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> It’s based on the premise that, instead of yet another never-ending feed, people would be much happier with a limited set of carefully curated stories, chosen

> It’s based on the premise that, instead of yet another never-ending feed, people would be much happier with a limited set of carefully curated stories, chosen by experts among topics we care about. To see if this would be a feature I want, I went to Medium's "Staff Picks" page to see what they already care about. Front and center is an article about some kind of convention for twins. Also featured: a post about witches getting political and another post about design lessons learned from cats. Not sold on Medium's ability to curate articles...

Swizec 10y ago
If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber. Their personalized curated feed is already really good. I had to stop looking at their weekly email because my clickthrough rate was too high and it was a time sink.
- bootload 10y ago
  "If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber." If I was Medium I'd hire a team (three or four) experienced newspaper editors [0] and use their expertise to bring back some discipline back to the story process. Do you remember newspapers? There were hundreds of competing stories but the news was carefully selected on a daily basis. This is what is lacking. The machine is being gamed. Maybe the editorial teams' suggestions should be used to train some aspects of story and category selection? Machine learning is a tool and if Facebook with all it's propellor heads have a problem, what hope have Medium? A different approach is needed. reference [0] Lots of newspaper people are out of work or under utilised and as such their availability is high. For example this tweet highlighting guardian journalists getting the sack: https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065 https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065
  - Swizec 10y ago
    > Do you remember newspapers? Honestly? No. They're that thing my dad would buy on the weekends, read one page of, and then we'd use it for potato peels, lining the floor when painting rooms, and stuff like that. By the time I was old enough to even consider reading newspapers, they had devolved into clickbait sensationalist garbage. Designed primarily to find whatever boogeyman would make each newspaper's audience most likely to buy the issue. For left newspapers the top story was always about a businessman doing something bad, for right newspapers the top story was about how this or that nationality is threatening our economy. Sometimes both sides had the top story as this or that natural disaster or war that happened so far away that it's irrelevant. At least the trashy magazines were always honest about being trashy. Their top story was this or that random celebrity doing some outrageous act that nobody cares about. Honestly, the problem is tying remuneration to readership. The other problems are emergent. Edit: the intro of this System of a Down video sums up my thoughts excellently --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk
    - arkitaip 10y ago
      Whatever your feelings about newspapers are, they have existed for hundreds of years and learnt some incredibly valuable lessons about news, journalism, reader psychology, etc. The collective wisdom of newspapers of record could fuel countless of business ventures and avoid lots of costly mistakes.
      - Swizec 10y ago
        Totally. I just don't think I've ever experienced that. For as long as I can remember news has been about sensationalism at all cost. The question was do I personally remember newspapers and the answer is no. I remember them as a thing that exists, yes, but not as a thing that provides value.
        hkmurakami 10y ago
        As one of the other commenters suggested, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Economist.
- majormajor 10y ago
