> "There are far, far, far too many advice articles on this site. It’s one thing to say ‘I lost my job and this is how it affected/changed me,’ that’s personal experience. But advice articles always contain the same implied subtext: you’re doing it wrong and I’m the genius who is going to show you how to do it the right way. Hence, how to fix your relationship, how to manage your spare time, ten things your boss does that you haven’t figured out, etc. etc."
I've seen this attitude in so many different situations IRL and online. It's so refreshing to read it so clearly and fearlessly stated like that.
> How can platforms like Medium cultivate a culture that deprioritizes and devalues the types of spam content the article author is referring to?
There's a lot of really well run subreddits like /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians where the people who get the final say are usually the ones who have the best credentials.
For websites like medium, it's less about the credentials but more about how flashy your title can be. Just look at the top articles - it's usually titled something along the lines of "You're all missing the point of X" or "Elon Musk is Dangerous" or "How the Tech World Trashes Women". And these articles tend to be written by social justice warriors or "motivational speakers" who have never actually done anything but coach.
Reddit has built an incredible community of contributors and moderators that's (amazingly) largely self-sustaining.
You're right - in the large majority of situations, the person voted to the top often has the most qualifications. That's an example of a social model (upvoting/downvoting affecting visibility) that's a design win.
What I'm wonder about is how to explore building a publishing/content platform with a data/interaction model that promotes the highest quality and authoritative content in a similar sort of way. Medium's automatic recommendation system is too easy to play the SEO game with.
The title examples you give are spot on; I usually avoid everything on Medium that wasn't painstakingly discovered by a human and saved for later reference here or on some other site like Reddit.
(Your reference of people who do nothing but coach reminds me of how I see politicians: they're like the people in young children's books who have a fixed position ("policeman", "man walking down street with dog", "grocer", "bus driver", etc) and don't have a life outside that position.)
Really, certainly for technical articles which can gather interested readers by posting on HN or reddit, why use medium at all and not some other alternative? Because it looks nice?!
r/AskHistory has very well defined rules, and enforces those rules quite well. This ensures the quality is of the highest order, even if it limits growth.
What rules are there on Medium? It's the wild west, really- then again I don't really know, I don't browse Medium. Sometimes really smart people will use Medium as an essay writing tool, and when I see it through my social network I read it.
Curation through social network filters may not be the best, but all the articles I've read from Medium have been of a quality and topic I find interesting.
I remember Anil Rash being behind Medium, if I remember correctly that should give you an indication on why there is so much trash on it. You're not wrong, just missing why it is the way it is. It makes more sense now, doesn't it?
Micro-payments for publishing. Medium (and other quality essay sites) should charge per essay. Nothing too big, have a scaled system that is affordable to all. Even a small payment of 1GBP/USD/EUR per post is enough to keep the spammers away. It might not deter the paid for corporate shilling, but it would be a good start.
I've not thought this through in depth - feel free to pick holes in it, but I firmly believe that the mess we're suffering on the self-published areas of the internet are because it's free-to-post. So to maintain a level of quality there needs to be some sort of barrier to entry.
I can see that it would lead to a deluge of 'Like this post? Please consider donating so I can continue spewing forth banal crap I lifted from Internet articles about Elon Musk' quite quickly.
Do you mean pay per article or pay per view? Per view would virtually eliminate the independent submitter and select for the spam and corporate shills. Who has the cash or wants to risk a penny per view (or whatever micropayment it is) except for corporate advertising? I don't think per article would fix the problem either. It is a sea of crap because of the quality more than quantity. If you are getting views then a penny or whatever micropayment per article is nothing. I doubt this guy would stick around if he had to pay per view and I doubt per post payment would limit the crap.
The most effective way would be some sort of peer reviewed limitation, but that is difficult to implement and would likely reduce medium's viewership (management says oh the horror of sensationalist articles in one direction and yes! Page views! in the other).
