Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-williams-medium-content-fast-food

by ALee • 10 years ago

219 157 10 years ago

Kenji3• 10 years ago

The problem is that most of news in itself is and always will be junk. Profound messages do not owe their value to novelty. If you take the time to read the newspaper and instead read a book about, I don't know, calculus, every day, you will lean much, much more.

free2rhyme214• 10 years ago

This is spot on. I don't believe the hype with Medium. The news will always be junk. You can centralize it and make it prettier on medium - but it's still centralized pretty junk.

stegosaurus• 10 years ago

Indeed.

I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia.

Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself.

It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.

qznc3• 10 years ago

I agree, for your personal development news is not important. However, this is how the big entities (countries, enterprises, etc) move. For example, watch the Panama Papers effect in Iceland and England.

Social networks are ok to move news around, but centralized media is more efficient to reach the masses.

draw_down2• 10 years ago

Excellent point.

matt40772• 10 years ago

News are, however, the source from which most 'profound messages' are distilled. While it doesn't really hurt a single individual to stop reading the news, if large parts of society do so, democracy no longer has the substance it needs to operate.

Also: judging by the amount self-righteousness in this thread, HN readers would never consume 'fast-food-content', read 'a calculus book per day' and see through all the marketing spin. All while compulsively reloading HN, probably.

draw_down2• 10 years ago

Would a cigarette smoker who tells you not to smoke be a hypocrite? Yeah. But they would also be correct.

Kenji3• 10 years ago

Hah, my bad, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean an entire calculus book per day. That would be absolute madness (well, at least if you calculate along with all the proofs). I mean a few pages of a calculus book every day instead of a few pages of newspaper ;)

And I read hackernews not because of the news articles but because of the value of the hackernews comments, though I agree, it is somewhat hypocritical, I also read the news sometimes.

sekasi• 10 years ago

I don't quite understand the reasoning in the start which seems to boil down to;

Content/Media on the web is bad and people are dissatisfied.

How exactly do you reach this conclusion? I mean we can all make huge assumptions about the opinions the average human have on the quality of media, but I don't think that qualifies as any form of factual commentary.

onewaystreet• 10 years ago

How exactly do you reach this conclusion

Ev was the founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter and now is the founder of Medium. If he's reached the conclusion that people are dissatisfied with content/media on the web it's probably because a lot of them have told him so (it's still just his opinion though, doesn't mean he's right).

Animats• 10 years ago

So he did Twitter.com (small), and Medium.com What next, Large.com? The domain is for sale.

kough• 10 years ago

This is a submarine piece for Medium, but I found this paragraph to be poignant:

“I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.”

It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

roymurdock• 10 years ago

Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.

dcposch• 10 years ago

What does "submarine" mean here? It must be a pretty unusual term because even Googling "submarine sponsored content" doesnt work

zarify• 10 years ago

I'd love a search engine built around something like this idea. Of course, how would you pay for something that discouraged the idea of advertising?

rhizome2• 10 years ago

The internet is still new and so businesses remain committed to pre-internet business models. Modal popups, interstitials, encroachment on real content...all of this stuff comes from broadcast and print advertising models that a majority of the players in this world were trained on, either through degree programs or experience at agencies themselves wedded to the status quo.

padobson• 10 years ago

It doesn't help that Google and Facebook figured out how to make those business models insanely profitable on the Internet.

hiou• 10 years ago

Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been shown to be addictive.

Junk food like McDonald's and Snickers bars have been shown to be addictive.

They are all the same type of product. It's amazing to see those involved in tech attempt over and over again to rationalize themselves out of that obvious connection.

beezle• 10 years ago

its funny reading him moan about it. the internet was already a difficult place for written word as the attention spans necessary for more than a page/screen are just not there. Then came twitter. Will it be long now before tweets come with tl;dr ?

Retra3• 10 years ago

Are you imagining a site that forces communication through emoji and nothing else?

tracker14• 10 years ago

I had a thought the other day while driving through Seattle... seemed to get stuck in traffic flows more than I'm used to in other places.

