Personally, I was excited by Medium all those years ago. Now I think twice before clicking a medium.com link. I really hate the obnoxious UI and usually close the tab before reading the article. Anyone else feel this way?
While some interesting and insightful articles still exist on the site, the majority feels like someone trying to explain me what they read on Wikipedia this morning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
A bit off topic, but in case you were still looking, may I suggest 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.
Is it really that bad? I’ve been reading some of the deep learning stuff and there are some pretty detailed ,lengthy explanations.
One time I did notice that An author copied/pasted most of their content from an obscure blog (90%)
and I was going to call them out but they did list the blog in their reference.
However I am still a beginner in programming as well as deep learning so maybe I lack the the ability to distinguish between real and fake experts.
>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.
I don't know how many websites like Medium it will take for people to realize that for quality content a website needs:
1. Well-defined subject.
2. Some standard for quality.
3. Editors with a stake in the website who filter out things that do not fit 1 and 2 and deliberately cultivate the reader base and frequent writers. (I.e. not Wikipedia-style "editors".)
It doesn't have to involve money. It doesn't have to be closed for the public to submit content. It doesn't have to mimic old media in any fashion.
Websites like that used to exist in late 90s early 00s. Web 2.0 movement waged a war against all 3 bullet points above for the benefits of technocrats at the expense of everyone else. Now we're enjoying the consequences.
Still the same theme, though. Leads you through a story then either issues a call to action or tries to sell you something. The whole thing is built to affect you enough emotionally to perform whatever action the author wants.
I feel like 95% of the Medium posts I find are some vague attempt to sell. Usually some company trashing a competitor for pages, and then the last paragraph is their call to action to try their new replacement to said competitor.
This is true. There's a certain subtle pressure in the dev and IT community to be like those prolific open source contributors, stackoverflow gurus, and insightful bloggers with thousands of twitter followers.
I imagine that there's a whole slew of different causes and neuroses mixed in with feeling that pressure, including the ever-present and insidious imposter syndrome. It's very difficult to feel "good enough" when you're comparing yourself to those hugely popular open source developers. It's probably tied up in the same bundle as people with an Instagram account trying to compare themselves to the models with tens of millions of followers.
Every time I click through to a post I want to read on Medium it gives me that damn full page popup about not being logged in (I know, I'm just reading a post, why would I want or need an account for that?) and then I generally just close the page and don't read whatever it was.
Not to mention that they don't advertise RSS feeds so you have to jump through hoops to use it for a feed reader.
Most big media sites now have "you read X free articles this month, you need a subscription to continue" popups. Medium doesn't require you to sign up to continue, but it acts and reads just like those in its cutesy way, hoping the user infers the requirement to sign up.
That popup is a UX dark pattern, and for me puts them in the same category as LinkedIn with its various means of lulling you into actions you wouldn't consciously take.
The feeds that are there don't work well. For most blogs/pages/people, there's no way to get a feed but one that includes not only the stories by that account, but any comment they left anywhere on the site too, as well as all the comments on their stories.
That's probably because I'm blocking some script, but I get a top menu that covers the top 20% of my screen, and an advertise (visual one) for their RSS feeds that covers the bottom 30% of my screen. None of them can be closed without some extension or the developer tools.
To be honest that's the biggest reason I have never really rooted for Signal. Even though it's like really beta, I would rather invest my hope and efforts in Matrix/Riot kind of setup.
I only recently got engaged in HackerNews. The UI isn't beautiful. There are minimal features. It's my favorite content aggregator right now. Obviously, HN isn't a blogging platform, but it accomplishes many of the things medium is trying to.
I wonder if many more partners will give up on medium? Hackernoon is moving away because of a change to medium's advertising policy.
Hard disagree. It's barely acceptable on desktop, but on a mobile device it's awful. All the links and buttons are tiny, and they're all so crowded together I frequently end up doing dumb things like tapping "flag" when I meant to tap "discuss."