There will be a transition to another blogging platform that sets up the right barrier to entry / moderation. Personally I don't think it is monetary.
Why would anyone want to pay to put an article on medium? They had better offer quite an impressive array of discovery features if I'm paying them to use a service that gives me less control over my own content than I would otherwise have.
The problem isn't that people are posting low quality, low effort content on medium. That's a problem that micropayments would solve. The problem is that it has become popular on medium to post certain types of content that other medium users find distasteful.
There's not much a site like medium can do to resolve a conflict of values in its userbase without restructuring the experience to enable the community to fragment, probably at the expense of some nice thing or another.
This is much ado about nothing. Why does it matter what content resides on this site? No one is going to judge the author or anyone else for publishing on Medium. If someone in your circle is judging you for publishing on Medium, you'd be better served to cut them out of your circle.
As if to prove his point, the 'recommended' articles below the post from 'Life Lessons' are:
* 'Whatever you do, just start.'
* 'How to build the self confidence you need.'
* 'Even a genius has to sell himself… the remarkable resume of Leonardo da Vinci'
Written in turn by a founder, a marketer, and the author of 'Massive Life Success.'
The recommendation algo seems to be serving a heavy dose of irony today.
The OP is right- Medium is drowning in trash, and kudos to him for saying it.
Edit: It's quite possible that Medium is going for the 'mullet' strategy of HuffPo. If you go to the front page of medium.com - it's okay, it's not exactly super high quality, but it's not the kind of crap that gets punted around on email and social. Maybe that's what they're going for? If so, shame.
Haha, well spotted.
I agree, I just joined medium last week because I had read great articles there, but the articles curated by the medium staff as well as articles that pop out as "top articles" are really really bad. I'm particularly surprised because the goal of medium was to avoid this kind of low quality content. I guess social media just has no future...
He complains in a very infantile way about "Business types" who only cares about selling an idea, but ultimately he's leaving Medium because it's a bad marketing decision for him. He says he doesn't want to be associated with medium because it conveys an image of bad content that he does not think it's good for his artwork. He's leaving Medium because of his personal brand.
There's nothing on Medium itself that inhibit the display of the art he wants to share. Medium as an platform, it's enough for his needs. But it is the brand and the marketing aspect of it that he does not like. He is not that different from those "business types". He doesn't see just a platform for sharing content, he sees a brand, and this brand is bringing a negative value to his own brand as an artist.
Besides, this world view of "business types" and "artists" is simplistic and childish, is a persuasive argument to convince us of the legitimacy of his artwork. It is Another marketing strategy: I am the real artist, my artwork is of original legitimacy, different from this capitalist world we live in.
He is obnoxious, loud, and his reasons are contradictory.
Even though he has a point: There's too much self-help on Medium.
He's leaving Medium because of his personal brand.
Congratulations. You possess exactly the lack of irony necessary to have just proved his point for him.
What if I told you there are more ways of looking at the world than market-capitalist terms? That some people value things on whole different axes than what will and will not make them more money?
The author said in the comments section: "honestly, i didn’t come here to follow people. i came here to build an audience"
He also said in the article: "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots and I am no longer comfortable telling people, ‘Yeah I post on Medium, check me out.’"
To me, this sounds like he is concerned about his personal brand / reputation, which he aggregates with the content of Medium as a whole. As such, I think that lucasnemeth's points are reasonable.
Building an audience is not the same as building a business. And the fact that most people now-a-days can't see the difference between the two things goes on to prove the all point of the article.
Some people just want to create and show it to the world, they are not obsessed in getting millionary over it. But that goes against the "entrepreneurial" culture installed over the last decade where everyone thinks it's a nice thing to actually pass all your time promoting yourself like you are some kind of brand.
From what I got from the article, that's exactly what the author of the article is against.
Please enumerate the market-capitalist value of your mother's love for you. What dollar value would you place on it, and how could we best leverage that resource?
