8 ms·

Or to sell themselves. Or worse, writing a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence".

tonystubblebine 8y ago
I run a publication on Medium, Better Humans. My understanding is that the pivot to be a place where most writing is paid for was specifically to crowd out content marketing. The content marketing is, as the two of you say, basically Wikipedia summaries and people selling themselves. It's part of the style guide for their Membership program that writers can't have calls to action (with a few exceptions, like if it's an excerpt from your book). It's been a great program for us. We write in the area of personal development and it's allowed us to pour a lot of money into getting authors who've actually tested their advice and then working with them to write very thorough tutorials that other people could follow. In my biased opinion, what we used to compete with was trash simply because it didn't work. Content marketers were writing great headlines for productivity advice they'd never tested, the advice had huge gaps or mistakes, and then it would stop short of telling you what to do so that it could make some call-to-action sales pitch. We've been getting much less competition for page views from these trash articles based on recent Medium changes. The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. As an example, I have an article I wrote that's just creeping up on 1M page views. That just wasn't possible before.
- criddell 8y ago
  Why stay on Medium? Why not take total ownership and move to your own space?
  - tonystubblebine 8y ago
    It's a good partnership for us. - they handle distribution and are better at it than us. - they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services. - it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business. We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.
    - criddell 8y ago
      I'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be around for a long time. One question though - what do you mean by distribution?
      - tonystubblebine 8y ago
        Re: sticking around. They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be. Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.
      - owens99 8y ago
        I’m not a fan of Medium (mainly because of the UI both on mobile and desktop) but it doesn’t seem like you have anything to back up what you are saying.
        criddell 8y ago
        Well they laid off a bunch of people, changed their business model, and are trying to raise another round. They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.
    - mprev 8y ago
      I’m curious as to what you mean by distribution. I can’t work out what that mean in the context of the web.
      - tonystubblebine 8y ago
        Re: distribution. I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers. They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers. I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts. I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. This is amazing - this is the thing that people demand of Youtube, in order that the algorithm stops promoting anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers.
  - Will_Parker 8y ago
    Dilemas are, who gatekeeps the gatekeepers, and how much do they want to act like a publisher vs a town square. If too much, maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish.
    - jamiek88 8y ago
      >maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish And therein you have found the crux. Take away the massive human resource cost of moderating this they still run the risk of implying approval/endorsement of things they do not manually kill that the algo throws up. Personally I think you could just consider that training for the AI. They will have to so something eventually, I can’t see the EU whose member nations do have hate speech laws letting this rabbit hole continue for much longer.
- bachmeier 8y ago
  > The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I'll start clicking on Medium links again (on purpose). "Trash articles" is a good description of the most recent content I read on there before giving up on Medium.
- DpdC 8y ago
  Medium pays? I just found out about that. And how exactly does it pay you? Because they have never paid me a cent. On the other hand. Medium. It is a specific platform for the English language. It would be impossible to make a blog in Spanish inside of Medium, And earn some money, really? I think I'm right.. Mmmm
duxup 8y ago
>a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence" As someone learning programming this hurts so much. I've read so many medium articles that are sort of correct .... but also not and imply things that are straight wrong. They clearly aren't that many steps beyond my ability and their writing implies they are ... but their work way not. Really frustrating when you see an obvious template or pattern that is just a bit "off" used in medium post after after post and the code works, but is way not handy to use as you can't really build much off of it / alter it with ease.
steve_adams_86 8y ago
This is so toxic and tiring. It's worth paying for tutorials these days because not only are there thousands out there who want to promote themselves, they want to do so by pretending to be experts. Some are very convincing. If you're a junior or unfamiliar with a technology, you can find yourself reading some of the worst trash out there. I'm fortunate to have enough experience to tell the wheat from the chaff usually, but holy hell there's a lot of sifting to do. I'm currently studying Python for the first time and the amount of garbage writing on the language I find is frustrating.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  The other trouble is, once you have some experience there just aren't very many good tutorials. I was looking through tutorials for node, and most of the ones I found started off with how to open the developer console, and what a for loop is. I'd very much prefer if tutorial authors would just link to one of the many basic CS fundamentals tutorials, and then skip much of the basics. If I'm learning Javascript, I just want to know what the for loop syntax is, without needing an explanation of the concept.
  - Pete_D 8y ago
    A bit off topic, but in case you were still looking, may I suggest https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/? That site is my first port of call whenever I need to get a quick overview of a new language.
    - wyclif 8y ago
      That is good. For books, I like Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS series.
- dabockster 8y ago
  This is me and Angular. I tried to study it via YouTube tutorials. There were so many holes in the teaching patterns that I gave up on it.
- 8y ago

I run a publication on Medium, Better Humans. My understanding is that the pivot to be a place where most writing is paid for was specifically to crowd out content marketing. The content marketing is, as the two of you say, basically Wikipedia summaries and people selling themselves. It's part of the style guide for their Membership program that writers can't have calls to action (with a few exceptions, like if it's an excerpt from your book). It's been a great program for us. We write in the area of personal development and it's allowed us to pour a lot of money into getting authors who've actually tested their advice and then working with them to write very thorough tutorials that other people could follow. In my biased opinion, what we used to compete with was trash simply because it didn't work. Content marketers were writing great headlines for productivity advice they'd never tested, the advice had huge gaps or mistakes, and then it would stop short of telling you what to do so that it could make some call-to-action sales pitch. We've been getting much less competition for page views from these trash articles based on recent Medium changes. The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. As an example, I have an article I wrote that's just creeping up on 1M page views. That just wasn't possible before.