The though occurred to me, that those highway signs with the mini ads for the gas stations and restaurants coming up could include products you'd be able to get at said gas stations and restaurants... Snickers could be on the sign, right next to Chevron or ARCO. That would be relatively cheap for some larger brands (Coca-Cola comes to mind), but potentially huge in terms of placement.

Gah, I hate that I come up with ways in the back of my mind on ideas like this... still it's better than the over-the-top ads in the clickbait sites.

foobarqux• 10 years ago

Is the hype for Medium legitimate? Why?

AdamSC12• 10 years ago

Yes and no.

First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages:

1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device.

2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write.

3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads.

4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further.

That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium.

Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

Can you monetise the content at all? I assumed Medium was the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory - with the difference that unlike most, you can get some useful exposure from it, maybe.

Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.

lmm2• 10 years ago

As a reader, it's a much nicer place to read articles than... literally anywhere else on the web. Just a really nice consistent UI that puts the content front and center and lets me get on with reading your actual words.

jplasmeier• 10 years ago

Well, what do you want for free?

"ad-supported"

rhizome2• 10 years ago

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"

mbesto• 10 years ago

“Medium doesn’t need to be the thing you check all day, every day. We’re not looking for addiction,” says Williams. “We’re just looking to give people one or two of what they think are the most important things on a daily basis. Things that they care about, things that change how they think about the world.”

With a business model exactly like BuzzFeed's, which is built on optimizing for content and titles that can be turned in native advertising. It's not changing the way how we think about the world...it's the changing the way we think about how advertisers want the world to look like.

briholt• 10 years ago

It doesn't take a PhD in data analytics to figure out that profit-motive will create a ceaseless pressure for page views, which means Medium will inevitably try to get people to spend all day everyday on Medium. Which means their unavoidable path is to become BuzzFeed.

amagumori• 10 years ago

oh man, the way they spun his quote in the title for outrage clicks...

ced• 10 years ago

We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”

Really disappointing from the Guardian.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

It's almost ironic to spin a quote in such a way to attract clicks on an article about how the media put junk in front of their consumers.

danyork• 10 years ago

But, sadly, the Guardian's business model is based around advertising and so they need the eyeballs... so to get the eyeballs on quick approach is to write the click-bait headlines. :-(

simonebrunozzi• 10 years ago

Right? Almost worse than pure click-baiting.

soared2• 10 years ago

Pure click-baiting

Oh god. Please no. Kill me.

rayalez• 10 years ago

One of the major reasons so much online content is junk is advertisements. When journalists make money based on clicks, they have very strong incentives to produce a lot low quality, easy to consume content. When you profit from manipulating attention, it's hard to resist generating clickbait. It is much easier to manufacture outrage(that spreads very well) than to educate or enlighten.

I think that the best way to fix this is to change monetization strategy from ads to premium content or paid subscriptions. When that happens, the main incentive turns from "quickly produce a lot of viral content" to "create high quality content that is worth buying". It is the easiest, the most straightforward way to properly align incentives.

I was so excited about Medium because it's a platform that had a chance to do that, and I hoped they would. Unfortunately, they have introduced ads as a monetization strategy. Too bad.

natrius7• 10 years ago

Advertising as a business model is destroying the things we love. Nobody wants addictive content. We want informative, enjoyable content, but that's not profitable. Page views are profitable, and page views require addiction.

Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.

seeing• 10 years ago

Are you willing to pay?

natrius7• 10 years ago

I subscribe to four publications and fund two nonprofit publications. But let's assume I wasn't willing to pay. We should still stop supporting our own addictions. Especially since the people feeding us junk literally sell changes in our behavior to the highest bidder. This is madness, y'all. Opt out.

dingaling• 10 years ago

Are you willing to pay?

Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money.

For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services.