It would be difficult to nail down a value in general since it will vary from person to person.
But to a capitalist market a mother's love of her child is of huge value. Because that child is immediately a part of that market due to the money the mother spends to raise the child. Then the child eventually grows up to enter the market as a consumer to spend money on herself or maybe enter as a producer. Eventually she may have a child of her own to repeat the cycle. Without children a capitalist market eventually dies and a mother's love is one way to help its survival.
I'm on your side, but I think this is a bad example or poorly stated. Mothers feel all kinds of pressure (from many angles) to, for example, buy their kids the latest toys or coolest clothes as an expression of their love. Etc.
I agree. Medium is riddled with advice articles written by "Motivational Speaker and Coach living in San Francisco" types who have never done anything consequential. It's also turned into a speaking podium for womens' rights activists who I frankly don't care about. Not to mention 50% of the articles there usually starts with "You're all missing the point of X".
Rather read a real book about people who have actually done great feats. Elon Musk's biography, and Pixar's Creativity Inc have had much better advice than the fluffy articles I see on medium.
Props to this guy for having the balls to speak honestly about Medium.
- Wherever possible, get extremely rich early on by having the good fortune to be bought out by Paypal.
- If the opportunity arises to be brought in as a charismatic figurehead for an existing electric car company, take it.
- Be sure to absorb as much government largesse as possible in the form of subsidies and federal contracts, while portraying yourself as a champion for private-sector innovation.
I read the Elon musk biography, I was pretty disappointed with it tbh, it focussed very little on the company side and was mostly a fluff piece about all the drama surrounding him and his companies.
I get why they did it that way but I walked away not really learning anything I didn't already know.
Maybe I got to medium late, but a medium link has always been a sure sign to me that the content I'm about to read is obviously wrong and likely lacking in humility
I post to medium, but I treat it as essentially a more modern Blogger. Do you skip any content you see posted to blogger.com or wordpress.com sites too? When I post there, I don't care about what other people are posting there, no more than I would avoid creating a website because many websites are shit.
As a blogging platform, Medium is OK. It's not brilliant. It's just OK. The editor is nice but too limited. The clean formatting is attractive but often I want more flexibility. The stats are useful but oddly, they refuse to show you more than 30 days worth at a time. Etc.
I have sometimes thought about going fully self hosted, but running my own blog is something I did years ago and I can't be bothered with that any more. Virtually all blogging software appears to be written in PHP by people who can't write secure code to save their lives ... WordPress is just a rolling disaster zone of exploits, I don't want viral articles to give me a big bandwidth bill, I don't want to have to set up my own analytics, etc.
Perhaps at some point I'll get over my inertia and move off of Medium, but it'd be unfortunate if I end up being motivated by "lol medium users are all idiots" becoming a meme rather than technical tradeoffs.
I do click on medium links if the content looks interesting, though they probably have to hit a higher bar than other sites to get past my nagging prejudices about medium content. Certainly anything that sounds like it might be hyperbole gets instantly ignored.
I'm afraid I actually find the clean formatting a little oppressive, although at least it's a consistently usable interface on mobile which is something you can't depend on in random blogs. The value-add features like read time and suggested articles don't add to the experience at all. In terms of the stats etc, I don't mind total views and uniques, which you could get from GA. Beyond that I think stats are part of the problem - I want to read things that people felt moved to write, not something that hits some kind of ROI metric.
I noticed the same happen, i click on some medium articles from HN. They might have okay title and theme, some can begin mildly entertaining, but then more often than not just end up being self indulgent marketing bs.
I've never seen his blog or a crow cartoon before. But I knew when I clicked that since it was hosted on medium.com, it was going to be at least mildly interesting because lots of good articles hosted there get linked on HN. This was the crappiest medium.com blog post I can remember reading this year. He sounds like an angry asshole! How's that for irony. But I'm merely an outsider, so I have no clue if the site is actually going down the shitter. If Medium is indeed swimming in trash, they still have time to fix that, because someone like me doesn't see it yet. So this one angry exit might be a martyr that gets the rest of the community motivated to change the problem, if it exists at all.
