
Bye – Why I'm leaving Medium - WA
https://medium.com/@charlesomeara/bye-11224eca4a99
======
i336_
> "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.

It's unfortunate that Medium have attracted all the seagulls
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3e0EkvIEM](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...](https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-
terrible-122d8a40e480)).

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)

~~~
Jaruzel
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.

~~~
kristianc
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.

------
kristianc
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.

~~~
d--b
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...

~~~
amelius
Can't they just rebrand that kind of content as "Medium Social" or something
like that?

~~~
kristianc
They probably could, but then 'Forbes Contributor' is synonymous with 'barely
vetted blogger.'

------
lucasnemeth
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.

~~~
jarcane
_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?

~~~
muraiki
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.

~~~
jbmorgado
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.

------
terda12
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.

~~~
ForHackernews
Important lessons from Musk's biography:

\- 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.

------
takno
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

~~~
mike_hearn
That's too bad.

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.

~~~
takno
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.

~~~
type0
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.

------
degenerate
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.

~~~
eterm
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.

~~~
degenerate
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.

------
toomanythings2
I totally agree with him.

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 don't trust most articles there anymore.

------
cha5m
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?

------
flashm
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.

1: [https://launch.blendle.com/](https://launch.blendle.com/)

------
mdjt
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"

Yes it has, and you sir, are one of them.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
I found his article a bit obnoxious. I've never heard of this guy, so all I
can judge him by is statements like this:

 _" To those folks who worked so tirelessly to make Medium the shit pile it’s
become, i say this: fuck off."_

Medium has some great writers. Even if I find their ideas uninspiring or
disagreeable, I still appreciate great writing. This isn't great writing.

------
crottypeter
> 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.

What if I told you, ... "Medium IS social media"?

------
TheRealDunkirk
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.

~~~
type0
> 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?

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
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.

------
Disruptive_Dave
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).

------
brudgers
Charle's crow comics: [http://crowhoho.weebly.com/crow-
cartoons-2016.html](http://crowhoho.weebly.com/crow-cartoons-2016.html)

------
chrisdotcode
> 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.

------
JustSomeNobody
_Sigh_ Another "Why I'm leaving X" post.

You could have written the best post the internet has read all year, but I
can't bring myself to read past the title.

------
rayalez
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.

------
tempodox
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.

------
cryptos
It's even worse since Medium's transition to a paid content (paid by the
industry, not by the reader) platform.

I wonder why not more people just use a static site generator like Hugo and
host their blog themselves.

~~~
mkohlmyr
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.

~~~
type0
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.

------
shitgoose
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?

------
zaphar
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.

------
ulkesh
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.

Whine less, do more.

------
cubano
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.

~~~
emdd
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.

------
lmm
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.

~~~
icebraining
Medium and Svbtle actually opened to the public right around the same time, in
October 2013 and January 2014, respectively.

------
octref
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.

~~~
karrondud
> I hope Medium have stayed invite-only.

They haven't. Anyone can sign up now.

------
Intermernet
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.

Am I missing something?

------
pjc50
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?

------
some1else
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.

1: [https://medium.com/@charlesomeara](https://medium.com/@charlesomeara)

------
Overtonwindow
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.

------
br3w5
"Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots". I think the world
is overloaded in this way too.

------
type0
To paraphrase some other site on the interwebs: narcissism is the cancer
that's eating Medium

------
ourcat
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_. :)

------
jhildings
A medium post about leaving medium.

Nothing more to say

~~~
partisan
He could have just... left Medium and left it at that. Instead, he brought
more traffic.

------
dexterdog
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?

------
prestonpesek
Perhaps your expectations were misplaced? Please see:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/investors](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/investors)

------
optimuspaul
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.

------
dataker
>They love to move into places where artists live and raise the cost of living
and build their crappy chain stores and push us out.

To be fair, they're still part of the gentrification cycle.

------
br3w5
"There are far, far, far too many articles of a purely commercial nature."

Is there a term for this corporate and media agency pillage of any and every
social platform?

------
m0llusk
This is what people are talking about when they advice not to let the door hit
you on the butt when you are on the way out. _just saying_

------
lasermike026
I like this guy.

