This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I’m a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you’ve read Medium articles.
One point he made that I found interesting was:
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
Nothing against OP, but man, this is a rough one. This is nothing more than an opinion piece with bad takes.
What a bullshit article. I’ve highlighted some of it below:
Forums are pretty structured. Twitter and the new reddit are way less structured unless you’re talking about structured with ads built in. That aside, that’s a personal preference not a fact of the internet.
if you use “dollhairs” in an actual publication you’re going to find it hard to be taken seriously.
They should have built out the feature set and had a good usable app before making the decision then. It was a dumb decision, full stop. Re-reading this it makes even less sense. Who is blaming them for researching 3rd party apps? And, OF COURSE, the investors are investing in reddit. That’s why they should have a usable app of their OWN before dropping the ball like this.
Good design absolutely adds to the valuation. Like, what? If an app performs as badly as the native app to the point people have no choice but to use 3rd party apps for basic things like, I don’t know, MODERATION, you need a drastic overhaul before shutting out those 3rd party apps.
I stopped reading it here. They lost me at this point. The author of this is either playing to reddit’s side, has no idea of what’s driving the current situation, or a mix of the two. There’s no way someone that actually wrote an article about this, and actually researched it, would come away with this take. Comparing a paid service, like Medium, deleting the articles and things you have paid to access is vastly different than shutting down an established forum(subreddit), that voted do so, that was free of charge the entire time. I know they have paid subscriptions and their dumb NFT stuff, gotta pay the bills somehow, but that was such a brain dead take I had to stop.
I haven’t read many Medium articles but if they’re all this low of effort I don’t feel I’ve missed out on much.
edit:
This part is the part that made me truly stop reading. I could imagine spez writing this himself.
That’s 99% of what gets posted to medium.com
Good to know, I don’t think I’ve heard of it until tonight but I saw enough to figure lol.
Was about to say the same.
Medium seems to be where all the people who used to post bad take blogs went to instead of self hosting
So a bunch of technically incompetent narcissists too busy with their head up their ass to realize no one wants to listen to what they say?
Sounds about right
I wonder what the overlap is with Twitter Blue subscribers…
Cross join
jeez you aren’t kidding
The top suggested article after that one was about men avoiding women because they didn’t want to make women uncomfortable and come off as creepy, and how men are terrible sexist monsters for doing this.
Are there any good takes on medium?
Once you hang around the fediverse long enough you’ll get used to the media being full of trashy the takes on social media.
Bottom line is that there’s a bit of a shake up or fracturing, and the average media talking head isn’t qualified to be insightful about it other than some basic vague feeling that a lack of stability in the structure of mass media is frustrating to them.
I’ve figured that the average media person’s mentality is geared toward mass distribution which conflicts entirely with the fediverse which is about diversity, choice, non-capitalistic work and freedom, and so they either don’t get it or have an interest in it failing, which really just reveals how much mass media is probably a bunch of big-corp bootlickers.
Even this ‘writers’ take is that their path was to move away from community and threaded conversations into monologues.
The guy is a self important twit full of bad takes
No joke.
The whole “Yeah i went to a platform where people couldn’t argue with me as easily and i didn’t have to face any criticism or being wrong. It’s far better this way” schtick was really obvious by the end of it, and super gross to have read all the way through that “Objective and unbaised” slog of very biased ramblings.
Yeah, when it comes to technical help a forum I found to be much more helpful, since relevant threads just don’t die. When someone comments it gets bumped up increasing the visibility that some helpful person will see it and respond whereas on reddit/lemmy/kbin/etc types posts as a community gets bigger is pretty much dead and talking into the void after sometimes a couple of hours later. So that encourages having to post again leading to more reposting. It’s just a much more quick rapid and temporary form of discussion. When you respond to someone those more modern takes on message boards the only one who’ll see it is the person you responded to.
Forums by their nature don’t need constant rapid activity of chats. Even on lemmy now as the activity has started to grow some posts are starting to reach the point that nobody will ever go back and read them as new content comes out. Compared to the beginnings where even week old posts people would comment on due to being visible. There’s a place for both traditional forums and rapid modern post based message board experiences.
And it does get annoying when you get pointed to some insanely long stickied thread if you want to respond, but it’s also a nice form of organized archival with getting to see the evolution of the topic. And it is way easier to follow the chronology of messages on very long message boards than on nested comments.
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@JickleMithers @curt @NightOwl yes. You have to enable them in settings, they’re disabled by default.
This is exactly how i felt by the end
“Objective and unbiased” my ass
I don’t get the medium critic either. If medium paid someone for their content, sure, they should have the right to host it even the writer now disagrees with them, but if they a platform and sharing some profits or no profits with the creator, pound sand, they absolutly get to hold their content hostage. They have every right to move their free work or stop sharing their free work where ever they feel like.