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My qualm with Medium isn't the idea of a hosted service, or the bloat, or even the annoying preciousness you allude to, but the degree of reader surveillance ba

My qualm with Medium isn't the idea of a hosted service, or the bloat, or even the annoying preciousness you allude to, but the degree of reader surveillance baked into the site. It pings back your exact scroll position in the document very frequently, and the behavior is neither advertised or (last time I checked) something you can disable. I'm kind of surprised you're a Medium advisor given that you are not the biggest fan of surveillance culture yourself.

muglug 11y ago
Sure, tracking how far down the page you read is a form of surveillance, but it's an incredibly anodyne one. It's possible to be upset about the government reading all your emails, and still find inoffensive a private company tracking (via an SSL-encrypted tunnel) how users interact with content they serve.
ehnto 11y ago
It's interesting you pointed out the scroll position in particular. Of all the things the site likely tracks, the scroll position is probably the least malicious, however it is the most present. It has a real time 'we are watching you right now' feel to it which is possibly why it irked you more than the fact that they probably just logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout. I imagine they use the scroll data to determine abandonment of the article, which is very valuable to marketers and writers. I wouldn't be surprised if the scroll data and other usage metrics are part of Medium's monetization strategy.
- benologist 11y ago
  They tell you how many viewers read your post in the post analytics.
- muglug 11y ago
  Scroll data is also great for gauging how much time the user is actually reading vs just has a webpage open. I imagine they could feed that data into recommendation algorithms with the aim of increasing average time on site.
- soared 11y ago
  > logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout I've got some bad news for you friend, all of that is tracked by every site that uses google analytics. Medium post [1] about abandonment: 7 minutes is optimal. They have plenty of other posts about writing good content based on their user metrics. 1: https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74b9f41509b#.rh8rrxd3h https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74...

muglug 11y ago

Sure, tracking how far down the page you read is a form of surveillance, but it's an incredibly anodyne one. It's possible to be upset about the government reading all your emails, and still find inoffensive a private company tracking (via an SSL-encrypted tunnel) how users interact with content they serve.

ehnto 11y ago

It's interesting you pointed out the scroll position in particular. Of all the things the site likely tracks, the scroll position is probably the least malicious, however it is the most present. It has a real time 'we are watching you right now' feel to it which is possibly why it irked you more than the fact that they probably just logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout. I imagine they use the scroll data to determine abandonment of the article, which is very valuable to marketers and writers. I wouldn't be surprised if the scroll data and other usage metrics are part of Medium's monetization strategy.

benologist 11y ago
They tell you how many viewers read your post in the post analytics.
muglug 11y ago
Scroll data is also great for gauging how much time the user is actually reading vs just has a webpage open. I imagine they could feed that data into recommendation algorithms with the aim of increasing average time on site.
soared 11y ago
> logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout I've got some bad news for you friend, all of that is tracked by every site that uses google analytics. Medium post [1] about abandonment: 7 minutes is optimal. They have plenty of other posts about writing good content based on their user metrics. 1: https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74b9f41509b#.rh8rrxd3h https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74...