That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.

brador• 10 years ago

Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.

natrius7• 10 years ago

Yes, it's an arms race. We might lose, but until then, let's go faster.

username2233• 10 years ago

We seem to have reached a bearable truce with spam. I think well north of 90% of email people try to send is spam nowadays, but no more than 50% of what I actually see on any given day is PR junk, unsolicited or otherwise. Granted, messages I care about sometimes get lost, but it doesn't happen often enough to make email useless. ML-based "native advertising" blockers will eventually become as common as spam filters, and the war will become a slightly unpleasant stalemate. Maybe the end-state will be something like current product placement in movies and TV, which is usually either comically heavy-handed, or completely unobtrusive and ignorable.

taneq2• 10 years ago

You mean like product placement in movies and TV shows? Because honestly that's quite bearable.

jlubawy• 10 years ago

Sounds exactly like the premise to this South Park episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising

James001• 10 years ago

I think you're missing the fact that everything already is a PR piece and has been forever

yoz-y2• 10 years ago

I like native advertising in general. The one thing I do not like though is the growing prevalence of "un-advertising" i.e. blurring logos of brands that appear in the image for different reasons. I have not looked into this but I presume this is done because some sponsor earned exclusivity.

Also, I absolutely hate the current trend in tv shows to put a sticker over a logo on _every single_ computer. Real world does not look like this, it is ridiculous.

krzrak2• 10 years ago

I see an analogy with free/cheap IT conferences: you go there (naively) expecting content, but it turns out that almost every talk is an advertisement of the product or job openings.

sys_argv• 10 years ago

naiveté

dcgoss• 10 years ago

While I understand your position, I'm not so sure that Google, Facebook, and Twitter would look the same today if they charged each user directly for access.

natrius7• 10 years ago

Right, they'd look very different. But charging money isn't necessarily the answer there. I'm betting on decentralization. Facebook and Twitter manage identities that let us interact with our friends, but we have the technology for decentralized identities that have no middlemen. We'll replace these services with clients that act on our behalf.

dota_fanatic• 10 years ago

The masses have been strongly motivated to prefer the easy, the immediately satisfying, the addictive, for centuries via advertising. If nobody wants addictive content then we wouldn't be where we are---domesticated, holding certain preferences that we like to believe are our own which are actually merely beneficial to certain businesses.

Turn on your ad blockers (and destroy addiction as a business model)? Yeah, right. Really, you're kidding, right?

pink_dinner• 10 years ago

Ad blockers will eventually do to the content industry what file sharing has done to the music industry: it will make it impossible to make a living at it unless you are part of a very large corporation, mostly because they have other businesses to subsidize the unprofitable content models.

Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.

open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.

The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.

Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.

stevesearer2• 10 years ago

My ad-run business is doing pretty well and I'm the only person running it. Ad blocking doesn't seem to have affected me - yet - because my ads are relevant, nice to look at, and self-hosted. Readers and advertisers (and me) get value out of them.

I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.

themartorana• 10 years ago

And that content will be served through what internet paid for by who(m) exactly?

ThomPete2• 10 years ago

Content marketing is destroying the things we love :)

It's almost impossible to read a well written popular piece of content today that isn't selling something either directly or indirectly.

I think we will see advertising in the form of a piece of promotion attached to other content is going to disappear as we become better and better at injecting it into our normal content.

mozumder2• 10 years ago

The problem is, the entire purpose of life is to sell.

People sell themselves just by brushing their teeth in the morning, so that they're more marketable than the slob that doesn't.

I am selling you my influence right now.

sytelus• 10 years ago

Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it.

Also, consider the fact lot of subscriptions have poor overall value. Advertises allow you to try and move on without making any commitments. If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.

Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model. Subscriber churn is almost always ongoing threat putting significant pressure on aquition pipeline. If TV channels went subscription only, most would die quick horrible death. The open secret in media industry is that advertisers are forced to pay lot more money than return they would actually get which ultimately "subsidizes" the content creation.

natrius7• 10 years ago

Advertisers aren't funding content to help the middle class. They're funding content to take the middle class's money. You might think advertising doesn't make people spend more, but there's a pretty big industry that disagrees with you.

I don't care if it's hard to build a business on subscriptions. The alternative—building a business on addiction and manipulation—is immoral. I will happily watch it die.

devishard• 10 years ago

Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it.

Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.

If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.

Sounds great to me. Most of the time I spend on the internet is spent looking for decent content, and most of that time is spent sifting through garbage.

Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model.

Excellent. I really hope the Buzzfeeds of the world go out of business.

