I Don't Like Medium | Hacker News Reader

I Don't Like Medium

sdgluck.com

94 pointsmemorable47 comments

Medium has bigger issues than its implementation. It quickly turned into the platform for relatively vacuous and self-gratifying posts that are basically “This is the deep insight I would share if I gave a TED talk”. I generally avoid going there since the quality of content is down there with long form LinkedIn posts.

This. Its content is largely written by people who seem to feel that their own opinion has some intrinsic value to other people (I used to be one of them). Doing research and focusing on weighing opposing viewpoints is too much work. Really cuts into the cathartic act of spewing words out into the world.

You are describing every single self-publishing platform in existence. Substack is getting there as well, as it gains popularity.

what you describe only happens to a "social network" where it's not a marketplace of content but of social credits instead. What you describe will not happen to substack same way it did not happen to youtube: people are here to sell content and make money, instead of selling their personal brand to make money elsewhere.

There are plenty of vapid self-aggrandizing talks on YouTube. Overacted stuff seems to have more success with the algorithm than slick marketer-style content, but I'm not sure that's an improvement.

I personally have more of an issue with people who have nothing interesting to sell, and make content to sell themselves intead. I dont have any quible with people who work hard to make and sell content. If you dont like their content you dont buy it, the martket is working.

The difference, I think, is that nobody goes to "Substack", they go to particular people on Substack. The existence of low-quality stuff on Substack doesn't have any impact on me at all, since I never see it and don't have to interact with it.

I suppose there is someone out there who actually browses the Substack front page, but this is very far from being the dominant mode for substack content.

Isn't it literally the same with Medium? People go to Medium posts from Google and co, and maybe subscribe to a specific Medium poster. Medium tries to do recommendations "since you've read X you might like Y" which are fine, but i doubt many people go to Medium.

> the Substack front page

I wasn't even aware there was such a thing, all substack content I consume I found organically. I'm sure it's much the same for the majority of their readers.

This is the Pareto principle at play, it’s the consequence of accessibility. But I’ve also found completely indie blogs that remind me of the Web 1.0/early 2.0 days.

> relatively vacuous and self-gratifying posts that are basically “This is the deep insight I would share if I gave a TED talk”.

What do you think the linked “I don’t like Medium” blog post is?

This made me laugh! You're so right. Luckily I made no claims to the contrary otherwise it would be rather awkward. As I said in the article though, I enjoy reading other people's thoughts. Hopefully others feel the same about mine one way or another, though you can't please everyone.

(I am the author of the blogpost.)

> “This is the deep insight I would share if I gave a TED talk”

I don't think we should be too harsh about that sort of thing. It's hard for people to learn how to have deep insights or how to communicate them if we are hyper critical of everything that isn't a perfectly formed nugget of transcendental genius. People need a bit of license to be over-excited about their own insights or over-optimistic or slightly prententious as they work out their voice. Sure, it's annoying, and taken too far it can be very unpleasant, but it's also probably a necessary part of learning to do and share anything creative.

Yeah, this is why I left Medium too. It felt like the most successful people there were the kind of bland 'self help gurus' that posted meaningless platitudes on a regular basis, and the suggested content in their newsletter would almost only suggest that stuff.

And I suspect the format of the platform encouraged that. Who is most likely to post on a platform where selling your writing for money was your foremost concern? Who would post their work on a platform where you have to sign in to view most articles?

Usually people who want to 'build a brand', or start a career in blogging/public speaking/whatever. The folks who just want to share their knowledge will pick a far less annoying service.

I agree. I just don’t know why it is so popular with scientific/tech folks, despite the fact that they don’t even support math notation and nice syntax highlighted code blocks.

I am wondering what other “medium” is worth paying attention to? Do twitter threads have the same issue? One difference might be that you could post wrong stuff on medium with impunity, but on twitter there is a sort of implicit crowd sourced review so you have to be thoughtful.

> It says I can continue to read if I sign up. So that's what I did. But then... I have been tricked into creating an account! This is a dark pattern, and I don't like it.

The screenshot literally says, “Read the rest of this story with a free account. Already have an account? <sign in>” and prompts you to link your google or Facebook account.

The Wikipedia dark patterns linked describes them as, “A dark pattern (also known as an anti-pattern or ‘Deceptive Design’) is ‘a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.’”

