There is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine, you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff.
I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.
I'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic popup that interferes with me getting to the content.
I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more discovery other ways and usually only end up on the site after a recommendation, etc...
Not just Facebook. Any site without attention paid to on-site SEO is basically impossible to find since Google gave up fighting the spammers and (effectively) stopped trying to provide access to a bunch of the web. That was back in, like, '08 or '09.
The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1) heavily penalizing low-traffic sites to the point of giving me top results that contain almost none of my keywords when there 100% for sure had to be sites that contained all of them, and 2) barely paying attention to text linking to a site anymore. I'm not even upset I couldn't find the site I wanted using my search terms so much as that part of their surrender to the spammers meant that most of the top results were "legitimate" content-mill spammers-by-another-name. I don't think I could have found anything like what I was looking for. Any similarly-obscure sites are just invisible now.
DDG wasn't much better. The spammers won and "web search" doesn't really search the whole web anymore, or even close to it.
Oh, that's what's going on. If I search, for example, "proton transfer balalaika" I get search results where the first few results are "Missing: balalaika | Must include: balalaika" but a result after these has all three search terms.
I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do.
That's frustrating. Low-volume sites represent a significant portion of the web results I need.
You know, it's obvious it's a link, and I'm pretty sure I clicked on it and noted it adds the quotes then immediately forgot.
I'm sitting here looking at it now and I still can't believe that's the function. It looks like a link to a search of just that term.
Of course, even when I click on it, I get ads for hotels that are missing "proton" and "transfer" first, then random word dictionaries, both well above perfectly valid results talking about chemists who played the balalaika or research done in the city of Balalaika.
Which means that it's a link to getting a different wrong set of results and it's there as a kind of fig leaf on the sin of distorting searches so heavily.
There are whole topics I can no longer search for on any engine because the results are so bad. The example I can think of is product reviews for just about anything - the results are almost always shitty "top ten" Amazon affiliate sites. If I want to find a legitimate opinion about certain kinds of products, it's nearly impossible to find via Google.
Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad copy of Quora with each answer recommending the automotive equivalent of essential oils.
Yeah, and the EU is basically taking legal action against Google right now to force them to do an even worse job of removing that kind of spam, under the pretense that it hurts competition.
Facebook+Reddit+stack exchange I think is a more comprehensive group to blame. I think a lot of people who use facebook for hobby groups maybe never would have discovered forums but Reddit definitely could have. And stack exchange kind of absorbed basically all technical forums
That's true, I forgot about Reddit. I check some sub-reddits that I'm interested but in general the format and quality of discussion is much lower than that of the now-dead forums that I used to check for similar content. The internet is like a barren wasteland to me now.
You know, I'd completely forgotten about forums? I used to be active on two. Doing a quick search now: one seems to have disappeared, but I managed to log in to the other one for the first time in nine years! (Those were the days before I used a password manager.) And it's actually still semi-active...
Facebook content is now such low-quality that it might as well be spam (my opinion). Also, pointless, toxic conversations. It seems to bring out the worst in people. I know some people like it for keeping in touch. I refuse to use it anymore, not worth it for me.
When I looked at facebook it was virtually all memes. I'm sure someone is about to tell me that I need better friends but these people are fine to talk to and interact with on other platforms but it seems facebook has become a meme graveyard.
No one posts actual quality content because stuff I want to read doesn't have a general appeal, its specialized to the things I am interested in. Facebook only allows for general appeal stuff so you end up with memes that everyone can understand.
I find Facebook to be quite useful, and the content to be of moderately high quality for the type of content it is intended for: social updates from friends and family.
The conversations on FB range from informative to toxic, and depend, like the internet forums of old, on the moderators. As FB does not actively moderate discussions, toxic conversations are the fault of the participants and the moderators, not on FB.
I legitimately want to read the articles--they have a lot of interesting ones.
The curious thing is that often enough you can't even click through--they insist that it's "Medium Exclusive" content and you can only view 3 a month. (Browser Private mode helps, but is not a panacea) But... If I search the 'net for the title of the supposed Exclusive article, I can frequently find it elsewhere with no nagging or paywall.
I don't really believe Medium has the exclusive content that gives it an advantage over anything else, but it's useful as curated, indexed content that you can find elsewhere. This is probably not what they are going for, though.
>>I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content.
Sure, but as those platforms grow, they will run into the same problem: having to pay for infrastructure. That shit ain’t cheap once you get past a certain size.
> maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers
This affinity both for caping up for corporate entities who'd sell you for your component atoms were it feasible to do so, and then for doing free work for them, is so weird. They're the ones making the money. Why isn't it incumbent upon them to do so?
Nobody said there is anything wrong with making money, that’s a straw man. The reality is that taking venture funding has forced these companies to compromise what made them useful in order to chase revenue for investors.
The venture funding doesn't really have anything to do with it, does it? Even if they were entirely self funded, they still need to generate enough revenue to cover their costs.
Sure it does, venture funding comes with investors seeking to make a large return in a specific timeframe. If they were entirely self-funded, they could slowly ramp revenue streams and build on a sustainable base.
Getting a large influx of funding forces a company to search for faster growth to justify the valuation and deliver projected future growth. In 2017, Medium laid-off 1/3 of their workforce because their advertising model wasn't working [1]. The implication is that they hired a bunch of people to sell something that nobody wanted. A self-funded company, would have likely never hired those people in the first place. That company would be on firmer footing now, but would have gotten less HN/TechCrunch coverage in the process.
So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes?
I would bet many of the investors were making a bet on Ev Williams as much as they were on Medium. Medium's business model has always felt a bit exploitative. If they truly are focusing on quality rather than quantity, maybe that will change.
> So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes?
Think of it more as forcing them to make a high variance bet.
The VC business model assumes that about 1/3 of the companies invested in will go to zero, and another 1/3 will make a below market return on investment. They need the Googles and Microsofts to pay for everyone else, so they just push all of their portfolio into trying to become billion dollar businesses.
To clarify, my point was specific to businesses like Quora and Medium that rely on high-quality content and engagement. These companies would have likely been better off as niche businesses with $10m-$50m annual revenue. Taking a large VC investment basically closes off that avenue.
Not every idea is a take-over-the-world multi billion dollar business. Something might be completely sustainable as a medium sized business but it will never have a large enough target audience to be able to scale (as the product was originally envisioned) to a multi billion dollar company.
The problem is this is what VC needs, and if your idea isn't one you're still stuck chasing that goalpost. So rather than be happy with your product you start making distortions to increase your mass appeal to help reach the unreasonably high (for your idea) goalposts set by VC funding.
I don't understand this mindset. In my worldview people deserve investment. VC funded corporations don't deserve any of my time to "make it as a better platform".
Companies should live or die by the market and if they piss customers off and lose marketshare, that's the market working for once.
I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.