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Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. You need

by WA 10y ago

Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. You need to have some metric to calculate impact. Likes and views can't have too much weight in the equation, because they can be gamed. Furthermore, page views are heavily influenced by Medium's recommendation engine. I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game. Ultimately, Medium might introduce something like Amazon's KDP Select Global Fund that pays money to writers based on some metric, but I doubt that it will be much better than what've got. Why? Human nature. The current media landscape is refined to perfection already, in a way. "Modern" articles push our buttons, we are like junkies waiting for their next fix of information (I guess every HN reader can relate to this – I certainly can). That's what we really want. We read what tingles our senses, preselected by a relatively stupid algorithm and social proof. How on earth would you construct a better algorithm that truly measures impact on our lives?

coldtea 10y ago
>Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. That's not the problem. The problem is that most people could not care less about either impact or rewarding the writers -- and the kind of writing on Medium is not the kind that has a paying fanbase (like e.g. fiction might).
chipotle_coyote 10y ago
Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do something better. I think an argument can be made that Ev is right that the advertising model for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting recommendations. I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I quietly move all my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross-posting certain articles over to Medium.
j2kun 10y ago
> I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game. While this may be true for most blogs, I curiously found myself in a different situation, having spent almost no time trying to game the social system on my blog (only setting up auto-posts of new content on facebook/twitter, very seldom manual tweet to promote archived content). Somehow I got up to today, with 1-2k daily hits for derelict content, and enough name recognition to get job offers and occasionally run into fans in real life.

by WA 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

>Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. That's not the problem. The problem is that most people could not care less about either impact or rewarding the writers -- and the kind of writing on Medium is not the kind that has a paying fanbase (like e.g. fiction might).

chipotle_coyote 10y ago

Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do something better. I think an argument can be made that Ev is right that the advertising model for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting recommendations. I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I quietly move all my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross-posting certain articles over to Medium.

j2kun 10y ago

> I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game. While this may be true for most blogs, I curiously found myself in a different situation, having spent almost no time trying to game the social system on my blog (only setting up auto-posts of new content on facebook/twitter, very seldom manual tweet to promote archived content). Somehow I got up to today, with 1-2k daily hits for derelict content, and enough name recognition to get job offers and occasionally run into fans in real life.