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Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’

219 points by ALee 11y ago

Kenji 11y ago
The problem is that most of news in itself is and always will be junk. Profound messages do not owe their value to novelty. If you take the time to read the newspaper and instead read a book about, I don't know, calculus, every day, you will lean much, much more.
- free2rhyme214 11y ago
  This is spot on. I don't believe the hype with Medium. The news will always be junk. You can centralize it and make it prettier on medium - but it's still centralized pretty junk.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Indeed. I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia. Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself. It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.
- qznc 11y ago
  I agree, for your personal development news is not important. However, this is how the big entities (countries, enterprises, etc) move. For example, watch the Panama Papers effect in Iceland and England. Social networks are ok to move news around, but centralized media is more efficient to reach the masses.
- draw_down 11y ago
  Excellent point.
- matt4077 11y ago
  News are, however, the source from which most 'profound messages' are distilled. While it doesn't really hurt a single individual to stop reading the news, if large parts of society do so, democracy no longer has the substance it needs to operate. Also: judging by the amount self-righteousness in this thread, HN readers would never consume 'fast-food-content', read 'a calculus book per day' and see through all the marketing spin. All while compulsively reloading HN, probably.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    Would a cigarette smoker who tells you not to smoke be a hypocrite? Yeah. But they would also be correct.
  - Kenji 11y ago
    Hah, my bad, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean an entire calculus book per day. That would be absolute madness (well, at least if you calculate along with all the proofs). I mean a few pages of a calculus book every day instead of a few pages of newspaper ;) And I read hackernews not because of the news articles but because of the value of the hackernews comments, though I agree, it is somewhat hypocritical, I also read the news sometimes.
    - matt4077 11y ago
      I know – sorry for making fun of that wording. Comment threads like this just get the worst of me. Having worked in journalism, I don't quite understand the disregard (hate?) for the profession, esp. considering how reasonable HN usually seems to be.
      - Kenji 11y ago
        No problem. I don't hate journalism. Contrary to the second part of my original comment, I actually worded the first part quite carefully, take note of the word 'most' and that I do not say that news cannot be profound. I don't disregard journalism, there are some journalists who I hold in very high esteem. The problem is a classic one: Journalists have a job to write up things. They seek out information and make an article out of it. This is very difficult to do right since most interesting articles emerge from an inverse process: That the writer learned or acquired valuable information first and later feels the need to share it. This kind of writing has a higher probability to contain anything of value.
sekasi 11y ago
I don't quite understand the reasoning in the start which seems to boil down to; Content/Media on the web is bad and people are dissatisfied. How exactly do you reach this conclusion? I mean we can all make huge assumptions about the opinions the average human have on the quality of media, but I don't think that qualifies as any form of factual commentary.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  > How exactly do you reach this conclusion Ev was the founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter and now is the founder of Medium. If he's reached the conclusion that people are dissatisfied with content/media on the web it's probably because a lot of them have told him so (it's still just his opinion though, doesn't mean he's right).
  - Animats 11y ago
    So he did Twitter.com (small), and Medium.com What next, Large.com? The domain is for sale.
kough 11y ago
This is a submarine piece for Medium, but I found this paragraph to be poignant: “I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.” It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.
  - dcposch 11y ago
    What does "submarine" mean here? It must be a pretty unusual term because even Googling "submarine sponsored content" doesnt work
    - saryant 11y ago
      http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    - prawn 11y ago
      It's just content that exists at the prodding of a PR company on behalf of their client. Once you've worked with and around PR people, you start to recognise it in the wild even when it's subtle. It's not always a direct angle but could be things to build the brand of key personalities like "Running a business with small children" where the business owner is profiled, or "Staying healthy at the office" where the business owner talks about what they eat and drink. A significant portion of print (and now online) pieces would be as a result of professional PR efforts. (My wife works in PR and I used to share an office with another PR company.)
hiou 11y ago
Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been shown to be addictive. Junk food like McDonald's and Snickers bars have been shown to be addictive. They are all the same type of product. It's amazing to see those involved in tech attempt over and over again to rationalize themselves out of that obvious connection.
- beezle 11y ago
  its funny reading him moan about it. the internet was already a difficult place for written word as the attention spans necessary for more than a page/screen are just not there. Then came twitter. Will it be long now before tweets come with tl;dr ?
  - Retra 11y ago
    Are you imagining a site that forces communication through emoji and nothing else?
- tracker1 11y ago
  I had a thought the other day while driving through Seattle... seemed to get stuck in traffic flows more than I'm used to in other places. The though occurred to me, that those highway signs with the mini ads for the gas stations and restaurants coming up could include products you'd be able to get at said gas stations and restaurants... Snickers could be on the sign, right next to Chevron or ARCO. That would be relatively cheap for some larger brands (Coca-Cola comes to mind), but potentially huge in terms of placement. Gah, I hate that I come up with ways in the back of my mind on ideas like this... still it's better than the over-the-top ads in the clickbait sites.
foobarqux 11y ago
Is the hype for Medium legitimate? Why?
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  Yes and no. First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt. That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages: 1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device. 2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write. 3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads. 4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further. That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium. Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Can you monetise the content at all? I assumed Medium was the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory - with the difference that unlike most, you can get some useful exposure from it, maybe. Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.
    - AdamSC1 11y ago
      Yeah - they've experimented with multiple monetization models over the past year or so. Now there is a beta for a select group of users. I for one really hope they nail it, but I'm not sure it's on the right path yet. The challenge is that the platform of curation of interesting content for the sake of interesting content, stops working when it becomes the curation of interesting content for profit. As unless you do it based on customer satisfaction in microtransactions (oh I like your content have a cheese puff), then it's based on views or clicks. Thus begins their decent into clickbait land where everyone gets cheesits (the crunchier, lamer and more disappointing brother of the cheese puff). You earn low volumes of cash as you don't have a loyal readership. I earn disappointment as your title was misleading, and we both go home and cry in the fetal position at what the internet has become. So, once again, hopefully they nail it - because right now they're pretty dandy.
jplasmeier 11y ago
Well, what do you want for free? "ad-supported"
- rhizome 11y ago
  "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
mbesto 11y ago
> “Medium doesn’t need to be the thing you check all day, every day. We’re not looking for addiction,” says Williams. “We’re just looking to give people one or two of what they think are the most important things on a daily basis. Things that they care about, things that change how they think about the world.” With a business model exactly like BuzzFeed's, which is built on optimizing for content and titles that can be turned in native advertising. It's not changing the way how we think about the world...it's the changing the way we think about how advertisers want the world to look like.
- briholt 11y ago
  It doesn't take a PhD in data analytics to figure out that profit-motive will create a ceaseless pressure for page views, which means Medium will inevitably try to get people to spend all day everyday on Medium. Which means their unavoidable path is to become BuzzFeed.
amagumori 11y ago
oh man, the way they spun his quote in the title for outrage clicks...
- ced 11y ago
  We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.” Really disappointing from the Guardian.
  - elcapitan 11y ago
    It's almost ironic to spin a quote in such a way to attract clicks on an article about how the media put junk in front of their consumers.
  - danyork 11y ago
    But, sadly, the Guardian's business model is based around advertising and so they need the eyeballs... so to get the eyeballs on quick approach is to write the click-bait headlines. :-(
- simonebrunozzi 11y ago
  Right? Almost worse than pure click-baiting.
  - soared 11y ago
    > Pure click-baiting Oh god. Please no. Kill me.
rayalez 11y ago
One of the major reasons so much online content is junk is advertisements. When journalists make money based on clicks, they have very strong incentives to produce a lot low quality, easy to consume content. When you profit from manipulating attention, it's hard to resist generating clickbait. It is much easier to manufacture outrage(that spreads very well) than to educate or enlighten. I think that the best way to fix this is to change monetization strategy from ads to premium content or paid subscriptions. When that happens, the main incentive turns from "quickly produce a lot of viral content" to "create high quality content that is worth buying". It is the easiest, the most straightforward way to properly align incentives. I was so excited about Medium because it's a platform that had a chance to do that, and I hoped they would. Unfortunately, they have introduced ads as a monetization strategy. Too bad.
