[HN Gopher] Medium's Partner Program Changes to Incentivize Huma...
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Medium's Partner Program Changes to Incentivize Human Writing over
AI Articles
Author : armanhq
Score : 24 points
Date : 2023-08-06 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.medium.com)
| politelemon wrote:
| I can't believe I didn't know this before, but seeing that Medium
| runs a partnership program just made me realize why I often
| associate the site with being low quality. I will encounter it in
| search results, often around data science topics. The posts are
| usually poorly explained, with important details omitted and code
| snippets that don't work. It felt like the author was just
| padding the content out but now I can understand it; they were
| trying to meet metrics.
|
| > Earnings will be based on more meaningful metrics.
|
| It seems they've put thought into this so I will assume the best
| intentions here and hope that this does result in better quality!
|
| It must be tough to decide on this because I can imagine that
| Substack too has eaten a lot of Medium's lunch, and a typical
| kneejerk reaction would be to doubledown on attracting views over
| quality.
| justrealist wrote:
| It was going downhill long before the partnership program
| launched.
| rchaud wrote:
| Replace data science with a host of other topics and it's
| mostly similar:
|
| -- UI/UX
|
| -- Entrepreneurship
|
| -- Productivity
|
| At some pointed Medium became a clearinghouse for all the
| articles that were rejected by the B-tier blogs.
| appplication wrote:
| There was a time (or maybe still) where some DS etc bootcamps
| would have their students publish medium articles as a capstone
| to their experience. I think both as a means of personal
| branding as well as researching and demonstrating subject
| matter competence and communication skills.
|
| Which all sounds sensible in a vacuum, but the internet is a
| big, dumb machine that can't distinguish competence (or even
| correctness) from expertise, and you end up with hyper specific
| articles like "Testing SKLearn Lasso Models inside Flask-
| SQLAlchemy using Mocked Spark Fixtures in Pytest" that others
| end up clicking on and it rises to the top of Google under some
| narrow search terms because of _engagement_ , even if the
| substance is completely bonkers.
|
| And then you get second order parroting of these ideas because
| a new grad without the experience to identify cruft actually
| uses them in public repos, or as the basis to hunt down and
| answer every SO question remotely related to this, for that
| sweet karma.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| There are also certification authorities who offer CEUs for
| blogging about the subject matter. So we'll find, say,
| Cybersecurity bloggers who are writing about some entry-level
| topic, like basic networking, or types of symmetric block
| ciphers, and they may blog on a regular basis, because you
| can rack up CEUs to a certain limit by repeating a particular
| activity.
| hejenenndm wrote:
| We need those little badges like in the 90s (e.g. made for
| Netscape navigator) that say "certified organic" for posts
| written by humans. Maybe even add author meta data to page as a
| signature of validity.
| beeburrt wrote:
| Something easily testable, provable and not able to be faked by
| AI.
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