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Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
461 points by slymerson on Feb 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 552 comments
Medium.com is still up and running so it hasn't failed exactly, but it's not the best platform to go to anymore when it comes to blogging.

The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm reading the same posts over and over again. Not to mention the stupid paywall which is infuriating.

Why did Medium end up like this? In the beginning it was pretty good but then it started to wither. Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?

Substack has done a good job at competing in the blogging market but it's different from Medium. Medium is more of a social blogging platform while Substack is more of a newsletter platform. Substack doesn't have an algorithm that recommends you content, but instead shows you exactly who you follow. This is nice, but I can't deny that I also like finding new content through a recommendation engine, which Medium also sucks at.




I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:

1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.

Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.

What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.


I think these are not the main pain points.

The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.

Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.

The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.


This is literally it.

Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down.

Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant?

That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.


I remember a few years ago I started to realize that if I somehow see the link pointed to "medium.com" I would just... nope. Not willing to take the gamble if I can read the page or not.


Agree, this is surprisingly annoying when you click and it tells you "nope sucker, not today, you're not getting to read something you're interested in". Why should I even bother to get my hopes up in the first place?


same with New York Times... and Wall Street Journal... and Financial Times... and The Economist... and many others. I've wondered what it would take to pre-emptively edit HN so i don't even see those links.


Substack does this too, though. In fact I feel like it's incredibly similar to medium in many ways.

Why has substack "won" this market? Or has it really? Is it just due to the newsletter publishing tools and subsidising some big name bloggers?


> Why has substack "won" this market?

Medium "won" this market a few years back as well. The reason it sucks now is because investors aren't paying them to make the internet reading experience nice. And in any case, readers aren't willing to pay a subscription fee for 'nice'.

Substack is now the leader because investors haven't pressured them to turn more newsletters into paid products. They will, they just haven't now. And just like Medium, the really good writers will have enough capital to run their own newsletters, and use Substack only for SEO. Sound familiar?

Soon, we'll begin to see "name.substack.com" with the same kind of suspicion that we now see "medium.com".


I already do.


Yeah, I want to "not", but sadly it's going that way for me as well.


Substack didn't start doing this until it had pulled significant share from Medium. I suspect it will hurt substack long term too.

In a way this feels like the cycle of image hosts. Everyone moves to the new user friendly one, that one enshittifies the site to make more money, cycle repeats.


I have a newsletter for CTOs, and I try hard not to link to Substack any more, the number of my readers seem to automatically lock the article behind a pay wall - Substack is lost I think as a website (don't know about the newsletter aspect).

I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.


Same here. I have no patience for this type of shameless spamming anymore. One thing I hate about Medium is that it puts a paywall across everything, as if they’re The NY Times. If anything, I care about the author I’m reading, not Medium. With Substack I can subscribe to an individual author and they are the ones deciding what to paywall. Sure Substack gets a cut if I subscribe but that’s in the background.


I'll interrupt this stream of consensus to note I don't have issues following a link to Medium.

Here's how it goes: I open a link, I dismiss a sign-up suggestion screen (if any), I read the stuff, and then I go. If there's a paywall I leave, but I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.

There are low-quality posts but they are plenty on all platforms (dev.to comes to mind). On plus side Medium articles are comfortable to read without distractions.


Medium is not Economist.


Point me to where I said "Medium is Economist" or cease.

I can count on my fingers the number of Economist articles I read per year while my history is full of recent Medium visits, mostly related to work so stuff that translates in productivity and earnings. They're not even in the same ballpark.


Sorry for rudeness I shouldn't get triggered by downvotes


> I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.

Of course but it has to be a balance. Medium does all the things I mention.

If they did just one of those to monetize, ok I'd not be happy but I'd give them a pass. A paywall ideally not because I'm really not going to subscribe after reading only 3 articles.

But doing all of those makes me feel like a cash cow. Like they're grasping at straws desperate to get some cash. They don't understand the user-hostility of this and that's important because the users are their resources.

And as far as the NYT and Economist, I avoid those too. If I really think something is worth reading I'll use a paywall bypass tool but generally I don't even bother.


Maybe that's just me or selective geolocation but in my experience Medium almost never hits with a paywall, and because a lot of useful material is there I am not seeing it a problem. Substack links, for example, are significantly more annoying so I actually take a moment and think if I should even bother.


Medium is the Pinterest of text.