With just a little bit of work HN's UI could be so much better.
Seriously I get that they want the 'shit plain look to scare off normal people' schtick but it's also terrible for accessibility.
For being a company that beats the inclusive and equality drum they seem to go out of their way to make it impossible for people who don't have incredible dexterity or eyesight to use this site.
I love the simple layout but make it accessible to everyone.
I was going to disagree with you on the sites accessibility but after taking a closer look it is pretty bad, though for different reasons. Tables everywhere, missing alt tags, doc language missing, no form labels..
As far as aesthetics I actually like the current site. It serves its purpose well IMO. The real accessibility issues should be addressed per WCAG.
I've been using hn.premii.com for years now ... also available as apps across iOS, Android and Windows UWP. Gives me an optimal reading experience on all my devices, but I'm mostly a lurker so YMMV.
Sure it looks new and mobiley but all I really want (not OP btw) is the same site but with bigger buttons on mobile.
I have it set up on iOS to auto zoom and to raise the font size a couple clicks but the action buttons are still hard to click on and at least once a day I flag or downvote something I have to then undo.
Unless you have perfect eyesight and dexterity it’s a chore.
I might make what i seek actually. At least then I’ve scratched my own itch.
Most complaints seem to be focused on mobile. Eh, on mobile I only consume content, so I don't really care if it's hard to post a comment or vote on mobile. Desktop computing is my jam.
And any complaints about its appearance on desktop are easy to tune to user preferences using a userscript. I have a simple userscript that changes the color scheme to a dark theme I quickly concocted. (Part of why I don't even bother to contribute on mobile is because mobile platforms are so constrained that a quick and dirty userscript isn't particularly easy to use.)
I'm with medium, but I didn't start there until they allowed for you to use your own domain.
If I want to leave I can re-house my content somewhere else and write a script to have the URLs match medium's article identifiers so I don't lose (much) Google-juice.
Not ideal, and not a perfect escape plan, but better than leaving all my eggs in one pretentious basket.
+1 - if I am reading hackernews and see a link that is from medium I will skip it. 99% if the time it will be some thinly-vieled marketing. I am sure there is a lot of perfectly good content on there, but the bullshit marketing crap has turned me off of the whole domain. It is basically as bad as seeing a wordpress link, except you can guarantee that 99 times out of 100 it will be someone peddling their startup (at least wordpress had some slightly out-of-left-field stuff on it)
There is nothing wrong with self-hosted blogs. If you still want to "blog" then go for it on your own domain, please don't feel like you have to publish through some random third party that exists to monetise your content.
Oh I still remember the dawn of Medium: What a revelation this thing was!
A wonderful platform, made for the reader! Nice typography, good layout, easy but pleasant on the eyes.
Oh what does Medium have become...
Meanwhile it became the villain in the game. (The Batman quote would really place itself nicely here)
Totally. The UI is positively atrocious -- especially for posting stuff, but also for viewing -- and the overall quality of content has taken a serious nosedive. Most of the Medium links I've clicked in the past six months have ended up being been regurgitated swill, or else simply claptrap.
I was a paid Medium member for a good while, but discontinued my membership late last year for those reasons.
Funny how these things go in circles. I remember the time where many webpages were unstyled, letting you freely choose the font, size, colors, etc. in browser preferences. But that was considered ugly and non-user friendly. Now with various readability buttons we're just moving back to that.
Without custom CSS, you couldn't, however, fix the single most important readability issue about unstyled HTML: add reasonable margins and keep body width at the recommended 60–70em or so. Readability modes finally get that right.
Right. I forgot to mention that we also used to be able to resize the browser to the width we personally found comfortable for reading. I guess that's something reader modes still have to rediscover.
Reader view doesn't always work though (at least in Firefox.) You can use the icon in the URL bar or CTRL + ALT + R to open reader view.