criddell 8y ago
Why stay on Medium? Why not take total ownership and move to your own space?
- tonystubblebine 8y ago
  It's a good partnership for us. - they handle distribution and are better at it than us. - they pay more than we'd make in ad rates or conversion to our own services. - it lets us focus on what we love doing, which is the writing and editing, without managing the other side of a publishing business. We have license to the copyright for most things we've done in the last 18 months, so it's not a full lock-in either.
  - criddell 8y ago
    I'd make sure you have good backups. Medium doesn't feel like it's going to be around for a long time. One question though - what do you mean by distribution?
    - tonystubblebine 8y ago
      Re: sticking around. They used to have zero revenue and deep investor pockets. Now they have growing revenue and still have deep investor pockets. There's ways for them to disappear, but fewer than there used to be. Re: distribution. On a typical article, 80% of page views comes from within the Medium network through promotion by the Medium algorithm. Those page views (and even the followers of our publication) are readers that Medium sourced by publishing lots of other articles than ours. Their algorithm is much more reliable at driving 10k's or 100k's of readers than my other choices: mailing list, reddit, hackernews, SEO.
    - owens99 8y ago
      I’m not a fan of Medium (mainly because of the UI both on mobile and desktop) but it doesn’t seem like you have anything to back up what you are saying.
      - criddell 8y ago
        Well they laid off a bunch of people, changed their business model, and are trying to raise another round. They aren't some scrappy startup anymore, they are the big dog in the space and doing those kinds of things doesn't exactly signal that all is well.
  - mprev 8y ago
    I’m curious as to what you mean by distribution. I can’t work out what that mean in the context of the web.
    - tonystubblebine 8y ago
      Re: distribution. I answered this above too. Medium finds me readers, both a lot of readers and high quality readers. They break out their stats by how many readers came directly from promotion throughout the Medium network. For a typical article, that can be in the 10k's of readers. I didn't mention this above though, which is that Medium readers seem to be very high quality. They share posts out on social media, so they're good for helping get the word out, and a lot of them are people I end up meeting in other contexts. I have one post from October that's creeping up on 1M readers. I never would have been able to get that many people to read it on my own.
pjc50 8y ago
> they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. This is amazing - this is the thing that people demand of Youtube, in order that the algorithm stops promoting anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers.
- Will_Parker 8y ago
  Dilemas are, who gatekeeps the gatekeepers, and how much do they want to act like a publisher vs a town square. If too much, maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish.
  - jamiek88 8y ago
    >maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish And therein you have found the crux. Take away the massive human resource cost of moderating this they still run the risk of implying approval/endorsement of things they do not manually kill that the algo throws up. Personally I think you could just consider that training for the AI. They will have to so something eventually, I can’t see the EU whose member nations do have hate speech laws letting this rabbit hole continue for much longer.
bachmeier 8y ago
> The biggest change was that they manually review all articles before allowing an article to get promoted by their algorithm. I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I'll start clicking on Medium links again (on purpose). "Trash articles" is a good description of the most recent content I read on there before giving up on Medium.
DpdC 8y ago
Medium pays? I just found out about that. And how exactly does it pay you? Because they have never paid me a cent. On the other hand. Medium. It is a specific platform for the English language. It would be impossible to make a blog in Spanish inside of Medium, And earn some money, really? I think I'm right.. Mmmm

duxup 8y ago

>a subpar programming tutorial to have "online presence" As someone learning programming this hurts so much. I've read so many medium articles that are sort of correct .... but also not and imply things that are straight wrong. They clearly aren't that many steps beyond my ability and their writing implies they are ... but their work way not. Really frustrating when you see an obvious template or pattern that is just a bit "off" used in medium post after after post and the code works, but is way not handy to use as you can't really build much off of it / alter it with ease.

steve_adams_86 8y ago

This is so toxic and tiring. It's worth paying for tutorials these days because not only are there thousands out there who want to promote themselves, they want to do so by pretending to be experts. Some are very convincing. If you're a junior or unfamiliar with a technology, you can find yourself reading some of the worst trash out there. I'm fortunate to have enough experience to tell the wheat from the chaff usually, but holy hell there's a lot of sifting to do. I'm currently studying Python for the first time and the amount of garbage writing on the language I find is frustrating.

zrobotics 8y ago
The other trouble is, once you have some experience there just aren't very many good tutorials. I was looking through tutorials for node, and most of the ones I found started off with how to open the developer console, and what a for loop is. I'd very much prefer if tutorial authors would just link to one of the many basic CS fundamentals tutorials, and then skip much of the basics. If I'm learning Javascript, I just want to know what the for loop syntax is, without needing an explanation of the concept.
- Pete_D 8y ago
  A bit off topic, but in case you were still looking, may I suggest https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/? That site is my first port of call whenever I need to get a quick overview of a new language.
  - wyclif 8y ago
    That is good. For books, I like Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS series.
dabockster 8y ago
This is me and Angular. I tried to study it via YouTube tutorials. There were so many holes in the teaching patterns that I gave up on it.
8y ago