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Rather than this community's emphasis on petty issues ("no javascript"), I'd start by saying something positive about Medium. If you can't be bothered to self-

by fleddr 4y ago

Rather than this community's emphasis on petty issues ("no javascript"), I'd start by saying something positive about Medium. If you can't be bothered to self-host a blog, you can link your domain to your Medium publication (before May of this year this was free, and continues to be free for earlier users). You'd then have a free blog on a proper domain, with zero ads and you can even tweak the design with a few clicks to make it your own. Further, it comes with a comment system, followers, etc. It's easy to blog as the writing experience is quite excellent. I think all of that combined is a lot of value, in particular for a casual blogger. And it doesn't cost a cent. To me, this counters the list of small UI annoyances. We've grown extremely entitled and cynical, I'm just trying to recognize value when I see it. Because certainly the value isn't zero. The negative I have about Medium is that just like many other content services, they failed to solve the discovery problem. There used to be a lot of quality writing on Medium and there might still be a lot, but those writers are not recognized by the ranking/discovery algorithms. Instead, they are completely outclassed by people gaming the system. Check any topic/category and see that most are flooded with low effort no-substance articles with click bait titles. Those people know how to work the algorithms, and they win. So...noise goes to the top instead of quality. And for those quality writers to gain traction, they need to join the engagement hacking or find crickets. It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up. It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jacooper 4y ago
> It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up. I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage. Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable. Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more. So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world. > It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point. I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting. HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with. But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Ads don't apply to Medium. It's a subscription model. In theory it's a refreshing take as they rightfully recognize the many (ethical) issues with running ads, surveillance tech, and so on. If for a moment we would assume a very large group of qualitative "citizen journalists" regularly writing, together they'd produce a vast sea of high quality content. Medium at one point also onboarded actual pro publications, so you'd get a really great set of content that in volume would be the equivalent of several thousands of newspaper and in terms of quality be close, whilst being more diverse. 5$ per month for that pile of quality is a steal. But for that to work, the quality has to be discoverable. You need to able to look at the homepage, and see top notch writing in the categories you're interested in. It would be a single place to do most of one's deeper reading, with seemingly no end. For very low costs. None of that has worked out, for the reasons I mentioned.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
You can write exactly the same about Blogger. Medium added nothing

by fleddr 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jacooper 4y ago

> It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up. I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage. Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable. Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more. So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world. > It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point. I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting. HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with. But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.

fleddr 4y ago
Ads don't apply to Medium. It's a subscription model. In theory it's a refreshing take as they rightfully recognize the many (ethical) issues with running ads, surveillance tech, and so on. If for a moment we would assume a very large group of qualitative "citizen journalists" regularly writing, together they'd produce a vast sea of high quality content. Medium at one point also onboarded actual pro publications, so you'd get a really great set of content that in volume would be the equivalent of several thousands of newspaper and in terms of quality be close, whilst being more diverse. 5$ per month for that pile of quality is a steal. But for that to work, the quality has to be discoverable. You need to able to look at the homepage, and see top notch writing in the categories you're interested in. It would be a single place to do most of one's deeper reading, with seemingly no end. For very low costs. None of that has worked out, for the reasons I mentioned.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

You can write exactly the same about Blogger. Medium added nothing