natrius 11y ago
Advertising as a business model is destroying the things we love. Nobody wants addictive content. We want informative, enjoyable content, but that's not profitable. Page views are profitable, and page views require addiction. Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.
- seeing 11y ago
  Are you willing to pay?
  - natrius 11y ago
    I subscribe to four publications and fund two nonprofit publications. But let's assume I wasn't willing to pay. We should still stop supporting our own addictions. Especially since the people feeding us junk literally sell changes in our behavior to the highest bidder. This is madness, y'all. Opt out.
  - dingaling 11y ago
    > Are you willing to pay? Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money. For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services. That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.
- brador 11y ago
  Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.
  - natrius 11y ago
brento 11y ago
Reading the comments in this thread, is somewhat ironic.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Information goods and markets are a poor match for numerous reasons. Paradoxically, it also seems to be the direction much of the advanced world is headed, in the sense both of goods which are nothing but information (data, print, audio, images, video), and those for which information content is a large component: high-tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and processes. One of the problems is fairly well understood: the tendency for marginal costs to approach zero, or at least a small fraction of the fixed costs of production (look at the story over how Boeing accounts for the R&D of its 787 Dreamliner). Another is more insidious: information isn't readily assimilarted. If you look at the advertiser's toolkit for message dissemination, what you see are all kinds of ways to drape the intended message over an assimilable one: sex, youth, beauty, fame, fear, greed, jealousy, envy, loss. Or repetition, music, disorientation, flashy elements. Junk food (of the dietary or infotainment variety) has cognizability, a word I first ran across in William Stanley Jevons description of characteristics of money. You instantly recognise what these are. Complex truths are, well, more complicated. The geniuses who discover or explain them come up with useful metaphors or analogies: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman. Much of that is mapping a novel thought onto a familiar one. We're not going to take that out of information, it's part and parcel of the bargain (a metaphor, incidentally, arguably a cliche). But we can try engineering systems for compensating and promoting information which don't flagrantly flog and feed junk. That's the feedback and control loops Williams talks of. One approach is to treat information as a public good. It's what the UK does with the BBC, and it's the philosophy of a number of institutions, including CUNY's Graduate Center (who've adopted this as their motto), and Robert McChesney and John Nichols: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-save-journalism-0/ http://www.thenation.com/article/how-save-journalism-0/
- mbrock 11y ago
  Cool comment. We can also look at the daily habits of the ordinary people who create non-junk content every day. De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is all about this: the fertile creativity of people going about their lives, which is overpowered by the glitz of mass media and the seriousness of corporate activity. That's where my love is, and it's the base for my anti-commercial sentiment. Power to the people. Corporations didn't invent food, literature, math, love, cleverness, music, fishing, gardening, dancing... they are sponsors at best, tyrants at worst. So when they try to convince me that, say, music is doomed because of "pirate copying," it really makes me laugh. I have a guitar right here, and two friends who are into folk song... And all this goddamn stuff they think it's important to consume, including all the goddamn news. To hell with it.
ubersol1 11y ago
In my humble opinion both platforms are turning into a place where people would like to complain or bitch about some things that bother them.
vanderZwan 11y ago
Kind of funny how he talks about content in terms of calories and junk food (and he's absolutely spot on, of course), and how Medium.com is one of the leaders in website obesity, which is "fat" on the technical layer: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (not meant a snide remark, just thought it was an interesting coincidence in choice of metaphor)
arisAlexis 11y ago
Not meant as an ad since I am fighting alone for a non-profit but checkout something that is meant as a free no-bs replacement of Twitter (maybe Medium too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660
- arisAlexis 11y ago
  I have coded 6 months for some good cause without money and still get downvoted :) oh well
codeulike 11y ago
The clickbait quote in context: "We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”
danr4 11y ago
The future of information is NOT in for-profit organizations.
eveningcoffee 11y ago
This quote is completely wrong! He told: ", well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”.