You've had your medium experience curated by HN if you're clicking through from here.
There will be others who are getting their medium experience curated through reddit, tumblr, facebook, other forums etc.
And HN doesn't tend to go in for "outrage linking", elsewhere people will link to blogs for the sake of "look how awful this opinion is" which may also affect their perception of the platform.
Medium is an open blogging platform, it seems unfair to blame an open platform for the authors on it, but part of the problem here is that medium used to be invite only, so perhaps people are still judging it based on the authors on there, this article's author for one.
I thought it was still invite only! You're right, I only access articles on there from HN. If they indeed are open-access like facebook now, I can completely see it being a festering cesspool of crap articles. Good riddance.
When I first heard of Medium, it seemed to have some well written articles. Then it turned into exactly what he's complaining about. Anyone can throw anything up there and wind up linked to on reddit, as if it was handed down from a mountain top.
I mean medium no worse than any other blogging platform. Who cares if there is crap content on there? The internet is a sea of crap. You just use your brain when reading to see if something sounds like bullshit, and take everything you read with a grain of salt, just like you would anywhere on the internet.
It's not like many people actually browse medium.com, we all just get linked there from HN and reddit, which could happen on any platform. Any crap is really the fault of a the community linking to it.
And in my honest opinion, I haven't really seen that many genuinely awful posts to medium. Perhaps some of you could link to some of the terrible posts this guy is referencing?
Although he's coming across as throwing his toys out of the pram, he's completely right.
This was obvious from the beginning when Medium opened the floodgates.
There is definitely room for a writing application that brings together original good articles from both professional and non-professional writers, a bit like Blendle[1] but more open.
All I took away from that post is that this dude is an asshole. Sure, I have noticed an influx of self-help/how-to articles, everyone has. But his insistent whining about "business types" is laughable. In his post he mentions his new blog twice and then continues to link to it in almost every comment he posts. If that's not a form of marketing, I don't know what is.
> "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots"
> Medium is swimming in crap. Like reprints or links to other pages. Why?
> That’s for social media. Don’t repost things. Where’s the originality in that.
I think the larger context is being missed. Any sort of open-to-the-masses forum will be gamed by people trying to get more out of it than you. More karma, more exposure, more information, whatever. Every system like this is eventually taken over by people who increasingly amass more power or influence, drowning out the "little" guy. It's probably easiest to see the direct actions taken by marketers and promoters, and you can say that all the voting and influence is just the way the systems work, but it's all politics and wrangling, in every platform, including this one. The key is to find ones that do a good job mitigating this gaming, as I believe HN does. It's ironic. If you have something to say, you want to do it at a place that can help amplify you, but if a place is good at that, it will attract bad actors, and it becomes self-limiting.
EDIT: I think this is why I continue to use Reddit. I created an account to subscribe to only a sub-section of subreddits, and none of them are defaults. It's what Reddit intended to be before it became what it is today. I get most of the benefit of "the platform," while avoiding _most_ of the bad actors.
> EDIT: I think this is why I continue to use Reddit.
I struggle to find good subreddits in the same way as subject specific forums can be (i.e physicsforums.com). Even those related to science and tech have huge chunk of crap floating around. Can you suggest how one could filter reddit content better?
Unfortunately, no. I've built my list of 50 subs by clicking links, using existing subs' sidebars, and, honestly, a lot of clicking the "random" button. I've winnowed and added and winnowed for years now. Like you, I find many subs that SHOULD be interesting, just aren't, and I scratch them and move on.
Medium was a mark of "interesting, well thought out content" when it first launched and was invite only. I gained access later on (early 2013), but definitely before it was widely adopted like it is today. I stopped spending much time there once it went that way, but I wasn't angry like this guy. I don't feel as though I am owed anything by others, as he seems to believe (more power to him).
