HN Explorer

Medium.com Competitor

1 points by sebastianprada ↗ HN
I have been using Medium for a while now and despite there being some quality posts (every now and then), the majority of the platform recommends you shitty articles. Not to mention that most of them are paywall gated.

I'm creating a Medium competitor website that would be free for everyone, and that would compensate writers through a split of ad revenue. The major differentiator is that it would have a recommendation engine that pushes out content that is hyper-personalized to you, similar to TikTok.

What do you guys think?

9 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] thread
snoot
> The major differentiator is that it would have a recommendation engine that pushes out content that is hyper-personalized to you

This relies on you having a greater supply of high quality content than Medium does for your engine to recommend.

How do you propose to prime the pump?

sebastianprada
By giving writers an incentive to write quality content.

Youtube pays their creators well, although I know that video is more engaging than text. Nevertheless, giving writers the chance to make good money on a platform will make them post quality content, and would make them continue to post quality content so that they get compensated. I'm a medium writer, and I don't get paid nearly enough what I should for the amount of work I put into my articles.

Medium doesn't have a great recommendation system. Tiktok does. The beauty of the tiktok algorithm is that it gives users what they want without them having to go through the trouble of finding what they want. On medium, you have to go to the topic and then from there see what you can find. On my platform, there will be a "For You" page that makes the content go to you.

snoot
Are you raising funding to pay people up front?
sebastianprada
That would be the plan, yes. In the beginning we would focus on using funding to compensate the writers until we start to gain network effects in which then we should be receiving ad money which would be shared with the writers.
qualudeheart
Recommendation AI seems like a real factor. Tiktok has the best recommendation algo in the industry- I use tiktok a lot- and the closer you approach it the better.

Please don’t make the UI full of obnoxious dark patterns. That’s killed Medium for me.

I have a lot more to say on this list of issues, but those are the most important to me. Also, if you’re reading this, please comment. I’m always excited to give feedback.

sebastianprada
Can you further explain what you mean by dark patterns? And yes, TikTok is excellent at giving you the content you want to see, which is why I think having an algorithm that is somewhat remotely close to TikTok's algo will make a greater experience for those that prefer to read long-form text content.

What other issues do you have?

qualudeheart
The nagging attempts to get you to log in or install an app are seriously annoying.
selfhoster11
Maybe the problem is that we need less algorithmic curation these days, and not more.
wan_ala
This sounds awesome, is there a way to find out when it is released?