3 ms·

I was going to do some technical posts for medium, but i found as a user they were not surfacing good technical content. They were surfacing bubble gum articles

I was going to do some technical posts for medium, but i found as a user they were not surfacing good technical content. They were surfacing bubble gum articles better placed in cosmopolitan, even after i set my preferences and explicitly searched multiple times. My click history did have me clicking on articles like that, but only on moments of weakness, i didn't intend to not did i want an infinite list of vacuous content. There is a classic problem in content recommendations, what someone says they want vs what they actually click, good systems ( from 2008 ) do a blend, then start balancing. I cancelled my 'open paywall' and will probably start a WordPress.

tonystubblebine 7y ago
FWIW, Medium switched editorial and curation strategies for technical content and all the technical content leveled up. My standard for technical content is O'Reilly circa 2003, and Medium's not there yet. But I'm hopeful that Medium's recent changes are a precursor to leveling up again down the road. The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs. For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes. I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard. A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication. The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.

tonystubblebine 7y ago

FWIW, Medium switched editorial and curation strategies for technical content and all the technical content leveled up. My standard for technical content is O'Reilly circa 2003, and Medium's not there yet. But I'm hopeful that Medium's recent changes are a precursor to leveling up again down the road. The change is to add a lot more human curation mixed in with the algorithmic promotion. They have deals now with at least three publications where that publication's editor's taste is factored into the promotion. Those pubs are Toward Data Science, Better Programming (which I help with), and one other that's not announced. As I look at Medium's featured articles in their Programming topic, 2/3 of the articles were curated by one of those pubs. For the Better Programming deal, we also got budget for copy editors and in the last 2+ months have copy edited about 700 articles. I find that the copy editors are doing a lot to make an article read better--it's subtle, but definitely way more than just fixing a few spelling mistakes. I worked at O'Reilly circa 2003, which is how it came to be my gold standard. A great technical document needs a smart author who has the time to write something complete and then that author needs to be paired with good quality control. It's like how the software you write is better if someone else tests it. O'Reilly literally had code testers for their book and a very robust errata program for folding in fixes to bugs after publication. The people who've done that in article length writing are RailsCast and more recently Swift by Sundell. That would be the obvious next level for Medium to support, and I think they will, but probably not for another year or more.