I have no reason to click on a Medium link | Hacker News Reader

I have no reason to click on a Medium link

5 pointsa3n9 comments

I just saw an interesting headline on hacker news. When I hovered over the link (to decide whether to click) I saw this:

  https://medium.com/p/1e695c46077e.

There is nothing in that link to attract me to the page, and I did not click. Medium itself, a mere blogging platform (I don't care what they call themselves), is not enough to get me to click. There's nothing about "1e695c46077e" to remind me that I may have liked something from them before.

I pass over Medium links a lot, probably more than once a day, in that very scenario.

Medium and its users should probably consider that.

"We don’t know all the answers. But we know that words matter (still), so we built a better system for sharing them."

OK, maybe it is better. But I haven't seen any reason to visit lots and lots of Medium links (I do visit some). The web is large.

And to 1e695c46077e, good luck with your writing endeavors.

View on HN

What do you expect to see in the URL to let you know it's good to read?

https://medium.com/p/JohnSmith?Rating=★★★★&Degree=PHD&TLDR=C...

Damn, I was building that sarcastically, but it's actually pretty awesome.

Where is "Favorite that comment" button when you need it?

Remember when websites were 100% focused on "content without scrolling?" Now medium has gone batshit crazy with their "NO CONTENT WITHOUT SCROLLING!"

>There is nothing in that link to attract me to the page, and I did not click.

There's this thing called the anchor text of the link. You can try reading this instead of the URL which is meant mainly for machines.

There's a very thick line behind nice-to-have friendly URLS and judging what to read from the url itself.

The irony is, I had to click on a link with the url `https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030258` to find out what OP's reason was.

Not to mention that the HN link might have even expired by the time you get to click it :-)

There's the title link on the HN page, and when you (I) hover over that, all I see is the link, no human-relevant text. Firefox 26 and Chromium whatever on Wheezy 7.now.

The title of the article looks interesting, but there's nothing to tell me that the writer has any credibility, in the subject or in general. Also nothing to tell me whether the writer does not have credibility.

What I'm looking for is reputational clues. (medium.com) after the link is not enough for me, because there's nothing about medium that tells me anyone associated with them will be worth reading; membership is random with almost no gatekeeping (which is fine). (wired.com) or (schneier.com) is enough, the one because I know from history that they have content that I like, and schneier because it's schneier.

There's no such clue in an association with medium, and a randomly generated user name. Note that I'm also looking for future reputation: if I see a new source, will I remember it in the future?

There's just not enough to go on, for me. Whoever the writer is should at least think about making themselves more identifiable; the same for medium users in general.

>There's the title link on the HN page, and when you (I) hover over that, all I see is the link, no human-relevant text

The _title_ is the human readable text. You're not supposed to go reading the link itself for human-relevant text.

>What I'm looking for is reputational clues. (medium.com) after the link is not enough for me, because there's nothing about medium that tells me anyone associated with them will be worth reading; membership is random with almost no gatekeeping

You saw a link for an article on HN and you didn't click to see it because of a lack of "reputational clues" in the URL link?

I like reputational clues too. If only there was some kind of social bookmarking site, where a community of people with some common interests could vote for articles, and you can read their _titles_ and see their vote count and go click on them.

A man can dream right?

>There's just not enough to go on, for me. Whoever the writer is should at least think about making themselves more identifiable; the same for medium users in general.

A nice-to-have as a URL requirement that you have blown out of proportion. You're using the web wrongly.

Seriously? No one is asking you to memorize a link. You see the anchor text and you click on it if you like it. How hard is it? You just took nitpicking to a different level.

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