it.

Curation through social network filters may not be the best, but all the articles I've read from Medium have been of a quality and topic I find interesting.

Micro-payments for publishing. Medium (and other quality essay sites) should charge per essay. Nothing too big, have a scaled system that is affordable to all. Even a small payment of 1GBP/USD/EUR per post is enough to keep the spammers away. It might not deter the paid for corporate shilling, but it would be a good start.

I've not thought this through in depth - feel free to pick holes in it, but I firmly believe that the mess we're suffering on the self-published areas of the internet are because it's free-to-post. So to maintain a level of quality there needs to be some sort of barrier to entry.

I can see that it would lead to a deluge of 'Like this post? Please consider donating so I can continue spewing forth banal crap I lifted from Internet articles about Elon Musk' quite quickly.

Do you mean pay per article or pay per view? Per view would virtually eliminate the independent submitter and select for the spam and corporate shills. Who has the cash or wants to risk a penny per view (or whatever micropayment it is) except for corporate advertising? I don't think per article would fix the problem either. It is a sea of crap because of the quality more than quantity. If you are getting views then a penny or whatever micropayment per article is nothing. I doubt this guy would stick around if he had to pay per view and I doubt per post payment would limit the crap.

The most effective way would be some sort of peer reviewed limitation, but that is difficult to implement and would likely reduce medium's viewership (management says oh the horror of sensationalist articles in one direction and yes! Page views! in the other).

There will be a transition to another blogging platform that sets up the right barrier to entry / moderation. Personally I don't think it is monetary.

The marketing "assholes" would be the ones most capable of paying to publish. (Publish press releases actually costs money!)

The supposed problem on Medium isn't automated spam, it's marketing.

Why would anyone want to pay to put an article on medium? They had better offer quite an impressive array of discovery features if I'm paying them to use a service that gives me less control over my own content than I would otherwise have.

The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful.

There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.

Actually it should be the other way around. This is a bit like saying filmmakers who put their movies on netflix should pay a little bit of money.

This is much ado about nothing. Why does it matter what content resides on this site? No one is going to judge the author or anyone else for publishing on Medium. If someone in your circle is judging you for publishing on Medium, you'd be better served to cut them out of your circle.

Really, so you wouldn't judge an author based on what magazines his work appears in?

This would be more akin to judging an author based on what media company prints the magazine (Hearst, or Time, for example).

It needs editors (or moderators if you prefer) deleting the spam content.

HN seems to do quite well with that model.

You pasted the quote twice.

Agh. I have a sensitive Insert key - I can just tap it without depressing it, and it fires. This is the first time it's failed me this badly :D

Fixed, thanks!

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