> Medium is swimming in crap. Like reprints or links to other pages. Why? That’s for social media. Don’t repost things. Where’s the originality in that.
Reposting (or the principle behind sharing someone else's work you find interesting) is something that's been around since the web's inception, and is actually a great thing: Hacker News itself is a link aggregator which is essentially a centralized reposting system, ordered by interest (up/downvotes). Hyperlinking is all about sharing awesome content, and there are thousands of things I never would have known about if somebody didn't reblog it, retweet it, share it on fb, or crosspost it from a different subreddit.
Originality is cool, but I'll never know about your original work if a friend of a friend of a friend didn't share it all the way down that chain until it got to me.
Pretty infantile and obnoxious post, though I agree with the main point - the content you see on Medium's front page is low quality.
That happens because Medium has a bad discovery system - which is a huge bummer, because they have really nailed everything else.
The solution is simple - just allow users to control which content they read, simply by copying what reddit has already figured out how to do. Allow people to follow tags and browse top articles of the week/month/year, and have a separate stream where I can see posts from the people I follow.
Instead, they have an opaque algorithm, and my front page has a bunch of seemingly random posts I would never choose to see.
I think this guy shows good insight and great instinct. In my view, he's completely right about Medium. It was quite clear to me early on that Medium would go that way and I'm sorry to see me proven right.
I wanted to write a technical article and medium seemed like a good place to publish it. The analytics were simple and didn't require additional set up and I was hoping to reach a different audience from publishing on medium. Overall I was satisfied, but might switch to a static site generator like you said for a couple reasons. The code style is clunky and doesn't highlight syntax and I believe HN penalizes medium articles in its algorithms.
A couple other people have submitted my article and I've watched the posts climb in (~10) votes and almost make it to the front page and then magically disappear. I've tried resubmitted a number of times to no avail. From what I've read it's because medium articles are devalued here. I put a lot of work into that article and while it did get a decent amount of views (~15k) and was on High Scalability, I am pretty discouraged that I couldn't share it with the HN community.
1. Most people don't want to generate a static site.
2. Most people don't want to host a static site.
3. Most people don't know how to do either.
4. Most people do want others to read what they write.
5. More people will visit your curator / aggregator of choice than your website.
That being said it would be kind of neat if they took on more of a wordpress strategy:
1. The blogging engine gets open sourced and is made self-hostable (in addition to hosted option)
2. They host an opt-in disqus-like widget for comments / likes.
3. The medium website did recommendation and curation for all blogs that use the widget.
4. They ran an opt-in ad-network for hosted and self-hosted alike.
Hugo is great though, easy to use, its not more difficult than other software to use. Users are just afraid of command line tools.
I don't think wordpress strategy would work for medium. The best they can do is to improve their algoritms so that people can get good suggestions on the things of their interest. Sort of like subject circles, marketing ppl get to see their shit, engineers get to see their and other nerds can have their own cirlejerk.
Author is breathing the same air, as bunch of obnoxious idiots breath too. That might cause some discomfort, should we leave the planet? I think he pays too much attention to the platform. All most people see is just a link. They click it, if they like what they see - they stay. And it doesn't bother them a bit if some obnoxious idiot has a blog on the same domain. I think author should let it go and focus on his work rather than on watching who else is standing next to him in line.
PS And, what is wrong with being dressed as a biker?
When Medium first launched I believe it was invite only. Which bootstrapped a community of mostly writers who cared about the problem that Medium wanted to solve, a better platform for writing on the web.
Then Medium opened the doors to everyone. This caused the inevitable problem that those who came flooding in didn't necessarily care as much about the craft of writing. They just wanted to ride the wave of popularity and have their advert hosted on Medium.
