3 ms·

Maybe I got to medium late, but a medium link has always been a sure sign to me that the content I'm about to read is obviously wrong and likely lacking in humi

by takno 11y ago

Maybe I got to medium late, but a medium link has always been a sure sign to me that the content I'm about to read is obviously wrong and likely lacking in humility

ljk 11y ago
you're not the only one, I always skip medium articles.
mike_hearn 11y ago
That's too bad. I post to medium, but I treat it as essentially a more modern Blogger. Do you skip any content you see posted to blogger.com or wordpress.com sites too? When I post there, I don't care about what other people are posting there, no more than I would avoid creating a website because many websites are shit. As a blogging platform, Medium is OK. It's not brilliant. It's just OK. The editor is nice but too limited. The clean formatting is attractive but often I want more flexibility. The stats are useful but oddly, they refuse to show you more than 30 days worth at a time. Etc. I have sometimes thought about going fully self hosted, but running my own blog is something I did years ago and I can't be bothered with that any more. Virtually all blogging software appears to be written in PHP by people who can't write secure code to save their lives ... WordPress is just a rolling disaster zone of exploits, I don't want viral articles to give me a big bandwidth bill, I don't want to have to set up my own analytics, etc. Perhaps at some point I'll get over my inertia and move off of Medium, but it'd be unfortunate if I end up being motivated by "lol medium users are all idiots" becoming a meme rather than technical tradeoffs.
- takno 11y ago
  I do click on medium links if the content looks interesting, though they probably have to hit a higher bar than other sites to get past my nagging prejudices about medium content. Certainly anything that sounds like it might be hyperbole gets instantly ignored. I'm afraid I actually find the clean formatting a little oppressive, although at least it's a consistently usable interface on mobile which is something you can't depend on in random blogs. The value-add features like read time and suggested articles don't add to the experience at all. In terms of the stats etc, I don't mind total views and uniques, which you could get from GA. Beyond that I think stats are part of the problem - I want to read things that people felt moved to write, not something that hits some kind of ROI metric.
  - type0 11y ago
    I noticed the same happen, i click on some medium articles from HN. They might have okay title and theme, some can begin mildly entertaining, but then more often than not just end up being self indulgent marketing bs.

by takno 11y ago

Maybe I got to medium late, but a medium link has always been a sure sign to me that the content I'm about to read is obviously wrong and likely lacking in humility

ljk 11y ago

you're not the only one, I always skip medium articles.

mike_hearn 11y ago

That's too bad. I post to medium, but I treat it as essentially a more modern Blogger. Do you skip any content you see posted to blogger.com or wordpress.com sites too? When I post there, I don't care about what other people are posting there, no more than I would avoid creating a website because many websites are shit. As a blogging platform, Medium is OK. It's not brilliant. It's just OK. The editor is nice but too limited. The clean formatting is attractive but often I want more flexibility. The stats are useful but oddly, they refuse to show you more than 30 days worth at a time. Etc. I have sometimes thought about going fully self hosted, but running my own blog is something I did years ago and I can't be bothered with that any more. Virtually all blogging software appears to be written in PHP by people who can't write secure code to save their lives ... WordPress is just a rolling disaster zone of exploits, I don't want viral articles to give me a big bandwidth bill, I don't want to have to set up my own analytics, etc. Perhaps at some point I'll get over my inertia and move off of Medium, but it'd be unfortunate if I end up being motivated by "lol medium users are all idiots" becoming a meme rather than technical tradeoffs.

takno 11y ago
I do click on medium links if the content looks interesting, though they probably have to hit a higher bar than other sites to get past my nagging prejudices about medium content. Certainly anything that sounds like it might be hyperbole gets instantly ignored. I'm afraid I actually find the clean formatting a little oppressive, although at least it's a consistently usable interface on mobile which is something you can't depend on in random blogs. The value-add features like read time and suggested articles don't add to the experience at all. In terms of the stats etc, I don't mind total views and uniques, which you could get from GA. Beyond that I think stats are part of the problem - I want to read things that people felt moved to write, not something that hits some kind of ROI metric.
- type0 11y ago
  I noticed the same happen, i click on some medium articles from HN. They might have okay title and theme, some can begin mildly entertaining, but then more often than not just end up being self indulgent marketing bs.