It's even difficult to read a medium post on archive.org because the page seems to reload every couple of seconds. (I was in archive.org because they banned somebody who thinks things that they don't think... Or something, it mentioned breaking rules but didn't say which rule, or link to the rules)


Fundamentally, it's hard to build a profitable blogging platform we'll like, because all you really need to do is render markdown/HTML with a decent stylesheet. Most features on top of that should either be browser extensions or shouldn't exist at all.

Everything else is platforming, which we will also argue should be separated from the blog itself. This is why we have URLs and links. Just as in the restaurant example, I first go to a credit card company, then I go buy dinner.


It's hard to build a profitable blogging platform because the economics of writing itself makes it unworkable.

The tech stack isn't even on the top 100 hindrances to profitability.


But medium isn't the one that does the writing here, so does that really matter?


That's a good point; I guess it's hard to build a profitable company that supports an unprofitable endeavor?


It’s crazy to me that they seem completely blind to the root problem. When I pick a blogging platform I don’t want popups, paywalls, required logins, or anything other than the content. Medium took off because it had a simple clean UI and good posts, and seemed like the lowest friction way to blog. Now Medium has huge amounts of friction and feels like yet another business trying to pump money out of users, so Substack is the new go-to and someone else takes their place.


I assume the plan from day one was make a very appealing platform at a loss, gain a moat from a huge library of good content, then squeeze the profit out of it.

It's a deceptive business model, and people feel deceived and no longer want to do business with that company (surprise!).


The same logic applies to Youtube. Do you think Youtube is going to fail soon?


The thing is video hosting at scale is still a pain, I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one, and almost all their content is still free in unlimited amounts. I'm not sure I've ever paid YouTube a dollar directly even though I watch it daily.

There may be some similarities (like when they used to let people upload full movies and TV shows), but it is a big stretch to paint YouTube and Medium with the same brush.


>I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one

hmm, not sure what you mean. I have a gmail account from early early days, and I've never created a youtube account. I would've accepted it if they forced it on me, but given the choice I've never seen a reason to create one. They nag me to create one if I forget and try to upvote, or comment, and they nag me for subscribing on the regular also.

perhaps if I created a gmail account later on it would come with youtube?


While there definitively _are_ similarities, this example (as far as I’m concerned) is a perfect illustration of a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and that Medium - as opposed to YT - unfortunately did cross. I’m personally trying to avoid Medium links because of the 3-article-max/month paywall applied to my account, but clicking on a YT link isn’t a problem for me. Why? Go figure! I’ll have to deal with the ad(s) - more and more so! - and a request to test YT-premium, but the net benefit is felt like positive for me at the end of the day. And for them too I guess!

Medium should invest in UX study, get to know better their targeted users and implement a paywall that is _just_ painful enough so that it doesn’t cause the customers to associate your brand with a negative concept.

You can trick us into paying, but do it nice and sweet! We want to feel like you deserve it, not that we got forced.


How is it the same model? I have been watching YT videos for years and was never denied access to any content.


"This video has been removed because of youtube policies".

This is the exact same thing: shitification.

Make a cool product at a loss then make it shitier to use to bring as much money as you can before enough users exit to break your network effect. You can even make it last longer by making it as hard as possible for your users to leave.

If the process is not entirely clear to you, look at Twitter. (Elon Musk is incredibly not-subtle at this). Everyone of those monopolies are "too big too fail" until it does. Yahoo was like this. Tumblr was like this. Facebook and Twitter were considered as indestructible gods yesterday: they look incredibly fragile now (I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"). Youtube is indestructible? Every single creator is complaining about having video removed/unmonetized while every single person I know is baffle and annoyed at the number of advertising they get. Wait for the moment when people will hear about Peertube.

What most people fail to realize is that "failing" is never a big nova disappearance. It’s more subtle, becoming slightly more irrelevant. Yahoo is still there after all. Youtube/Facebook will still be there in 10 years. (while some may even wonder if Twitter will still exist next year). I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.

What few realize that it is all part of the plan when running a VC business. You have the "invest phase" (everything is free, growth at all cost) then the "cashing phase" (aka "shitification"). VC never invest without an horizon. So, sooner or later, money will flew out and the whole thing will fall. People miss it because the brand usually keep a residual value which keep the light on.

That’s why the only long-term sustainable solution is free software. Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades (sometimes without major changes in their architecture, which is awesome when you think about it).

That’s why, all in all, Medium must fail. It’s all part of the plan. I was lured in myself years ago but I painfully exported all my medium content to my own blog. It took me years to realize that any centralized platform is one signature away of being elon-musked.


> That’s why the only long-term sustainable solution is free software. Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades (sometimes without major changes in their architecture, which is awesome when you think about it).

