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.