The only way to solve this is careful curation which comes with it's own set of problems. The takeaway is that any platform that intends to open the doors to the general public eventually will inevitably exhibit a degradation of content. It should never be a surprise. If you don't want to be part of the next Buzzfeed then be aware going in that this is the eventual fate of all open access and free platforms for content publishing.
My simple response is: go make your own blogging platform for artists then.
While I never subscribed to the idea of some centralized blog platform (though I've tried them), I don't begrudge others for taking part, nor do I judge them because they're not "artist" enough.
I think a more interesting question is...can any successful self-publishing website do the things necessary (whatever they may be) to prevent it from becoming the marketing shit-heap he describes?
I have my doubts, but anything is possible I guess.
Since it is just as much Sofia media as it is a publishing platform/blogging tool-- I agree. I like Twitter, but there are a lot of idiots there. I like Facebook (sometimes), lots of idiots there as well.
We all like tools to encourage free speech here (I'd assume), this is just one of the negatives that comes with it.
Medium's openness to everyone - even, shock horror, businesspeople - rather than a pretentious clique of self-described artists with rich parents - is its great strength. It's why it's succeeded over the likes of svbtle. The democratization of content is the heart of the web's success, and you have to take the bad with the good.
Curation/recommendation is a hard problem that needs work. But I sincerely hope that Medium continues to offer a great platform for anyone to write, about anything. That's worth paying a lot for.
I hope Medium have stayed invite-only. It's really hard to keep the content high quality when a lot of people flood in. The atmosphere changes, and that changes the culture and everything.
And I'm really sad that Signal v. Noise has moved to Medium, too. I miss the "Happy Monday" every time I come to the site. It feels like walking in a local bakery and having a friendly chat with the waitress. It's a warmth and sincerity I seldom find in today's websites.
I've never understood Medium. I've always just thought it was Blogger with a locked (although very nice!) theme.
Honest question: What do Medium users regard as the killer features of the platform? Can these be achieved with your own site?
My guess is that the most prominent reason is that every Medium user is on a centralized platform and therefore more discoverable. This is bound to asymptotically trend to almost zero as more people use the platform.
People browse Medium "horizontally"? News to me; I get all my medium links through other social networks and never bother with the recommended articles.
I was considering doing some vaguely highbrow blog posts and choosing Medium as the platform for it, precisely because it has some cachet as being the platform for quite a few political articles I read. Would hosting it myself add to or detract from the impression people would get?
Frankly, his profile page[1] doesn't really do any favors for his content. There's great stuff in there, but the timeline has less impact than a blog index or a Twitter feed. I'm wondering if he might have been more at home on Tumblr.
I've always felt like Medium was a more professional version of Blogger. Anyone can create, anyone can post, and anyone can post about anything. If Medium, or any other service, really wants to create a better platform, they're going to have to deal with the "anyone" factor. Otherwise it's just another blogging site.
Good advice.
But rather than Weebly, why not get back to self-hosting?
The latest Wordpress version and the forthcoming Version 2 REST API (plugin, for now) is going to create huge opportunities for the creation of apps for creating and consuming great content that YOU own. :)
Any idea why he lists his new blog site as www.crowhoho.weebly.com? It doesn't even land there, but rather at the more logical crowhoho.weebly.com. Do people still need to see www at the beginning of a domain to think it's something they can click on?
This is silly, it's like saying I'm leaving the internet because the internet or I'm allergic to cats so I can't use Facebook. I certainly don't judge someone who posts on medium just because they are on Medium.
I've seen this attitude in so many different situations IRL and online. It's so refreshing to read it so clearly and fearlessly stated like that.
It's unfortunate that Medium have attracted all the seagulls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3e0EkvIEM), because they've done so much awesome technical work on the platform, for example with editing (https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...).
How can platforms like Medium cultivate a culture that deprioritizes and devalues the types of spam content the article author is referring to?
EDIT: Accidentally pasted the quote twice, fixed (thanks yxlx)