Firefox does some detective work to choose whether to show the reader view icon but using the keyboard shortcut used to work regardless. Recently it seems even the keyboard shortcut doesn't work unless the icon is visible - I think becausethe heuristic for showing the icon is more accurate these days.
Nah, you're not the only one. The various modals and 'log in' prompts are obnoxious, and it's only made worse by how 90% of promoted Medium.com articles are paid now (so there's a good chance you'll see a 'pay to continue reading' warning instead of any content).
And that's before you even get into the content, which is usually either:
1. Pointless bullshit from some 'influencer' no one cares about filled with silly buzzwords
2. Political panicking about Trump
3. Or generally uninteresting articles in general. Medium's long since gone through its Eternal September phase, so there's no real quality difference between the stuff there and the stuff anywhere else.
I stopped reading Medium after hearing that a guy I know was never paid for the articles he wrote for them back in 2014. I took a look again in 2017 after being out of college for a few months and it looked like a bunch of college sophomores trying to one up each other on how long they've been programming, going to hackathons, contributing to OSS, etc. So toxic.
Shameless plug for warisboring.com. Go support my friend's work. If anyone at Medium sees this, just pay him already.
Same. When they first started, I was excited. Now they just seem scummy. If there's an article that I really really want to read, I put the url into outline.
Same. The header and footer give me visual claustrophobia. If the article is something I really want to read, I right-click on each and do Inspect > Delete.
It's still the nicest, simplest web design I know that has any level of popularity for blogging. I'd still rather read on Medium than on Wordpress or Discourse or Blogger or Ghost or really any popular blog layout I've seen.
I don't want to trivialize how annoying the login popups are, but ultimately I put up with them for the sake of a more readable article on the other side.
The UI/UX for medium comments is so utterly horrible it makes me angry just thinking about it.
I was reading some interesting articles the other idea, and it was a painful, torturous struggle to read all of the comments and their nested responses.
The entire text of a comment should not be a clickable link! And you shouldn't have to go to a new page to read comment replies...
Deeply nested discussions get harder, much like on StackOverflow. I think it's a deliberate design decision and I'm not convinced it's a bad one; you do miss out on some deeper discussion, but it encourages people to work-up their responses into full-sized posts (and making a new post is very easy).
Fair enough, I get that it is non-trivial to design UI for nested discussions.
I'm most annoyed by the entire comment being a clickable link that takes you off of the page (and the scroll position being lost when you click "back").
I've accidentally clicked on a comment numerous times. I then have to click the back button, scroll down to the comments section, click "show all comments", and then search for the comment I was reading, just to simply to get back to where I was. It is a quite bad user experience when it happens.
It's especially bad on mobile. On my iPhone SE, the top is a banner promoting their native app, then a top navigation bar and their logo. The bottom is an ad for the paid membership, a dialog for Do Not Track info. The tiny space that's visible behind all these craps is.... the irrelevant hero image. I can't even read the title!
I use Pocket also, but: For most web sites, Pocket makes a text-only copy that you can read offline without hitting the website again. But Pocket doesn't do that for Medium articles; it will only take you to medium.com to see the original (or offer to view it with the Medium app), so either way you have the login requirement, 3-article limit, etc.
I suspect that Pocket and Medium have some kind of agreement; Medium may have stepped in to say "you can't make that text-only offline copy; that's our content" and Pocket, not wanting to get sued, went with the linked strategy instead.
I have always liked blogs hosted on their own. Different fonts, different background, font size/colours, different layouts et cetera. It feels very personal. Medium felt like an assembly line. It's very bland.
The first thing I do when I load a Medium hosted page on my phone is to use uBlock origin to hide the app button and the fixed top bar. If I couldn't do it anymore, I'll stop reading those pages.
The popup asking you to sign in everytime I'm logged out is do incredibly annoying that I just send the page to Pocket or Outline if I think I might read it later.
I've never had a Medium account and don't want one. I stopped reading Medium articles because of the annoying popup begging me to "make this relationship more serious" or whatever and get an account.
