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This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no al

This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market. Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals. Medium was the only good option for that. Features like the table of contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.

whsheet 7y ago
> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above. Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.
- close04 7y ago
  > all non-tech Medium blogs > link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service. But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?
  - LordDragonfang 7y ago
    If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.
    - close04 7y ago
      > much more likely Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference. The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know". > interesting insights How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.
      - whsheet 7y ago
        You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true. Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.
    - kixiQu 7y ago
      Your second statement might more accurately be formulated as "I tend to find the insights of people with a technical background more interesting", or even "I am more capable of understanding what is interesting about the insights of people with some sort of technical background even if it is not my own." Otherwise, you're claiming that there's something objectively "uninteresting" about, like, the majority of human insights that civilizations have ever had and found valuable.
- arielm 7y ago
  Focus is great, but fluff exists everywhere. Tech and non-tech alike (although there are far more sub divisions...). Even tech.
thanatropism 7y ago
I started my blog thinking "at most 10 people will actually keep up with this". It's a little frustrating to have low traffic levels -- everyone wants to be famous and loved by millions -- but as it turns out I know my handful of readers on Twitter and it's a fruitful interaction. OTOH I'd be constantly trying to tune my writing to please a mass undifferentiated audience. I'd sound like kdnuggets or some such. Life is too short for that.
daliusd 7y ago
Good content finds its readers itself.
forrestthewoods 7y ago
Medium is absolute garbage for discovery. Worthless trash. My typical post on Medium got 5,000 to 10,000 views. I’ve had a few break 100k. Medium provided roughly zero views. All my views came from Reddit, HN, Twitter, or Google. If you’re using Medium for discovery you’re wasting your time.
joelrunyon 7y ago
Discoverability isn't real. It's a term people use when they want to abdicate their marketing efforts. Whether you use your own platform or build on someone else's - discoverability almost never "just happens." People put a ton of work into being discovered "organically."
paulddraper 7y ago
> Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. Could you syndicate? For programming topics, I've done that with DZone for years.
bhl 7y ago
Personal blogging and discover-ability are reconcilable: why doesn't someone build an aggregator where people can submit their essays and write-ups with RSS feeds?

whsheet 7y ago

> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above. Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.

close04 7y ago
> all non-tech Medium blogs > link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service. But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?
- LordDragonfang 7y ago
  If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.
  - close04 7y ago
    > much more likely Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference. The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know". > interesting insights How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.
    - whsheet 7y ago
      You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true. Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.
  - kixiQu 7y ago
    Your second statement might more accurately be formulated as "I tend to find the insights of people with a technical background more interesting", or even "I am more capable of understanding what is interesting about the insights of people with some sort of technical background even if it is not my own." Otherwise, you're claiming that there's something objectively "uninteresting" about, like, the majority of human insights that civilizations have ever had and found valuable.
arielm 7y ago
Focus is great, but fluff exists everywhere. Tech and non-tech alike (although there are far more sub divisions...). Even tech.

thanatropism 7y ago

I started my blog thinking "at most 10 people will actually keep up with this". It's a little frustrating to have low traffic levels -- everyone wants to be famous and loved by millions -- but as it turns out I know my handful of readers on Twitter and it's a fruitful interaction. OTOH I'd be constantly trying to tune my writing to please a mass undifferentiated audience. I'd sound like kdnuggets or some such. Life is too short for that.

daliusd 7y ago

Good content finds its readers itself.

forrestthewoods 7y ago

Medium is absolute garbage for discovery. Worthless trash. My typical post on Medium got 5,000 to 10,000 views. I’ve had a few break 100k. Medium provided roughly zero views. All my views came from Reddit, HN, Twitter, or Google. If you’re using Medium for discovery you’re wasting your time.

joelrunyon 7y ago

Discoverability isn't real. It's a term people use when they want to abdicate their marketing efforts. Whether you use your own platform or build on someone else's - discoverability almost never "just happens." People put a ton of work into being discovered "organically."

paulddraper 7y ago

> Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. Could you syndicate? For programming topics, I've done that with DZone for years.

bhl 7y ago

Personal blogging and discover-ability are reconcilable: why doesn't someone build an aggregator where people can submit their essays and write-ups with RSS feeds?