
Ask HN: What do you think when you see a post is from Medium? - gnicholas
Does seeing that a HN post is from Medium make you more or less likely to click it? Do you expect a certain type of post (rant, musing, personal story)?<p>My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front page of HN, then it&#x27;s probably at least somewhat relevant to my work&#x2F;life, and is probably decently-written. When I find Medium stuff through other channels (Pocket, FB, etc.), I am much less likely to click.
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tracker1
I don't really have a preconceived notion as to anything. Each individual
author is the one who maintains their content. So each article really needs to
be taken mostly on its' own merit.

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red_blobs
My thought? Most likely an ill-informed rant by a millennial.

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gnicholas
Totally agree. What if the title doesn't sound rant-y or millenial-y? Like "An
Analysis of Yelp's Sorting Algorithm", or something else that is data-driven
and not emotional-sounding? I'm interested to know how the common underlying
reaction that you describe could be different depending on what the article
sounds like.

That is, does seeing "medium.com" after reading a post only serve to amplify a
pre-existing suspicion (based on title) that the article sounds rant-y, or
does it actually decrease your likelihood of clicking _regardless_ of what the
title was and how you felt about it?

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minimaxir
> My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front
> page of HN, then it's probably at least somewhat relevant to my work/life

You're hitting a selection bias. If _anything_ gets to the front page of HN,
it is likely relevant, even moreso with Medium posts that are penalized and
require extra effort for placement.

If you browse /new, the Medium posts are 90% useless thought-pieces.

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gnicholas
I actually find that Medium pieces on the front page are more likely to be
relevant to my work/life than other front-page posts. This is perhaps because
I am less technical than many here, so the intricacies of hardware articles or
specific coding languages do not resonate with me. The Medium-hosted pieces
tend to be "lighter", and perhaps for this reason they have a (somewhat)
higher hit rate for me.

I completely agree that most Medium posts on /newest are junk. Part of the
reason I posted the Ask was because I'm curious what happens when I post
something I've written (on Medium). How are people's first reactions affected
by that? Is it like when people see a Business Insider article and then
automatically ignore the post?

Also, I'd be interested to know more about Medium posts being penalized.
Details?