219 points by ALee 11y ago

Kenji 11y ago

The problem is that most of news in itself is and always will be junk. Profound messages do not owe their value to novelty. If you take the time to read the newspaper and instead read a book about, I don't know, calculus, every day, you will lean much, much more.

free2rhyme214 11y ago
This is spot on. I don't believe the hype with Medium. The news will always be junk. You can centralize it and make it prettier on medium - but it's still centralized pretty junk.
stegosaurus 11y ago
Indeed. I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia. Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself. It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.
qznc 11y ago
I agree, for your personal development news is not important. However, this is how the big entities (countries, enterprises, etc) move. For example, watch the Panama Papers effect in Iceland and England. Social networks are ok to move news around, but centralized media is more efficient to reach the masses.
draw_down 11y ago
Excellent point.
matt4077 11y ago
News are, however, the source from which most 'profound messages' are distilled. While it doesn't really hurt a single individual to stop reading the news, if large parts of society do so, democracy no longer has the substance it needs to operate. Also: judging by the amount self-righteousness in this thread, HN readers would never consume 'fast-food-content', read 'a calculus book per day' and see through all the marketing spin. All while compulsively reloading HN, probably.
- draw_down 11y ago
  Would a cigarette smoker who tells you not to smoke be a hypocrite? Yeah. But they would also be correct.
- Kenji 11y ago
  Hah, my bad, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean an entire calculus book per day. That would be absolute madness (well, at least if you calculate along with all the proofs). I mean a few pages of a calculus book every day instead of a few pages of newspaper ;) And I read hackernews not because of the news articles but because of the value of the hackernews comments, though I agree, it is somewhat hypocritical, I also read the news sometimes.
  - matt4077 11y ago
    I know – sorry for making fun of that wording. Comment threads like this just get the worst of me. Having worked in journalism, I don't quite understand the disregard (hate?) for the profession, esp. considering how reasonable HN usually seems to be.
    - Kenji 11y ago
      No problem. I don't hate journalism. Contrary to the second part of my original comment, I actually worded the first part quite carefully, take note of the word 'most' and that I do not say that news cannot be profound. I don't disregard journalism, there are some journalists who I hold in very high esteem. The problem is a classic one: Journalists have a job to write up things. They seek out information and make an article out of it. This is very difficult to do right since most interesting articles emerge from an inverse process: That the writer learned or acquired valuable information first and later feels the need to share it. This kind of writing has a higher probability to contain anything of value.

sekasi 11y ago

I don't quite understand the reasoning in the start which seems to boil down to; Content/Media on the web is bad and people are dissatisfied. How exactly do you reach this conclusion? I mean we can all make huge assumptions about the opinions the average human have on the quality of media, but I don't think that qualifies as any form of factual commentary.

onewaystreet 11y ago
> How exactly do you reach this conclusion Ev was the founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter and now is the founder of Medium. If he's reached the conclusion that people are dissatisfied with content/media on the web it's probably because a lot of them have told him so (it's still just his opinion though, doesn't mean he's right).
- Animats 11y ago
  So he did Twitter.com (small), and Medium.com What next, Large.com? The domain is for sale.

kough 11y ago

This is a submarine piece for Medium, but I found this paragraph to be poignant: “I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.” It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

roymurdock 11y ago
Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.
- dcposch 11y ago
  What does "submarine" mean here? It must be a pretty unusual term because even Googling "submarine sponsored content" doesnt work
  - saryant 11y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - prawn 11y ago
    It's just content that exists at the prodding of a PR company on behalf of their client. Once you've worked with and around PR people, you start to recognise it in the wild even when it's subtle. It's not always a direct angle but could be things to build the brand of key personalities like "Running a business with small children" where the business owner is profiled, or "Staying healthy at the office" where the business owner talks about what they eat and drink. A significant portion of print (and now online) pieces would be as a result of professional PR efforts. (My wife works in PR and I used to share an office with another PR company.)

hiou 11y ago

Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been shown to be addictive. Junk food like McDonald's and Snickers bars have been shown to be addictive. They are all the same type of product. It's amazing to see those involved in tech attempt over and over again to rationalize themselves out of that obvious connection.