  This might work for most people in five to ten years. Today, Spotify's algorithms couldn't figure out that I might be interested in a new album released by one of my most-listened-to bands last year. I didn't know about it until seeing it on Wikipedia, of all places, since I rely (over-rely) on Spotify for discovery. Netflix is great at telling me I might be interested in stuff I've heard of but intentionally not watched cause I'm not interested in it despite superficial similarities with stuff I do like. They seem rather useless at detecting that I like a certain type/style/"quality" (this is too pretentious, but I can't come up with a better word at the moment) of movie/show regardless of genre rather than a certain set of genre tags. And so on. What I wouldn't do to get most machine-learning curated recommendation engines with human-curated ones. Think of it as the difference between reading The Wirecutter and buying based on whatever Amazon.com's homepage pops up. Or comparing a daily digest of The New Yorker with whatever shit articles Facebook bubbles up to me.
- YPCrumble 10y ago
  You're implying that it was a time sink because your clickthrough rate was too high. If reading a news source isn't worth doing once a week it probably isn't worth doing once a month, once a year, or ever. I don't think the issue is your clickthrough rate. I think the issue is that once you click through to the articles they don't contain anything of value. Your email sounds like a curated list of clickbait articles without any substance. It sounds like they've used machine learning to curate the most clickable titles (short-term gains) while ignoring quality of content (long-term retention). In a high-growth environment, for a startup that's less than five years old, that isn't surprising.
superquest 10y ago
I think it's a pretty large strategic disadvantage for a news organization to be headquartered in the little bubble that is San Francisco. Goofballs in SF will read that shit but few others will. Particularly that "design lessons learned from cats" piece haha! Can't see a newsroom anywhere else in the world being impressed by that ...
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  Medium's trying to get in on that buzzfeed cash.
  - Veen 10y ago
    BuzzFeed makes its money from native advertising, and it pays for content. In many ways, BuzzFeed is quite a traditional media organization. Medium doesn't pay for content (at the moment) and doesn't do advertising. While people will happily click on garbage content if it's free, I don't see anyone paying for a "Membership" so they can get a stream of cat design stories and low-effort listicles.
    - LoSboccacc 10y ago
      especially because that service is already there all in all it's weird that medium intend to monetize the viewers instead of the publishers. well many newspapers do that but then readers have back news articles, not blogs and opinion pieces.
asadlionpk 10y ago
They can definitely learn a thing or two from Spotify and Quora. Those Quora emails are always on point!
- samsolomon 10y ago
  Quora's Daily Digest is the best transactional email I've seen! I'm curious what their open rate is because, it's one of the few digest emails I read every time. For those that aren't on Quora, here are some topics from my most recent digest: - As a SaaS company, do you allow customers to pause their account? https://www.quora.com/As-a-SaaS-company-do-you-allow-customers-to-pause-their-account https://www.quora.com/As-a-SaaS-company-do-you-allow-custome... - Why does every employer asks about my current salary during a job interview? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-every-employer-asks-about-my-current-salary-during-a-job-interview https://www.quora.com/Why-does-every-employer-asks-about-my-... - What is the strangest archaeological object ever found? https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strangest-archaeological-object-ever-found https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strangest-archaeological-o... - What is the typical revenue ramp for a venture-backed SaaS startup? https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-typical-revenue-ramp-for-a-venture-backed-SaaS-startup https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-typical-revenue-ramp-for-a...
smcnally 10y ago
> a limited set of carefully curated stories, chosen by experts among topics we care about That's a good definition of a magazine and of a newspaper.