Free software isn't enough though, we need publicly run platforms that are not driven by profit interests. I think the only way this can work long term is if those platforms are sufficiently decentralized that the damage can be "repaired" when individual instances fall.

The alternative would be government- or non-profit-run infrastructure, but I am not confident that that will hold up against money interests. See e.g. ICANN and the increasingly monetized domain name system or the sellout of Freenode how money can corrupt or take over such centralized platforms.


You are framing it as if money is the root of the problem. But it's not the case. It would be cheaper for Youtube to not ban anyone. It would be cheaper not to spend money on algorithms and people that post something they don't like. They don't make money - at least not directly - by controlling the narrative of public discussion and distorting it to their liking. They get something which is very important to somebody who already has the money - power. With power, they can ensure they keep the money, and also enjoy all the benefits of being rich and powerful. If you think getting the government to rule it would be better, you are deluded. Government is concentrated power, so it would only multiply the problems, and since the government can not be replaced by something else (at least not without very much unpleasantness and shooting and other bad things), they would have zero interest in sharing their power with anybody else. And if you think you will be able to control this power by just voting once in two years, you are double deluded.


Censorship is a different issue. It is a political/culture war related, not denying me content because they want money from me, but denying me content because they think this content should not be available to anyone. It is a horrible thing, much worse than paywalling tbh, but completely different thing.

> I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"

Mostly true, but that isn't that bad tbh. Grandparents have income, grandparents have time to spend, and grandparents aren't prone as much to jump to the next new shiny thing. True, they will eventually go away, but it's not going to happen very soon. So if that is true, Facebook has at least a decade, and maybe more because my generation (which would roughly be "parents" to your students) also uses FB, though much less now.

> I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.

Is there? I see two tweets links, and none of the "toots" (I will never get over the fact that this word means "fart"). I am no fan of twitter, but I am not sure how Mastodon would be better - all censorship fans are already there. I mean, you could use it as a blog, I guess, but why not just use a blog then?

> Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades

I was thinking that too, for a while. Until culture warriors started attacking the free software. Now I am not so sure. I mean, they probably won't be able to take down a huge project like Linux - too many people depend on it being there - but I am pretty sure they could destroy any smaller project. Think about it - how much abuse would a person be willing to take based on something they don't even get paid for?


Youtube has amazing infotainment right now. Its a super cool emergent phenomenon that there are soo many amazing niches filled by content creators putting out information dense 45 minute+ videos. I don't mind the ads in this case (vs some short clip), and they all seem to have sponsors as well.


I'm already less likely to click Youtube links than a (usually Fediverse-hosted) webm/mp4. I think innertia will keep them going for quite a while though but hopefully more sites will start hosting their own videos. And hopefully browsers will pull their head out of their collective behinds and fix the <video> tag so you can do statically hosted adaptive streaming without bringing your own HLS/DASH implementation.


And Substack's already starting to feel the same way; the incessant prompts to create an account and subscribe to something are the telltale first red flags heralding an intention to put monetization first and utility second.


I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this.

A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.)

Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement.

I don't know what analytics compel these guys to put a gate in front the platform. Just accept what people are willing to give you. I guess they wake up one day and realize everyone just moved on.


Quora is a shithole too. I remember 5-6 years ago I hung out in Quora because it high quality content from real experts. It was really interesting. Now it's nothing.

Websites (forums, mostly) have figured out they'll actually drive more traffic if they didn't have a sign-up wall.

The signup requirement is myopic, some PM looking into the data and doing some math they can make more $$$ per unique visit if they make them sign up, not realizing the long-term harm it creates because it drives the unique visits way down.


I would ban quora and Pinterest from all search results if I could.


You can with the "uBlacklist" extension


No argument. But how do they make money without these measures? Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker, the vast majority of their labor—moderators—work for nothing.


I have known dozens of people who would gladly pay $20 a month to have a platform where they can freely share their writings and discuss with like-minded people -- small clubs, if you will.

Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.

Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.

The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.

Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.

But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.


I was going to say that $20/mo sounds a bit high but then I remembered that I still have a $20/mo VPS for pretty much that purpose (email, small websites) and I can't can't really be bothered to downsize the server even though there is plenty of room (except disk space).


People only view $20/mo as high because many other subs are less but when you point out to them how much money they spend on several $5/mo subs and they come over to your side.

Frankly I'd gladly pay $20 for privacy-preserving focused online service that does exactly what I want. And I believe many people would as well.

The problem as usual are others poisoning the well e.g. Netflix et. al. because they are kinda commoditized for many people at this point and they perceive them as impossible to live without.


