Do People Like Medium?
I find it annoying that I am constantly asked to sign up and pay for articles that I find in search engines but I'd like to hear what everyone else things.
I think the problem with medium is that there are a lot of low-quality no use for anything articles on the platform. May be you can do some sort of moderation to ensure good articles are present, not sure if it’s against your policies.
Also, another reason which annoys me is the signin to read the article. Why do I have to sign in to read an article everytime? I think this trend overtime created a reflux such that every time I see a medium link, I do not click it.
Loved the platform earlier, I hope you turn it around!
I think part of it is how aggressive the monetization is. That isn't to say that your competitors, and a huge swathe of publishers aren't doing the same thing. It seems the value prop is getting rid of all the noise. That can be a difficult sell. Publishing is in a weird place. For writing about current events or topics in the zeitgeist, the internet is flooded with articles re-tracing the same points.
I think the other part is that a similar problem that every platform that allows its user to monetize UGC, it attracts large numbers of people who want to game the system (or well meaning people who still exhibit spammy behavior). So those people upload poor articles and share them to as many places as they can to try to capture some ad rev. They end up flooding somewhere like HN, and people sour on the platform instead of the person who uploaded it.
I don't think that is unique to medium, or even unusual in the publishing space. It seems more likely that Medium is big platform, so people see it more often, and more often associate it with these problems.
That doesn't seem so bad. So I'm wondering if there is some toxic overlap of what is bad on Medium also does well here, and what is good on Medium fails here.
For example, I saw that the 3.3 release of Dart got posted on Medium and then here yesterday. I think that's unambiguously good given that it's written by the creators of Dart. But, it's also kind of boring and specific to a small subset of developers.
Anyway, thanks for responding.
So it is on you because you are the one who needs the brand to be viewed positively.
Specifically, it is on you to put on a product hat, come understand what we feel, why we feel it, and what might make us more interested in your product. Or not. Your company, your choice.
The trope we use for bad articles that used to do well on Medium are "X is dead." They are always written by people who don't have nearly the life experience to call it. But they invite reactions. They do less well now on Medium because we redid our recommendations to have human curators in the loop. I would want the same thing to happen here and I honestly don't understand why a community that is generally so good at boosting high quality articles falls for them.
Now though? It's a goddamn trainwreck, with an obnoxious UI filled with modals and that irritating paywall (which you need to leave enabled to make use of most of the article promotion features) and low quality content galore. Indeed, something like 90% of the content there now seems to be hustle culture/growth hacking/self help bullshit or other such vapid junk.
But I guess that's the way of every platform. It starts out with interesting, intelligently written content, then eventually gets buried under the flood of auto generated, SEO focused hustle junk.
I guess that’s part of the appeal of Medium. They have a method for discoverability, and lots and lots of authors means lots of text to read. I’m not 100% sure exactly what my gripes with Medium are, but I guess that it feels a bit like a text factory. Personally, I prefer a more decentralized approach than what Medium offers.
However, I don’t use RSS at all. For me, finding blog posts via HN and Lobsters is sufficient – YMMV.
With that said, one of the best technical “blogs” I know of is actually a newsletter: Cryptography Dispatches.
It has a feed, I can warmly recommend it! https://words.filippo.io/rss/