4 ms·

It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading experience of any publishing platform. Remember when they used to publish blog ar

It seems to be commonly regarded that Medium has the most excremental reading experience of any publishing platform. Remember when they used to publish blog articles about making the web a better reading experience? That seems a bad joke now. So Medium have trashed their brand. But my question is: do they know? Do they care? Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? What's going on?

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
> do they know? Maybe > Do they care? Sure, if they know. > Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? Doubtful >What's going on? They don't know how to monetize any better than any other web site. They're following what other sites do to try and engage the people who do visit Medium longer. The problem is, what works for sites where the reading experience is secondary doesn't work for a site whose reading experience is primary. Somehow they either don't know that or cannot think of anything better to try.
- true_religion 9y ago
  They're probably seeing an uptick in signups, subscriptions, and all the other metrics they care about---so they keep going down the rabbit hole of adding more modals and call to actions, and popunders. They don't realize at the end of that track is a brick wall of 0% growth as new visitors are instantly turned off. If I werent' already committed to using Medium, I'd click away the instant I saw the site as it reminds me too much of spam-blog pages.
  - carapace 9y ago
    I just reached the point of "ew, no" when I'm about to click a link that I can see is going to go to Medium due to the popups that start, "You've read N articles on Medium, ..." I can't recall what the rest says because by the time I've scanned the first part I've already right-clicked to "inspect" to delete the element. (Then I cleared all Medium cookies, but that doesn't prevent them from showing the popup again, and it still has the N so obviously they are storing it server-side. :-( ) Bleah.
ryandrake 9y ago
I don't work for Medium, so total speculative fiction here, but let me imagine the life of a product manager at a small growing company... Somewhere at Medium, perhaps even reading this thread, there is a Product Manager in charge of, among other things, making the Medium reading experience great. Unfortunately, he (not knowing his gender, just picking a pronoun) is angry and frustrated every day. He wants to do right by users, indeed, his mission is to make everything about the product awesome. But, there are so many competing priorities and agendas. His boss will say things like "We can't measure whether it's a better reading experience, so your KPIs are things like conversion, reach, number of user engagements!" So he grudgingly sets out to optimize these things, while at least trying to keep the site usable. His first suggestion is to pin all the site links to the top of the page so people are always clicking around Medium, churning from page to page. The "Social Sharing" PM reaches out with "Hey, buddy, why not make the social sharing buttons twice as big, and never remove them from the page--both our numbers will be through the roof! The "Audience Growth" PM wants to make sure there are at least 3 signup buttons visible at all times, because obviously users are just not seeing them. He wants to help his colleagues, and, he is expected to drive his KPIs. We can compromise a little here, and a little there. All these internal stakeholders will be grateful, and he will be seen as a team player. So he has the developers go off and implement these things, rolls them out, and checks the all-important metrics dashboard. Lo and behold, all his targets are met! Success! A few more stock options next review-time! But in the back of his mind, the product owner in him is screaming in horror at what he's putting his users through in order to meet these goals. Maybe he even brings up these concerns with his management, but they dismiss them and want to instead talk about the next floating button bar he's going to add to drive those numbers even higher...
mannykannot 9y ago
Readability seems to be in regression, and not just at Medium. If a (near-) optimal solution has been found, and you are committed to doing something different, it is likely to be suboptimal.
CM30 9y ago
Medium's trashed their brand way before this. Likely the point where quality content became less of a concern than 'anything with words' and the staff decided that promoted the vapid and overtly political was more important than finding decent stuff for their users to read. Of course, all these layout changes and annoyances have helped even more, so what was once a minimalistic site with a decent quality control standard is now just any old blogging platform with any old blogging platform's ugly awkward to use layout.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Medium is not, by a long stretch, the worst reading experience out there. But it is intentionally bad. Which is actually even more annoying. Medium took a format which was actually quite good and then deliberately, with full awareness, and malice aforethought, went and made it worse. That ... is pretty annoying, and tells you about the site's priorities.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

> do they know? Maybe > Do they care? Sure, if they know. > Do they read all the articles about how appalling the reading experience on their platform is? Doubtful >What's going on? They don't know how to monetize any better than any other web site. They're following what other sites do to try and engage the people who do visit Medium longer. The problem is, what works for sites where the reading experience is secondary doesn't work for a site whose reading experience is primary. Somehow they either don't know that or cannot think of anything better to try.

true_religion 9y ago
They're probably seeing an uptick in signups, subscriptions, and all the other metrics they care about---so they keep going down the rabbit hole of adding more modals and call to actions, and popunders. They don't realize at the end of that track is a brick wall of 0% growth as new visitors are instantly turned off. If I werent' already committed to using Medium, I'd click away the instant I saw the site as it reminds me too much of spam-blog pages.
- carapace 9y ago
  I just reached the point of "ew, no" when I'm about to click a link that I can see is going to go to Medium due to the popups that start, "You've read N articles on Medium, ..." I can't recall what the rest says because by the time I've scanned the first part I've already right-clicked to "inspect" to delete the element. (Then I cleared all Medium cookies, but that doesn't prevent them from showing the popup again, and it still has the N so obviously they are storing it server-side. :-( ) Bleah.

ryandrake 9y ago

I don't work for Medium, so total speculative fiction here, but let me imagine the life of a product manager at a small growing company... Somewhere at Medium, perhaps even reading this thread, there is a Product Manager in charge of, among other things, making the Medium reading experience great. Unfortunately, he (not knowing his gender, just picking a pronoun) is angry and frustrated every day. He wants to do right by users, indeed, his mission is to make everything about the product awesome. But, there are so many competing priorities and agendas. His boss will say things like "We can't measure whether it's a better reading experience, so your KPIs are things like conversion, reach, number of user engagements!" So he grudgingly sets out to optimize these things, while at least trying to keep the site usable. His first suggestion is to pin all the site links to the top of the page so people are always clicking around Medium, churning from page to page. The "Social Sharing" PM reaches out with "Hey, buddy, why not make the social sharing buttons twice as big, and never remove them from the page--both our numbers will be through the roof! The "Audience Growth" PM wants to make sure there are at least 3 signup buttons visible at all times, because obviously users are just not seeing them. He wants to help his colleagues, and, he is expected to drive his KPIs. We can compromise a little here, and a little there. All these internal stakeholders will be grateful, and he will be seen as a team player. So he has the developers go off and implement these things, rolls them out, and checks the all-important metrics dashboard. Lo and behold, all his targets are met! Success! A few more stock options next review-time! But in the back of his mind, the product owner in him is screaming in horror at what he's putting his users through in order to meet these goals. Maybe he even brings up these concerns with his management, but they dismiss them and want to instead talk about the next floating button bar he's going to add to drive those numbers even higher...

mannykannot 9y ago

Readability seems to be in regression, and not just at Medium. If a (near-) optimal solution has been found, and you are committed to doing something different, it is likely to be suboptimal.

CM30 9y ago

Medium's trashed their brand way before this. Likely the point where quality content became less of a concern than 'anything with words' and the staff decided that promoted the vapid and overtly political was more important than finding decent stuff for their users to read. Of course, all these layout changes and annoyances have helped even more, so what was once a minimalistic site with a decent quality control standard is now just any old blogging platform with any old blogging platform's ugly awkward to use layout.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Medium is not, by a long stretch, the worst reading experience out there. But it is intentionally bad. Which is actually even more annoying. Medium took a format which was actually quite good and then deliberately, with full awareness, and malice aforethought, went and made it worse. That ... is pretty annoying, and tells you about the site's priorities.