I don’t want to defend Medium, but their approach hardly strikes me as deceptive or particularly tricky. Annoying? Yes. Dark pattern? No.

You left out the content of the screenshot located between “But then…” and “I have been tricked into creating an account!” Like you said, the message said op could “read the rest of this story with a free account.” When op made an account, suddenly a paid membership was needed to read the rest of the article. You can argue whether it’s a dark practice but it’s certainly more deceptive than you make it out to be.

You don't need an account to read stories on Medium (?) I was never required to log in.

I mean it does say "You have 2 free member-only stories left this month." at the top but the counter never actually decrements.

(If you have cookies enabled on all websites by default maybe it would decrement, but you really shouldn't.)

>(If you have cookies enabled on all websites by default maybe it would decrement, but you really shouldn't.)

That's a very rare configuration. You should have instead said "if you clear your cookies, you can read as many articles as you want".

Is it? This is "Hacker" News ...

You are missing point - the dark pattern is that medium told the user in exchange for creating an account, they could read the rest of the store. They created an account and then were told they could not read the rest of the story. The sign up flow lied to them. It's the equivalent of an e-commerce site saying "Sign up to get 50% off any order" and then when you signed up there is no discount on your order.

I would say it's worse than a dark pattern. It's fraud. They say if you create a free account you'll be able to read the article, but then when you create the free account, you still can't read the article.

I looked at Medium, Substack, and ended up on Hashnode for a bit (Medium for devs, markdown blogging with a platform/feed).

I just recently setup a Hugo blog and hosted it on Netlify in an afternoon, doesn't look as "pretty" but loads much quicker.

Big shout-out to https://github.com/janraasch/hugo-bearblog and https://bearblog.dev/ as they are amazing examples of how to have a blog that is JUST a blog.

Another option for those who don't feel like self-hosting is Ghost.org.

There are very "pretty" Hugo themes out there, and the setup is usually extremely straightforward.

But in general the UX is great. There's some terminology to learn if you want to get really deep, but it strikes a great balance, imho, between usability and customisability.

Couldn't agree more! If you didn't want a theme you could be up and running in an hour or you could spend a month making your own theme. I wanted something clean and fast to setup and load so I leaned on https://github.com/janraasch/hugo-bearblog

I barely even knew Medium was a platform that had its own post feed.

I only knew it from clicking link submissions here that looked like they were from a corporate blog, but then turned out to be Medium with a custom domain, mainly as I would see a header saying 'by using Medium you agree to the privacy policy', which is a statement that is vague in a few ways:

1. Am I 'using Medium' if I'm reading a blog post on blog.somecorp.io that only says it's 'Medium' in the privacy policy header?

2. Have I been 'using Medium' by simply opening an article on it? Why have I not been given any time to not agree?

3. If I want to read the privacy policy, it seems to be hosted in a Medium article itself, with the same self-referential banner 'by using Medium, you agree to [the privacy policy]' which is a link to the same page.

4. If 2) applies, by reading the privacy policy I agree to the privacy policy. The escape in 1) doesn't apply either as the privacy policy is (or was?) hosted on a subdomain of medium.com. By trying to read the privacy policy (or interacting with the link that leads to the privacy policy?), I therefore have implicitly agreed to it.

This not only seems illegal in various jurisdictions, it's also very immoral.

Medium was pretty great when they started. Minimal layout with focus on reading content and generally good writers.

I think they either hired writers or at least only allowed people “good enough” to write on the platform.

They also did (and still do) an extremely good job at SEO.

But then they opened the flood gate and filled themselves with a lot of bad writers, who positioned themselves as if they mattered.

They piled on pop up and widgets and paywalls until the site was anything but focused on content.

The only thing they do well is SEO. My last company switched from self hosting to medium and saw a noticeable uptick in lead generation.

So I guess that’s why we are stuck with shitty medium.

I thought the real death was when they started gating and paywalling things

To me it felt like they happened in tandem.

So how do you monetise the platform then? Donations? I feel like that rarely works

I feel like if they wanted to monetize through subscription they’d need an editorial team to keep the quality high.

Early medium felt like you could trust the quality of an article based on the domain, the same way you used to trust that tomorrows issue of a newspaper or magazine would be high quality.