Advertisers and the garbage they fund make the world a worse place. They prop up businesses that provide negative value. They drain resources from businesses that provide value but have to advertise to the level of their competition's advertising. They introduce insecurity and complexity to our infrastructures. They waste the talents of thousands of brilliant minds who could be solving real problems. They sell people things they don't need or want, for prices they can't afford. Worst of all, they poison the collective consciousness with ignorance and outright lies. They deserve to go out of business.

People are willing to pay for what they actually want, and people want good content, so creators of good content will be okay. The creators of garbage who need ads to legitimate their sorry existence, on the other hand, can burn.

kriro2• 10 years ago

If I were a cynic I'd say the result of such a plan would be more articles like the one we're discussing here. Thinly veiled PR pieces. I should probably dust of my Zotero subfolder on subliminal stimuli, too.

VenkiPhy6• 10 years ago

Personally I have gotten access to some legitimately good products via ads. So, I don't believe advertising is destroying things - only irresponsible, immoral advertisements of bad products is. This latter form of advertising thrives only via junk content(like daily newspapers, reality television etc.). No good company will be willing to advertise its products via junk content and no creator of good content is going to let a bad product get advertised. So I feel, speaking against junk content is the way to go. That way we will have good content making money by advertising products that actually deserve it while also getting rid of bad companies and junk content.

If you are thinking of blocking ads then that will hit not only the pockets of junk content creators(which is fine) but also that of good content creators who will then eventually turn to the junk.

tracker14• 10 years ago

X10 is the brand I will forever associate with popover/under ads... The product itself and the company weren't necessarily bad. That said, I've always avoided them because they started it all in my mind.

amelius• 10 years ago

Personally I have gotten access to some legitimately good products via ads.

Don't worry. When, someday, ads are gone, you can probably subscribe to some product recommendation service if you so desire.

qznc3• 10 years ago

In Germany we have mandatory media flatrate. A different business model. However, many people don't like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...

pluma2• 10 years ago

It's not a media flatrate. It's a tax by any other name to maintain publicly funded television and radio channels while maintaining a separation of state and media (because of bad experiences with state-controlled media in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic).

The reason many people don't like it are:

* it feels like a third-party license fee due to how it is charged (e.g. you have to pay it yourself and it is charged per household rather than per citizen)

* prior to the simplification of the rules in 2013 many people would be subjected to "inspections" by the media companies, with ethically and legally dubious behaviour like peeking into bedroom windows and rummaging through trash cans (in the days of tv magazines)

* it costs money, unlike most private channels (via satellite or antenna)

* you have to pay even if you don't use it or don't want it

* despite being something you have to pay for, there is no obvious way to influence the programming

* although they are the only channels that are required by law to feature a certain amount of educational and cultural programming, in practice a lot of it is basically "entertainment for the elderly" (like telenovelas and cheesy romance flicks) or game shows

Personally I'm also extremely annoyed that they give free airtime to the dominant religious groups (Catholic Church of Germany, Evangelical Church of Germany and sometimes Jews or Muslims) "because culture", to the point that they always invite religious ministers or monks for ethical debates and frequently give them more weight than secular arguments (though to be fair: the religious representatives usually come off as fairly progressive although their arguments are of course still entirely based on theology).

Plus, of course, the fact that while BBC subscribers get Terry Pratchett we only get Rosamunde Pilcher -- and German actors, who are mostly horrible and take themselves too serious.

return02• 10 years ago

I don't think it's advertising that has got people addicted to facebook & twitter.

natrius7• 10 years ago

The advertising business model is why those companies built addictive products. To make money from ads, you have to keep them coming back as often as possible, even if it isn't adding value to their lives.

jcslzr• 10 years ago

Ads are not bad, they allow more content to be available, its one thing to see my ads on every site like a virus or spam but if you enjoy visiting my site the least you can do is allow the ads so I get a profit out of it. Also Free content is not better, and it makes easier for people with money and an agenda to fill the space of people who tries to make a living HONESTLY with ads.

brento• 10 years ago

Reading the comments in this thread, is somewhat ironic.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

Information goods and markets are a poor match for numerous reasons. Paradoxically, it also seems to be the direction much of the advanced world is headed, in the sense both of goods which are nothing but information (data, print, audio, images, video), and those for which information content is a large component: high-tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and processes.

