Advice a sales coach gave me was “sales is sorting, not convincing.”
I always found that put me in the right headspace to focus on listening first, then being clear. Whether they sort themselves into a yes or no is on them.
It really made me think of Dopplr, which was one of the delighful and beautiful Web 2 apps that never quite broke out.
The thing that feels different between now and Web 2 is that the Internet is so much bigger. So you can build an app that has a niche and it can still be pretty big. I was on the early beta for this app and it's great, especially if networking and travel are a big part of your life. I honestly have no idea if it even needs to be bigger than that although I know it can be.
I’m not surprised. There had been some talks among various platforms to form a coalition and the reason we (Medium) thought they broke down was because people were trying to cut individual deals. I think this is overall bad for the internet because it cuts creators out of the decision and compensation.
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.
Fwiw, I didn't say fair. I think we all have the same goal which is that we want the front page of Hacker News to have great links. I've been a community member here since 2007 (geez, that's a long time) and have checked it basically every single day other than the very rare days where I haven't had internet access.
The trope we use for bad articles that used to do well on Medium are "X is dead." They are always written by people who don't have nearly the life experience to call it. But they invite reactions. They do less well now on Medium because we redid our recommendations to have human curators in the loop. I would want the same thing to happen here and I honestly don't understand why a community that is generally so good at boosting high quality articles falls for them.
Why is this on us (I'm Medium's CEO)? We have control over our own recommendations, and they have gotten a lot better. But people seem to take the worst articles, post them over here, and the people here upvote them. That seems like a problem with HN.
This impulse isn't true for us (I'm the CEO) and so I've wondered why this accusation toward management is so common.
I suspect, but obviously don't know for sure, that merely making use of the real estate doesn't factor at all. It's more "come into the office because that's how I know how to manage people" and "somethings actually are hard to do remote."
We are productive remote for some things, but then get stuck on tricky issues that seem to get solved instantly when we are together. So we solved that by gathering twice a year at company retreats and having budget for more mini-gatherings. But our feeling is that going back to the office will never happen.
I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as occupants even with zero usage.
This author specifically and intentionally put this piece behind the paywall. There's no reason to worry about your blog posts on Medium being behind a paywall unless you did the same.
Isn’t it net good that tech companies regularly overhire? I’d be afraid that too much regulation would end up making companies hesitant to hire in the first place. And why are we asking companies to act as charities here. That’s so against their nature. Tax them instead and have government improve the safety net.
Thanks for explaining and being specific. I did do that when this thread started, opening the article in an incognito window. It’s a modal. Dismiss it.
I always found that put me in the right headspace to focus on listening first, then being clear. Whether they sort themselves into a yes or no is on them.