[lbhdc]

Hey Tony, from my perspective, I think there are a couple things at play with peoples sentiment about Medium.

I think part of it is how aggressive the monetization is. That isn't to say that your competitors, and a huge swathe of publishers aren't doing the same thing. It seems the value prop is getting rid of all the noise. That can be a difficult sell. Publishing is in a weird place. For writing about current events or topics in the zeitgeist, the internet is flooded with articles re-tracing the same points.

I think the other part is that a similar problem that every platform that allows its user to monetize UGC, it attracts large numbers of people who want to game the system (or well meaning people who still exhibit spammy behavior). So those people upload poor articles and share them to as many places as they can to try to capture some ad rev. They end up flooding somewhere like HN, and people sour on the platform instead of the person who uploaded it.

I don't think that is unique to medium, or even unusual in the publishing space. It seems more likely that Medium is big platform, so people see it more often, and more often associate it with these problems.

[tonystubblebine]

We definitely attract a lot of bad UGC. Not even just bad, a lot of it now is fraudulent AI generated trash. You got me interested in what the volume is of Medium links on HN. I think it's about 10 a day according to Algolia's HN search.

That doesn't seem so bad. So I'm wondering if there is some toxic overlap of what is bad on Medium also does well here, and what is good on Medium fails here.

For example, I saw that the 3.3 release of Dart got posted on Medium and then here yesterday. I think that's unambiguously good given that it's written by the creators of Dart. But, it's also kind of boring and specific to a small subset of developers.

Anyway, thanks for responding.