Ask HN: What do you think when you see a post is from Medium? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think when you see a post is from Medium?

2 pointsgnicholas5 comments

Does seeing that a HN post is from Medium make you more or less likely to click it? Do you expect a certain type of post (rant, musing, personal story)?

My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front page of HN, then it's probably at least somewhat relevant to my work/life, and is probably decently-written. When I find Medium stuff through other channels (Pocket, FB, etc.), I am much less likely to click.

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I don't really have a preconceived notion as to anything. Each individual author is the one who maintains their content. So each article really needs to be taken mostly on its' own merit.

My thought? Most likely an ill-informed rant by a millennial.

Totally agree. What if the title doesn't sound rant-y or millenial-y? Like "An Analysis of Yelp's Sorting Algorithm", or something else that is data-driven and not emotional-sounding? I'm interested to know how the common underlying reaction that you describe could be different depending on what the article sounds like.

That is, does seeing "medium.com" after reading a post only serve to amplify a pre-existing suspicion (based on title) that the article sounds rant-y, or does it actually decrease your likelihood of clicking regardless of what the title was and how you felt about it?

> My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front page of HN, then it's probably at least somewhat relevant to my work/life

You're hitting a selection bias. If anything gets to the front page of HN, it is likely relevant, even moreso with Medium posts that are penalized and require extra effort for placement.

If you browse /new, the Medium posts are 90% useless thought-pieces.

I actually find that Medium pieces on the front page are more likely to be relevant to my work/life than other front-page posts. This is perhaps because I am less technical than many here, so the intricacies of hardware articles or specific coding languages do not resonate with me. The Medium-hosted pieces tend to be "lighter", and perhaps for this reason they have a (somewhat) higher hit rate for me.

I completely agree that most Medium posts on /newest are junk. Part of the reason I posted the Ask was because I'm curious what happens when I post something I've written (on Medium). How are people's first reactions affected by that? Is it like when people see a Business Insider article and then automatically ignore the post?

Also, I'd be interested to know more about Medium posts being penalized. Details?

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