Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done | Hacker News Reader

Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done

quoteinvestigator.com

148 pointsfanf228 comments

The title is wrong. The title is "It's called Medium because it's neither rare nor well done". It should be "Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done". The title is missing the indefinite article "a" which misleads the reader into thinking it's about Medium, the website.

Amusingly, the dig works just as well when applied to Medium, the website.

On the other hand a non-clickbait title might not have gotten to the front page, so ...

Like many others I thought this was about Medium.com because I've been saying it wasn't well done for years. I didn't know my joke wasn't original!

I thought they were talking about the blogging engine.

folks, dont read the article, the title is misleading

the blog IS rare and not well done

I thought this was going to be about the blog site which I loathe.

But it was a fun quick read about television.

I still think it’s true about the blog site too

I think it is misleading on purpose. Some kind of SEO probably. The real title is "Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done".

1. "Television" has been removed.

2. "a Medium" became "Medium"

3. all uppercases have been removed except the one for "Medium" which makes it a proper name.

Especially since "Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium" was on the front page today.

Link for those who (like me) missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24942037

And this quote was one of the comments on that thread

Came in the comment to say exactly the same. It could be a title about the blog site .

I practically chuckled and smirked reading the clever title with Medium in all caps

Because this article does not deliver time for a repost with a newly inspired blog post... on Substack

Since Medium is uppercased but none of the rest of the title is, it implies as much.

It might well be appropriated for the former...

3rding the above desire.

me too, I was to say that this is the greatest title ever for a post about medium, now that I see its not I'm stealing it

So did I. And when I read the word "loathe" I was hearing Jim Carreys delivery in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas".

What I particularly hate is when blog postings about programming end up behind paywalls. Sure well done if you find a way to earn a living, but I suspect that for most people it probably doesn't amount to much.

Anyway, now I have another domain I'd love to filter out of Google searches besides Pinterest.

Looks like the title should be corrected to possibly enable discussion of the actual article rather than the paraphrased misleading title given here. Should be:

"Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done"

I think it was a drive-by jab at Medium. Submitted title: It’s called Medium because it’s neither rare nor well done.

The quote investigation is interesting but not really pertinent.

Yes. It is possible that the original submitted title included this. I have submitted similarly formatted titles before and had the leading colon-delimited content automatically removed.

However, if the submitter will edit the submission quickly enough (within 2 hrs I think), then an edited title with the correction will be accepted. At least that has been my experience in the past.

I'm pretty sure this is intentional. Note how the article "a" is missing before "Medium", and the capitalization has been changed to sentence casing while retaining the upper-case on Medium.

You have to be careful with taking something from QI and believing it too much. They often stretch the truth, simplify connections, and obfuscate etymology.

I mean, it is a TV show, after all. /s

I know it's shit on Medium day for some reason on HN. I admit that I just don't understand why people would be so up in arms about a $5 subscription. Like, just don't read it? But also, many of us are professional programmers and $5 to get the answer we're looking for is completely trivial. If you keep getting sent to Medium then that's a sign.

In any case, the reality of Medium is that it's a very big platform and some of what's on it is shit and some is great. And that's just the nature of platforms.

But as a publisher there, I do know that they are giving more money than they've ever announced publicly to authors and that every month their investment in quality goes up. Essentially, every new subscriber puts more money in their budget which draws in a higher caliber of author. And on top of that, there's more and more editorial work going on there which is what is necessary to bring articles up to the standard you might find in books.

Did you, uh, read the article?

Yes, the article is about TV. But this quote came up this Medium thread today and then got posted here with the word Medium capitalized in the title and nothing else. Most of the commenters took it as a jab at Medium.com. As did I.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24942037

Also, this was more clear before the title got changed. The original submission didn't have the word Television.

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