π’€­π’‚—π’†  ENKI ][e
it seems that medium has pulled a quora and alienated its audience of skilled and motivated early adopters in favor of casuals to the point where it has become very hard to get high quality conversation. i'm starting to get to the point where most comments on my posts are by people who clearly haven't read the post.
Aug 2, 2023 at 2:08pmWeb
Show threadπ’€­π’‚—π’†  ENKI ][eAug 2, 2023

i've spent progressively less time actually reading stuff on medium (largely because dayjob + book clubs monopolize my reading time, and working from home i can just as easily spend downtime during work watching youtube or using social media rather than reading essays) but i kept my membership because i knew that i periodically will spend a whole day reading shit there

but maybe i'll exhaust my to-read list and cancel the subscription

for a long time, most of the recommended articles have been crap (and there's always been a certain amount of crap in specific topics -- most writing advice is aimed at people who can't write at all, rather than people who write regularly, for instance -- and they fucked up the following feed with low-quality recs starting more than 5 years ago) and this isn't the first big decrease in quality, but it's the first point at which i feel like five bucks per month is way too much to pay for material of this quality.

really, the poor quality responses are what's getting me. it's normal to see a certain number of poor quality responses on a very popular article. but if an article is 5 years old and has only hundreds of views and starts getting replies by people who clearly haven't read it and lack the context to understand it, that indicates a kind of saturation -- that articles these guys can productively interact with are exhausted. (specifically, some capitalist shill came into my mentions complaining that i had an anti-corporate bias)

Show threadJanuaryAug 2, 2023
@enkiv2 hell yeah you have an anti corporate bias
Show threadπ’€­π’‚—π’†  ENKI ][eAug 2, 2023
@codicil
yeah, when some rando complains about something like that it's clear they haven't just not read the one essay, but haven't read any of the others lol
Show threadDan ShickAug 2, 2023
@enkiv2 i feel like you could replace β€œmedium” in your post with the names of like two dozen services
Show threadπ’€­π’‚—π’†  ENKI ][eAug 2, 2023

@datn

it's definitely a pattern, though it happened differently for medium than for quora. both have been decaying for a really long time.

quora had its massive quality drop early: the first group of people to use it heavily were its intended audience (experts in various fields looking for quick answers to various questions by other experts), but they happened to release a phone app before facebook & twitter did, and got a massive influx of indian teenagers who wanted a social media app for their phones & abused quora's features for that purpose, which drove away the early audience. that was in, like, 2013. they recognized this was a problem, and eventually introduced incentives to improve quality (including a partner program where people get paid to report poor-quality posts), but those incentives were gamed out the wazoo, and the average post on quora has been of abysmally poor quality for a long time. if you were a computer person there was a justification for staying there: several famous ex-PARC and ex-Bell Labs people were very active there, until a few years ago.

medium has had a lot of churn, in terms of how they wanted to encourage high quality posts. initially they had their own paid blogging verticals, then they switched to syndication, and then they eventually switched to allowing writers to paywall posts on a post-by-post basis and get a cut of a reader's monthly subscription fee based on reading time. all of these things were somewhat effective in keeping *some* high-quality material on the platform, but the amount of clickbait steadily increased as the average payouts for writers decreased.

i mean, i guess the moral of the story is: high-quality content is not compatible with any form of money-making endevour, especially not something VC-backed.

Show threadsparseMatrix βœ…βœ…βœ… πŸ“»Aug 2, 2023

@enkiv2

I stopped using medium, as a reader, when the nagging got to be worse than from the New York Times or Washington Post.

Show threadπ’€­π’‚—π’†  ENKI ][eAug 2, 2023

@sparseMatrix

I've heard people complain about nagging, but I've never actually seen it. I assume this is because I have an account & am logged in. Certainly, aggressive registration-walls are a generally bad decision.