> But how do they make money without these measures?

By inserting ads every few posts in the feeds, letting users pay for bonus features and letting users pay for bonus features for others as a show of approval.

People don't generally go to Reddit to read one single thing that was linked from another site, so the kind of "engagement" platforms like Medium are struggling to achieve through incessant nagging happens a little more naturally. It doesn't have to dedicate a third of the screen area to links and thumbnails of totally unrelated articles, because I'm already in e.g. /r/StarWars where people voluntarily organize exactly what I was interested in reading about when I went there.

You also don't have to be as wary of the hustle because unlike Medium, as there's really no straight forward way to make money off of "engagement" with your Reddit posts and replies. You aren't there arguing about some detail in Star Trek TNG S03E14 with /u/dickmonger in order to boost your LinkedIn profile either. Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled—it has a sense of honesty and realness that you don't get when people are deliberately trying to culture profitable personas and turning every semblance of original thought into revenue streams.

> Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker,

Is Medium? I don't know that either of these companies make their profit public, but I have a hard time believing that Reddit performs worse than Medium. As someone who ends up reading an article here and there on Medium very occasionally, the changes I see between the visits tell of a company desperately struggling to keep investors happy.


> Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled

A lot of communities are not like this though. There's a lot of good ones too.


For me the bar is that a site has to work in incognito. That's how I open all links, so login is out of the question. Medium actually works very well that way, I didn't even know they still have the paywall -- or I might have disabled some scripts?


> For me the bar is that a site has to work in incognito.

Or you'll do what?


Or I don't use the site. I make exceptions for e-mail, Hacker News, and sometimes GitHub. But not for newpapers, Google, or Facebook. And definitely not for Medium.


Maybe you have the Bypass Paywalls extension (https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) installed?


No I don't, but I do have uMatrix with scripts not loaded by default. So that might be it.


The point where once-enjoyable services start turning to shit to make a buck is inevitable; it was the VCs footing the bill, but now it's the user's turn. The illusion of 'startup disruption' collapses once it reaches what I call the "somebody has to pay for all this shit" phase.


yes but it can be more complicated than that. A site might run in the black and make small money being a sleepy, friendly site, but still succumb to the lure of taking a gamble to make more money.

Somebody could enjoy building a site for awhile, but not ultimately enjoy running it, so they sell it, because included in the value of that ongoing concern is the option to shoot for the stars.


> It’s crazy to me that they seem completely blind to the root problem.

I know it's cliché, but the classic quote remains true:

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.


I've never used these commercial blogging platforms, so the answer to this question may be obvious.

Do these platforms provide something useful compared to something like write.as which is based on an open source solution? Is their tools so much better than the open source alternatives?


It honestly seems like a lowest common denominator play. I currently subscribe to a substack and they are allergic to using a computer beyond the most rudimentary interactions - launching a web browser. (Blocked and Reported specifically)


Bait and switch is the de facto business model of the internet.

Burn money to bring in users, then monetize and exit.


Substack doesn't even support markdown yet, right ?


As far as I can see markdown is very popular in developer circles only - I guess due to GitHub popularizing it.

So I could imagine it's not on their radar for something aimed at bloggers - of course some will be developers too but not too many.


This is the reason.


>Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order.

The first thing I'd think is "how high are the prices that they suggest I need more credit?"


Agree. There's a reason there are so many "de-medium-er" scriptlets and browser plugins; to get away from all that crap.

Here's the one I use with mostly success:

    javascript:location.href="https://scribe.rip"+location.pathname;


I don’t understand what you mean by hijacking copy paste and highlighting and I’d like to. Could you say more?


> you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away

I cannot agree more. The brand has destroyed itself by putting everything behind a login/pay-wall. I don't even click on medium.com links anymore, regardless of how interesting the content may be. And if I accidentally click on one, I click the back button in less than a second.

I understand the desire to monetize, but this is not the way.


How do they monetize? I never tried to register. Do they ask money to actually read the content they did not even produce themselves?

I'd expect for them to monetize on ads. And ads show up regardless of registration status.


I was looking at Medium yesterday for the first time after a long break.

"X free articles." OK. Fine.

How much does a subscription cost? No idea. That info isn't available without a signup. [1]

This is so fucking stupid. With other content sites I can see a price and I can decide if I think it's worth it.

With Medium it feels like they have something to hide.

Obviously I didn't sign up and I didn't click through.

If the content was good enough and if it was worth the money I would. But they way Medium is now, neither of those important details is visible.