Swizec 10y ago

If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber. Their personalized curated feed is already really good. I had to stop looking at their weekly email because my clickthrough rate was too high and it was a time sink.

bootload 10y ago
"If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber." If I was Medium I'd hire a team (three or four) experienced newspaper editors [0] and use their expertise to bring back some discipline back to the story process. Do you remember newspapers? There were hundreds of competing stories but the news was carefully selected on a daily basis. This is what is lacking. The machine is being gamed. Maybe the editorial teams' suggestions should be used to train some aspects of story and category selection? Machine learning is a tool and if Facebook with all it's propellor heads have a problem, what hope have Medium? A different approach is needed. reference [0] Lots of newspaper people are out of work or under utilised and as such their availability is high. For example this tweet highlighting guardian journalists getting the sack: https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065 https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065
- Swizec 10y ago
  > Do you remember newspapers? Honestly? No. They're that thing my dad would buy on the weekends, read one page of, and then we'd use it for potato peels, lining the floor when painting rooms, and stuff like that. By the time I was old enough to even consider reading newspapers, they had devolved into clickbait sensationalist garbage. Designed primarily to find whatever boogeyman would make each newspaper's audience most likely to buy the issue. For left newspapers the top story was always about a businessman doing something bad, for right newspapers the top story was about how this or that nationality is threatening our economy. Sometimes both sides had the top story as this or that natural disaster or war that happened so far away that it's irrelevant. At least the trashy magazines were always honest about being trashy. Their top story was this or that random celebrity doing some outrageous act that nobody cares about. Honestly, the problem is tying remuneration to readership. The other problems are emergent. Edit: the intro of this System of a Down video sums up my thoughts excellently --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk
  - arkitaip 10y ago
    Whatever your feelings about newspapers are, they have existed for hundreds of years and learnt some incredibly valuable lessons about news, journalism, reader psychology, etc. The collective wisdom of newspapers of record could fuel countless of business ventures and avoid lots of costly mistakes.
    - Swizec 10y ago
      Totally. I just don't think I've ever experienced that. For as long as I can remember news has been about sensationalism at all cost. The question was do I personally remember newspapers and the answer is no. I remember them as a thing that exists, yes, but not as a thing that provides value.
      - hkmurakami 10y ago
        As one of the other commenters suggested, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Economist.
majormajor 10y ago
This might work for most people in five to ten years. Today, Spotify's algorithms couldn't figure out that I might be interested in a new album released by one of my most-listened-to bands last year. I didn't know about it until seeing it on Wikipedia, of all places, since I rely (over-rely) on Spotify for discovery. Netflix is great at telling me I might be interested in stuff I've heard of but intentionally not watched cause I'm not interested in it despite superficial similarities with stuff I do like. They seem rather useless at detecting that I like a certain type/style/"quality" (this is too pretentious, but I can't come up with a better word at the moment) of movie/show regardless of genre rather than a certain set of genre tags. And so on. What I wouldn't do to get most machine-learning curated recommendation engines with human-curated ones. Think of it as the difference between reading The Wirecutter and buying based on whatever Amazon.com's homepage pops up. Or comparing a daily digest of The New Yorker with whatever shit articles Facebook bubbles up to me.
YPCrumble 10y ago
You're implying that it was a time sink because your clickthrough rate was too high. If reading a news source isn't worth doing once a week it probably isn't worth doing once a month, once a year, or ever. I don't think the issue is your clickthrough rate. I think the issue is that once you click through to the articles they don't contain anything of value. Your email sounds like a curated list of clickbait articles without any substance. It sounds like they've used machine learning to curate the most clickable titles (short-term gains) while ignoring quality of content (long-term retention). In a high-growth environment, for a startup that's less than five years old, that isn't surprising.

superquest 10y ago

I think it's a pretty large strategic disadvantage for a news organization to be headquartered in the little bubble that is San Francisco. Goofballs in SF will read that shit but few others will. Particularly that "design lessons learned from cats" piece haha! Can't see a newsroom anywhere else in the world being impressed by that ...

beaconstudios 10y ago
Medium's trying to get in on that buzzfeed cash.
- Veen 10y ago
  BuzzFeed makes its money from native advertising, and it pays for content. In many ways, BuzzFeed is quite a traditional media organization. Medium doesn't pay for content (at the moment) and doesn't do advertising. While people will happily click on garbage content if it's free, I don't see anyone paying for a "Membership" so they can get a stream of cat design stories and low-effort listicles.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    especially because that service is already there all in all it's weird that medium intend to monetize the viewers instead of the publishers. well many newspapers do that but then readers have back news articles, not blogs and opinion pieces.

asadlionpk 10y ago

They can definitely learn a thing or two from Spotify and Quora. Those Quora emails are always on point!

samsolomon 10y ago
Quora's Daily Digest is the best transactional email I've seen! I'm curious what their open rate is because, it's one of the few digest emails I read every time. For those that aren't on Quora, here are some topics from my most recent digest: - As a SaaS company, do you allow customers to pause their account? https://www.quora.com/As-a-SaaS-company-do-you-allow-customers-to-pause-their-account https://www.quora.com/As-a-SaaS-company-do-you-allow-custome... - Why does every employer asks about my current salary during a job interview? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-every-employer-asks-about-my-current-salary-during-a-job-interview https://www.quora.com/Why-does-every-employer-asks-about-my-... - What is the strangest archaeological object ever found? https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strangest-archaeological-object-ever-found https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-strangest-archaeological-o... - What is the typical revenue ramp for a venture-backed SaaS startup? https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-typical-revenue-ramp-for-a-venture-backed-SaaS-startup https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-typical-revenue-ramp-for-a...

smcnally 10y ago

> a limited set of carefully curated stories, chosen by experts among topics we care about That's a good definition of a magazine and of a newspaper.