Medium really doesn't need a large team. The whole product could have been produced and maintained even now by 4-5 devs. An operation like that could be donation based, for sure. Not every idea deserves to be or would even be useful as a billion dollar corporate monster. Many would be maximally useful as a small donation-based service, run by 2-5 devs. Were it not for VC funding and a crazy startup culture, ideas like this would never grow beyond a 5 person company, anyway. The decline in medium usage is just a market correction. It was never a profitable idea. Once it becomes profitable, people don't want it.

Medium, the platform that has somehow figured out the miracle of how to make plain text take 30 seconds to load.

6s for a blog post isn't "reasonable", and we shouldn't give them the benefit of pretending it is.

When I started getting blasted with Medium email digests that were all articles about the war in Ukraine, that was it—-done. I interacted with one email out of morbid curiosity a day or two before. Next digest I paid attention to I received that Saturday. I’m on the toilet, every single article in my email is political commentary. Irritated, I click into one. Two sentences in I realize I’m spending this valuable moment reading a political opinion from what seems like some kid who writes like they are halfway through their second political science class in college. Oh, geopolitics now? Why would any two people connect over a trite written artifact? It’s so obvious it’s all for internet clout. That’s the last article I opened and read since, except for the occasional, mindless zip through to find something relevant in the stack I’m coding in. I’m still irritated and offended as I recall this situation on the throne. Their credibility with me also flushed down the toilet that day! I think I just tolerated it for so long because I tuned out the opinions and some articles about software were decent or at least thought provoking and therefore useful. No trust now.

I don't click Medium or Substack links anymore. I know they won't load on my mobile phone.

Substack is the new Medium.

When I visit Substack posts it still feels like Medium to me but I'm not too sure if it's just my negative bias towards these publishing platforms generally or an actual issue I have with Substack.

Would you be willing to share what makes Substack better or different from Medium to someone who will never use either? I just have noticed a huge amount of techies use Substack and from the name I can deduce it's geared for a more tech-focused audience.

As someone who has read Substack and Medium articles on mobile, Substack has less clutter than Medium, and also doesn't require you to sign up to read the rest of the article like Medium or restrict you. Also, Substack is far more reliable than Medium, as Medium articles often times failed to deliver the article, requires you to use alternative front-end like Scribe[0].

[0]: https://sr.ht/~edwardloveall/scribe/

(IMO) Substack is not geared more for a tech-focused audience; the difference between it and Medium is that Substack is focused on newsletters, not blogging, and was always laser-focused on monetizing an audience. (That aspect of Medium wasn't there from the start, and Medium has thrown a lot of monetizing strategies at the wall to see if they'd stick.) Substack is arguably competing as much with Patreon as it is with Medium.

But at least sucks less than Medium

I tried Bearblog once, I liked it. However, I've shifted to using Notion as my blog since then. The options I've tried so far are:

1. Using Next.js to render my Notion blog. Goes on a custom domain. Hosted on Vercel.

2. Using worker scripts on Cloudflare. (Fruition)

Medium use many deceptive patterns - especially with language:

‘Paywall’ → called ‘Partner Programme’

Double negatives → weird phrases like 'To make your post unmetered, deselect the checkbox'

Paywall is Opt-in by default: The option to log in is checked by default, meaning you actively have to say no to earning money when unchecking it.

They were a major offender in this post i wrote:'Dark Patterns in UI Copy' https://prototypr.io/post/we-value-your-privacy-at-about-0-5... (need to replace dark patterns with 'deceptive patterns')

Thanks for sharing, and hope more people are thinking about this, it's not fair for the web

Actually, I think recently, Medium has considerably improved their UX/UI. They used to have a lot of popups and text obstructions that you had to manually click away from. Nowadays, on free articles, the middle column column is just content, while left and right columns are simple and clean.

Have blocked medium.com in my pihole. I never read a single article on there worth my time. It's all just low-quality bullshit these days. Might have been different years ago but just like Quora it has big quality issues.

I'd argue Substack is on a trajectory to get on my banlist as well.

Medium used to be one of my go-to platforms for reading and writing (This is back in 2018). The clean look of reading articles, and the amazing content made me sold that time and I was also a monthly subscriber because it was adding immense value to me.

But, things changed drastically when Medium started promoting its paywall like never before. Most of the good content went behind the paywall and it pissed off so many writers as well who did not want to write under it.

Recently read about Medium changing their recommendation engine and it is really good. But because there are so many other good platforms evolving, it will be hard for so many people like us to go back to Medium. Substack is really good, but I always find it difficult to discover good content on Substack.

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