Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
I'm all for opinions on current affairs (I have loads!) but it's not what I came here to read, nor is it what your title suggested.
It's been a great program for us. We write in the area of personal development and it's allowed us to pour a lot of money into getting authors who've actually tested their advice and then working with them to write very thorough tutorials that other people could follow.
In my biased opinion, what we used to compete with was trash simply because it didn't work. Content marketers were writing great headlines for productivity advice they'd never tested, the advice had huge gaps or mistakes, and then it would stop short of telling you what to do so that it could make some call-to-action sales pitch.
We've been getting much less competition for page views from these trash articles based on recent Medium changes. The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm.
As an example, I have an article I wrote that's just creeping up on 1M page views. That just wasn't possible before.
- they handle distribution and are better at it than us.
- they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services.
- it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business.
We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.
One question though - what do you mean by distribution?
They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be.
Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.
They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.
I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers.
They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers.
I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts.
I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.
This is amazing - this is the thing that people demand of Youtube, in order that the algorithm stops promoting anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers.
And therein you have found the crux.
Take away the massive human resource cost of moderating this they still run the risk of implying approval/endorsement of things they do not manually kill that the algo throws up.
Personally I think you could just consider that training for the AI.
They will have to so something eventually, I can’t see the EU whose member nations do have hate speech laws letting this rabbit hole continue for much longer.
I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I'll start clicking on Medium links again (on purpose). "Trash articles" is a good description of the most recent content I read on there before giving up on Medium.
As someone learning programming this hurts so much. I've read so many medium articles that are sort of correct .... but also not and imply things that are straight wrong.
They clearly aren't that many steps beyond my ability and their writing implies they are ... but their work way not.
Really frustrating when you see an obvious template or pattern that is just a bit "off" used in medium post after after post and the code works, but is way not handy to use as you can't really build much off of it / alter it with ease.
I'm fortunate to have enough experience to tell the wheat from the chaff usually, but holy hell there's a lot of sifting to do. I'm currently studying Python for the first time and the amount of garbage writing on the language I find is frustrating.
However I am still a beginner in programming as well as deep learning so maybe I lack the the ability to distinguish between real and fake experts.
Often feel like resume padding is the underlying motivator too.
I imagine that there's a whole slew of different causes and neuroses mixed in with feeling that pressure, including the ever-present and insidious imposter syndrome. It's very difficult to feel "good enough" when you're comparing yourself to those hugely popular open source developers. It's probably tied up in the same bundle as people with an Instagram account trying to compare themselves to the models with tens of millions of followers.
1. Well-defined subject.
2. Some standard for quality.
3. Editors with a stake in the website who filter out things that do not fit 1 and 2 and deliberately cultivate the reader base and frequent writers. (I.e. not Wikipedia-style "editors".)
It doesn't have to involve money. It doesn't have to be closed for the public to submit content. It doesn't have to mimic old media in any fashion.
Websites like that used to exist in late 90s early 00s. Web 2.0 movement waged a war against all 3 bullet points above for the benefits of technocrats at the expense of everyone else. Now we're enjoying the consequences.
Not to mention that they don't advertise RSS feeds so you have to jump through hoops to use it for a feed reader.
That popup is a UX dark pattern, and for me puts them in the same category as LinkedIn with its various means of lulling you into actions you wouldn't consciously take.
Medium tried to act as if it were something a little bit better than the rest of the web and it quickly became something just a little bit worse.
Why?
If you are running a tiny service you can get together a community of people who are two or three standard deviations better than the mean.
If that service grows, it is going to tap a wider pool of lesser talent and the quality of the discussion will decay.
Hacker News has fought this, but Hacker News is not funded the same way as the firms that Y Co invests in.
I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to.
I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.
If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice.
Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
Didn't they block it? I read a post here about it some time back. I doubt medium would make you leave it easy.
I disagree. HN's UI is perfect.
100% agree that HN's UI is great, but I'm not sure anyone would look at it and say, "oh that's gorgeous." Or at least I wouldn't
After all, the purpose of UI is not to be beautiful, but too many people still think it is
With just a little bit of work HN's UI could be so much better.
For being a company that beats the inclusive and equality drum they seem to go out of their way to make it impossible for people who don't have incredible dexterity or eyesight to use this site.
I love the simple layout but make it accessible to everyone.
As far as aesthetics I actually like the current site. It serves its purpose well IMO. The real accessibility issues should be addressed per WCAG.
A much nicer mobile interface for consuming HN, but you'll have to go direct to the site to interact with it.
Sure it looks new and mobiley but all I really want (not OP btw) is the same site but with bigger buttons on mobile.
I have it set up on iOS to auto zoom and to raise the font size a couple clicks but the action buttons are still hard to click on and at least once a day I flag or downvote something I have to then undo.
Unless you have perfect eyesight and dexterity it’s a chore.
I might make what i seek actually. At least then I’ve scratched my own itch.
Maybe an extension?
Can that even be done with the current apis?
Markdown that drives people to use block quotes when it isn't needed and make reading quotes a nightmare on mobile.
Clicking the back button after replying doesn't show your post.
Low contrast difference between background and thread title.
The list goes on.
Most complaints seem to be focused on mobile. Eh, on mobile I only consume content, so I don't really care if it's hard to post a comment or vote on mobile. Desktop computing is my jam.
And any complaints about its appearance on desktop are easy to tune to user preferences using a userscript. I have a simple userscript that changes the color scheme to a dark theme I quickly concocted. (Part of why I don't even bother to contribute on mobile is because mobile platforms are so constrained that a quick and dirty userscript isn't particularly easy to use.)
I am totally not satisfied hackernews website design and UI.
There is nothing wrong with self-hosted blogs. If you still want to "blog" then go for it on your own domain, please don't feel like you have to publish through some random third party that exists to monetise your content.
Oh what does Medium have become... Meanwhile it became the villain in the game. (The Batman quote would really place itself nicely here)
I was a paid Medium member for a good while, but discontinued my membership late last year for those reasons.
If they block that then I give up.
https://add0n.com/reader-view.html
It's great for these situations.
Reader view doesn't always work though (at least in Firefox.) You can use the icon in the URL bar or CTRL + ALT + R to open reader view.
Firefox does some detective work to choose whether to show the reader view icon but using the keyboard shortcut used to work regardless. Recently it seems even the keyboard shortcut doesn't work unless the icon is visible - I think becausethe heuristic for showing the icon is more accurate these days.
And that's before you even get into the content, which is usually either:
1. Pointless bullshit from some 'influencer' no one cares about filled with silly buzzwords
2. Political panicking about Trump
3. Or generally uninteresting articles in general. Medium's long since gone through its Eternal September phase, so there's no real quality difference between the stuff there and the stuff anywhere else.
Shameless plug for warisboring.com. Go support my friend's work. If anyone at Medium sees this, just pay him already.
I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side.
What blog styles do you like reading?
I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses.
The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies...
Sorry, just venting, not directed at you.
I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back").
I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.
I suspect that Pocket and Medium have some kind of agreement; Medium may have stepped in to say "you can't make that text-only offline copy; that's our content" and Pocket, not wanting to get sued, went with the linked strategy instead.
Keep in mind that Medium is just YouTube, except with text-based content.
Since ˜1 year, I have no pleasure to use it and I tend to get away from it.