beezle 11y ago
its funny reading him moan about it. the internet was already a difficult place for written word as the attention spans necessary for more than a page/screen are just not there. Then came twitter. Will it be long now before tweets come with tl;dr ?
- Retra 11y ago
  Are you imagining a site that forces communication through emoji and nothing else?
tracker1 11y ago
I had a thought the other day while driving through Seattle... seemed to get stuck in traffic flows more than I'm used to in other places. The though occurred to me, that those highway signs with the mini ads for the gas stations and restaurants coming up could include products you'd be able to get at said gas stations and restaurants... Snickers could be on the sign, right next to Chevron or ARCO. That would be relatively cheap for some larger brands (Coca-Cola comes to mind), but potentially huge in terms of placement. Gah, I hate that I come up with ways in the back of my mind on ideas like this... still it's better than the over-the-top ads in the clickbait sites.

foobarqux 11y ago

Is the hype for Medium legitimate? Why?

AdamSC1 11y ago
Yes and no. First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt. That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages: 1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device. 2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write. 3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads. 4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further. That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium. Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Can you monetise the content at all? I assumed Medium was the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory - with the difference that unlike most, you can get some useful exposure from it, maybe. Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.
  - AdamSC1 11y ago
    Yeah - they've experimented with multiple monetization models over the past year or so. Now there is a beta for a select group of users. I for one really hope they nail it, but I'm not sure it's on the right path yet. The challenge is that the platform of curation of interesting content for the sake of interesting content, stops working when it becomes the curation of interesting content for profit. As unless you do it based on customer satisfaction in microtransactions (oh I like your content have a cheese puff), then it's based on views or clicks. Thus begins their decent into clickbait land where everyone gets cheesits (the crunchier, lamer and more disappointing brother of the cheese puff). You earn low volumes of cash as you don't have a loyal readership. I earn disappointment as your title was misleading, and we both go home and cry in the fetal position at what the internet has become. So, once again, hopefully they nail it - because right now they're pretty dandy.

jplasmeier 11y ago

Well, what do you want for free? "ad-supported"

rhizome 11y ago
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"

mbesto 11y ago

> “Medium doesn’t need to be the thing you check all day, every day. We’re not looking for addiction,” says Williams. “We’re just looking to give people one or two of what they think are the most important things on a daily basis. Things that they care about, things that change how they think about the world.” With a business model exactly like BuzzFeed's, which is built on optimizing for content and titles that can be turned in native advertising. It's not changing the way how we think about the world...it's the changing the way we think about how advertisers want the world to look like.

briholt 11y ago
It doesn't take a PhD in data analytics to figure out that profit-motive will create a ceaseless pressure for page views, which means Medium will inevitably try to get people to spend all day everyday on Medium. Which means their unavoidable path is to become BuzzFeed.

amagumori 11y ago

oh man, the way they spun his quote in the title for outrage clicks...

ced 11y ago
We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.” Really disappointing from the Guardian.
- elcapitan 11y ago
  It's almost ironic to spin a quote in such a way to attract clicks on an article about how the media put junk in front of their consumers.
- danyork 11y ago
  But, sadly, the Guardian's business model is based around advertising and so they need the eyeballs... so to get the eyeballs on quick approach is to write the click-bait headlines. :-(
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
Right? Almost worse than pure click-baiting.
- soared 11y ago
  > Pure click-baiting Oh god. Please no. Kill me.

rayalez 11y ago

One of the major reasons so much online content is junk is advertisements. When journalists make money based on clicks, they have very strong incentives to produce a lot low quality, easy to consume content. When you profit from manipulating attention, it's hard to resist generating clickbait. It is much easier to manufacture outrage(that spreads very well) than to educate or enlighten. I think that the best way to fix this is to change monetization strategy from ads to premium content or paid subscriptions. When that happens, the main incentive turns from "quickly produce a lot of viral content" to "create high quality content that is worth buying". It is the easiest, the most straightforward way to properly align incentives. I was so excited about Medium because it's a platform that had a chance to do that, and I hoped they would. Unfortunately, they have introduced ads as a monetization strategy. Too bad.

