For the tutorial quality and UX scumminess typical of Medium, no, I don't want the $5(/month?) option. I'd prefer any of these options:
1) Free, non-scummy tutorial sample, with the rest offered for money, or
2) Free full tutorial with non-scummy ads/UX, or
3) Free full tutorial with the understanding that this is self-promotion and I should raise my evaluation of the author and seek to hire their other work.
Which of those do you feel is unjustifiably entitled?
Probably the fact that while you listed your preferences you and most everyone else wouldn't bother to pay. Primarily since it would mean making a credit card transaction to an unknown site.
Your options are clearly biased towards the fact that you don't want really to pay anything, either in terms of money or ads/attention.
No, I've paid for courses before, far more than I care to admit. And I've listed an ad-based option that makes money (2), I'm just allowing for the possibility of people who want to get paid in self-promotion (3), although that's perhaps redundant, being a species of advertising.
I'm not going to subscribe to Medium or other things like it. I don't like subscriptions and avoid them for the most part, and Medium is effectively a weird bundle of mostly crap I mostly don't care about.
When something is worth it, a la carte works for me. It should cost more than as part of a bundle. (Although I'd need to need your tutorial rather badly to pay the price of a book for it.)
Many Reddit subs have been discouraging people from posting their own content for years now, and the reach you get on Twitter is entirely dependent on who's in your network. Hacker News is probably the second-best option to Medium since both are about as democratic, but Medium has more readers.
Nope. I'm just wondering what the sentiment is. I've obviously struck a nerve. "Oh no paywall!" for a site that pays its authors.
Now, if it ripped the authors off or engaged in other shitty tactics, then that's one thing. But nobody is responding with that kind of information. It's all a response against the paywalls, and I'm trying to figure out if it's knee-jerk or not.
I mean, aren't people allowed to make a living by teaching others?
> I mean, aren't people allowed to make a living by teaching others?
Absolutely good point!
I think if I were to rephrase the submitter's comment in a way that aligned with my own views and concerns, it would be:
If your intent is to put information into the world for others to share purely out of charity/a desire to help others, or to get your name out, please consider options other than Medium, as Medium is ultimately in control if whether anyone can actually gain access to the content you've produced.
If, however, as you say, one's goal is to produce and monetize content as part of a personal revenue stream, then Medium seems like as good an option as any (though, personally, I'm not a huge fan of contributing content into walled garden ecosystems where the publisher can unilaterally change the rules on a whim), and folks here complaining that stuff is behind a paywall should go find free content elsewhere.
I strongly agree with the part about the purpose of sharing the information:
I am buying from time to time website-based tutorials or other type of content. I agree this creates a new problem: I don't even know what I bought in the last years, what kind of online live books with exercises I bought and from where. I try to keep them in a document, but sometimes I forget and search email to find out.
Still I would like to ask that if someone just wants to share information and it is not focused on monetization then please consider other options than Medium.
A lot of newcomers will not make a subscription there.
I prefer ads because, if they're a typical tracker disguised as an ad, I can block them without feeling even a tinge of guilt.
A few weeks ago I saw an ad on a blog post. I think it's the only one I've seen all year. I was so surprised, I looked at the source. It was just an image, hosted on the same domain, wrapped in standard anchor tag. It was even something I might consider using, a server monitoring service. I had never been so happy to see an ad.
I don't have a problem with ads in general. But, I prefer not to have targeted ads -- I prefer ads that shoot from the hip and know as little about me as possible. I know that's not as compelling for advertisers, but they did ok with that model for a century.
I mean, if it were just as simple as, he likes gadgets and cycling: let's show him an ad for a new bike accessory -- that isn't so bad.
But when they know what your mood is, what your insecurities are, what your financial situation is, past purchases at one retailer linked with your phone number to purchases at another retailer, how likely you are to buy at a certain time of day, etc and then they show you the right ad, in the right place at the right time to exploit all of those things... that is too manipulative for my taste.
If it's a programming tutorial, it seems like the ad doesn't need to be targeted to you specifically, but to programmers in general. I really don't want to see another Zappos ad for some shoes I bought a month ago when reading a React tutorial.
It's not just $5 per month, it's $5 on top of all the other subscription services with their low, low monthly costs. Death of 1000 cuts.
A service must be really compelling and unique to persuade people to commit to an open-ended subscription on top of everything else crying for their dollars.
That's why the likes of Apple are racing to bundle their services for a single monthly family fee, they're getting ahead of 'subscription fatigue' where the mental and financial burden of managing a plethora of small monthly charges becomes overwhelming.
> That's less than a starbucks latte.
That's a perfect analogy. The majority of people in any population don't buy a Starbucks latté because the cost-value assessment indicates it's not worth it on top of more essential daily living costs.
Okay, but I have no problem with people sharing useful knowledge as personal advertising, so long as it's actually useful and not otherwise scummy (e.g. the Medium UX).
