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> I got the distinct feeling I was being sold something while reading it, and the last paragraph confirmed it.

I have this feeling medium is being kept alive on the shoulders of other companies’ marketing teams in an attempt to write thinly-veiled sales pitches disguised as blog posts from a “neutral” 3rd party.

Coupled with the zero-life-experience blogger trope, the signal to noise ratio on medium is practically nil.

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There is a strong "thought leadership" vibe.

The signal I’ve started looking for is an above the fold “minutes to read” stat. Sites, like Medium, that have it are practically all worth ignoring because it’s either astroturfing or just navel gazing.

Many static site generators add that stat. I find it useful.

Absolutely agreed, there's a huge difference between a 5 minute article you can quickly read whenever you stumble upon it, and a 30 minute post (like acoup.blog's excellent articles) that you might have to save to read later.

The New York Times has the "x min read" stat listed under articles on its homepage.

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