One of the problems is fairly well understood: the tendency for marginal costs to approach zero, or at least a small fraction of the fixed costs of production (look at the story over how Boeing accounts for the R&D of its 787 Dreamliner).

Another is more insidious: information isn't readily assimilarted. If you look at the advertiser's toolkit for message dissemination, what you see are all kinds of ways to drape the intended message over an assimilable one: sex, youth, beauty, fame, fear, greed, jealousy, envy, loss. Or repetition, music, disorientation, flashy elements.

Junk food (of the dietary or infotainment variety) has cognizability, a word I first ran across in William Stanley Jevons description of characteristics of money. You instantly recognise what these are. Complex truths are, well, more complicated. The geniuses who discover or explain them come up with useful metaphors or analogies: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman. Much of that is mapping a novel thought onto a familiar one.

We're not going to take that out of information, it's part and parcel of the bargain (a metaphor, incidentally, arguably a cliche). But we can try engineering systems for compensating and promoting information which don't flagrantly flog and feed junk. That's the feedback and control loops Williams talks of.

One approach is to treat information as a public good. It's what the UK does with the BBC, and it's the philosophy of a number of institutions, including CUNY's Graduate Center (who've adopted this as their motto), and Robert McChesney and John Nichols:

http://www.thenation.com/article/how-save-journalism-0/

mbrock4• 10 years ago

Cool comment.

We can also look at the daily habits of the ordinary people who create non-junk content every day.

De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is all about this: the fertile creativity of people going about their lives, which is overpowered by the glitz of mass media and the seriousness of corporate activity.

That's where my love is, and it's the base for my anti-commercial sentiment. Power to the people.

Corporations didn't invent food, literature, math, love, cleverness, music, fishing, gardening, dancing... they are sponsors at best, tyrants at worst.

So when they try to convince me that, say, music is doomed because of "pirate copying," it really makes me laugh. I have a guitar right here, and two friends who are into folk song...

And all this goddamn stuff they think it's important to consume, including all the goddamn news. To hell with it.

surfaceTensi0n2• 10 years ago

In advertising there is a concept called effective frequency which is, essentially, how many times someone needs to be exposed to your ad before they make a purchase. This is tied pretty directly to the complexity of your message. The more complex your message, the higher the effective frequency and the more times people need to be exposed to your ad before they buy your product. Hence the tendency towards easily assimilated ideas like you mention.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

I'm starting to think I need to look at advertising theory some more. Ugh.

Thanks for the comment though, pretty much as I'd suspected.

Another note: if the frequency is too high in any one period of time, I suspect there's burnout. Political advertising seems to hit this point -- a friend in a heavily campaigned state a few years back used to respond to candidate spots with "F--- you <name>" when yet another of the multiple-times-an-hour ads would sound.

You need repetitions, but also spacing.

There's also ... I forget the name, but "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy", a 1930s / 1940s Texas politician. Ended up governor, before getting caught up in a corruption scandal. Early name recognition came from his fame as a bluegrass / popular music performer.

ubersol1• 10 years ago

In my humble opinion both platforms are turning into a place where people would like to complain or bitch about some things that bother them.

vanderZwan• 10 years ago

Kind of funny how he talks about content in terms of calories and junk food (and he's absolutely spot on, of course), and how Medium.com is one of the leaders in website obesity, which is "fat" on the technical layer:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

(not meant a snide remark, just thought it was an interesting coincidence in choice of metaphor)

arisAlexis2• 10 years ago

Not meant as an ad since I am fighting alone for a non-profit but checkout something that is meant as a free no-bs replacement of Twitter (maybe Medium too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660

arisAlexis2• 10 years ago

I have coded 6 months for some good cause without money and still get downvoted :) oh well

codeulike• 10 years ago

The clickbait quote in context:

"We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”

danr4• 10 years ago

The future of information is NOT in for-profit organizations.

eveningcoffee• 10 years ago

This quote is completely wrong!

He told: ", well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”.

Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’

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