natrius 11y ago

Advertising as a business model is destroying the things we love. Nobody wants addictive content. We want informative, enjoyable content, but that's not profitable. Page views are profitable, and page views require addiction. Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.

seeing 11y ago
Are you willing to pay?
- natrius 11y ago
  I subscribe to four publications and fund two nonprofit publications. But let's assume I wasn't willing to pay. We should still stop supporting our own addictions. Especially since the people feeding us junk literally sell changes in our behavior to the highest bidder. This is madness, y'all. Opt out.
- dingaling 11y ago
  > Are you willing to pay? Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money. For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services. That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.
brador 11y ago
Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.
- natrius 11y ago

brento 11y ago

Reading the comments in this thread, is somewhat ironic.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Information goods and markets are a poor match for numerous reasons. Paradoxically, it also seems to be the direction much of the advanced world is headed, in the sense both of goods which are nothing but information (data, print, audio, images, video), and those for which information content is a large component: high-tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and processes. One of the problems is fairly well understood: the tendency for marginal costs to approach zero, or at least a small fraction of the fixed costs of production (look at the story over how Boeing accounts for the R&D of its 787 Dreamliner). Another is more insidious: information isn't readily assimilarted. If you look at the advertiser's toolkit for message dissemination, what you see are all kinds of ways to drape the intended message over an assimilable one: sex, youth, beauty, fame, fear, greed, jealousy, envy, loss. Or repetition, music, disorientation, flashy elements. Junk food (of the dietary or infotainment variety) has cognizability, a word I first ran across in William Stanley Jevons description of characteristics of money. You instantly recognise what these are. Complex truths are, well, more complicated. The geniuses who discover or explain them come up with useful metaphors or analogies: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman. Much of that is mapping a novel thought onto a familiar one. We're not going to take that out of information, it's part and parcel of the bargain (a metaphor, incidentally, arguably a cliche). But we can try engineering systems for compensating and promoting information which don't flagrantly flog and feed junk. That's the feedback and control loops Williams talks of. One approach is to treat information as a public good. It's what the UK does with the BBC, and it's the philosophy of a number of institutions, including CUNY's Graduate Center (who've adopted this as their motto), and Robert McChesney and John Nichols: http://www.thenation.com/article/how-save-journalism-0/ http://www.thenation.com/article/how-save-journalism-0/

mbrock 11y ago
Cool comment. We can also look at the daily habits of the ordinary people who create non-junk content every day. De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is all about this: the fertile creativity of people going about their lives, which is overpowered by the glitz of mass media and the seriousness of corporate activity. That's where my love is, and it's the base for my anti-commercial sentiment. Power to the people. Corporations didn't invent food, literature, math, love, cleverness, music, fishing, gardening, dancing... they are sponsors at best, tyrants at worst. So when they try to convince me that, say, music is doomed because of "pirate copying," it really makes me laugh. I have a guitar right here, and two friends who are into folk song... And all this goddamn stuff they think it's important to consume, including all the goddamn news. To hell with it.

ubersol1 11y ago

In my humble opinion both platforms are turning into a place where people would like to complain or bitch about some things that bother them.

vanderZwan 11y ago

Kind of funny how he talks about content in terms of calories and junk food (and he's absolutely spot on, of course), and how Medium.com is one of the leaders in website obesity, which is "fat" on the technical layer: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (not meant a snide remark, just thought it was an interesting coincidence in choice of metaphor)

arisAlexis 11y ago

Not meant as an ad since I am fighting alone for a non-profit but checkout something that is meant as a free no-bs replacement of Twitter (maybe Medium too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660

arisAlexis 11y ago
I have coded 6 months for some good cause without money and still get downvoted :) oh well

codeulike 11y ago

The clickbait quote in context: "We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”

danr4 11y ago

The future of information is NOT in for-profit organizations.

eveningcoffee 11y ago

This quote is completely wrong! He told: ", well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”.