[1] Or by Googling. Which works, but...


> How much does a subscription cost? No idea. That info isn't available without a signup.

On top of that, they don't let you specifically log into an account. They let you type in an email address, which will either log into an existing account or create a new account. Better hope you use the same email for every site. Also better hope you're not trying to check if an account exists or not, because the process of checking will just create a new account if not.


That subscription cost thing is a really good point, totally forgot about that when I wrote the original comment, I also ran into that myself and I still don't know because I never created an account.

This is also a bad idea IMO because it brings up the feeling of "if you have to ask..."


Exactly, it is the enshittifying of the service by corrupting it’s original promise and replacing it with “make more money”.

Nobody comes to use your service just because you want more money. People come to get value, and that has been sniffed out.

P.S. props to Corey doctorow for his fantastic “enshittification” posts.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys


Thanks for the link, found the post very interesting.


On top of that, medium just isn’t a site that matters much to me. I am not interested in exploring medium to find the interesting articles they are boosting. For me medium is just a place that hosts articles that I find through reddit or HN or mastodon. The best thing it can do is let me read that one article and get out of the way. It doesn’t need features, it doesn’t need recommendations, it just needs to not be annoying to read, it needs to not try to engage me.

But the investors will never let it just be that, there’s too much money involved.


Agree idk why anyone would stay in the medium ecosystem. The site is annoying so much so that like others I think twice before I even click a medium link.


I love these. Someone posts a scathing critique of a company. Company representative responds with a mea culpa that misses the mark, and includes plans to fix. Top reply nails the actual problem, why the fix won’t work, and gets massive agreement. Company rep doesn’t respond.

You know it hits hard though. Hopefully they take it to heart. I like using medium as an author but HATE the “4 articles remaining” crap. I’ve been planning to move elsewhere but have been lazy. I’ve noticed from my readership numbers that I’m not alone.


I think it's just cause there's two options.

As the platform goes to shit, keep milking it for all it's worth till the bitter end.

Or

Try and fix it and earn a bit less money for a year or two as it becomes healthy again and thrives.

It's not easy to tell investors that losing money for a year or two is ok and "just trust me".


Exactly. X-views is just disrespect and ensures I never build a habit out of the platform’s content. Same goes for sites like FineHomeBuilding.com. Even if I know there’s good content there, I now avoid clicking just to not “use up” my stupid 3 views a month (yes, can copy/paste url to private browsing, but easier to just go elsewhere).


these days i usually immediately close a page if it's on medium.com because of these dark patterns


Same feeling here. There was a time in which it was pleasant to read an article in medium but not anymore and they made the experience so awful that I'm not willing to give them any more chances to improve. And reading the CEO here it seems they aren't even aware what the real problems are.


I wonder how much traffic they loose on that first pop up. I bet like 25-50% of all views never make it past that shitty subscribe thing


Exactly my reasons as well. I just kept running into walls on medium. I recall commenting on articles that I did end up reading wasn't smooth either.


Everyone needs to build a brand, with their own blog. When posting on Medium, it also feels like Medium is hijacking the long-term reputation that we’re building.

I don’t know, maybe Medium should promote individual articles that are on Wordpress instances of personal and corporate blogs. Who would be happy to pay to apply to the vetting process.


This. I never felt recommendations were a problem. I stopped reading medium articles once everything was behind a paywall. When most content is mediocre at best, paywalls aren’t helpful.


But even if the content is good.. Annoying me with making an account and only viewing 3 random articles ensures I'll never find out how great it is. Making an account is a pretty big step if you're just consuming content.

Unless those 3 articles all happen to be amazing which is unlikely, and even then it's still a very large jump to a pricey subscription. Not everyone makes silicon valley money.

Ps not sure if it's still 3, because I haven't visited medium for about a year now.


Could you give an example of 3 amazing articles that would make you purchase a subscription if you found them on the same platform?


> The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away.

I'm not a spiteful person in general, but I won't pay for anything that does things like this out of spite.

I just assume I'll be paywalled before clicking a Medium link, so I don't.


Exactly, at the risk of repeating the same word that many other sibling comments begin with.

After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.

I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.

But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.

I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.

But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because of the possibility of making money off of Medium (even if I opted out), that gave them free license to make money off of me, so of course their pursuit of exploiting me of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of my own labor and content unless I systematically and enthusiastically played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.

I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.

I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.

If I write an article about ray tracing lime jello, then why can't I submit it for syndication to three specialty groups about ray tracing, jello, and limes, without restricting everyone on the internet from discovering and reading it for free in my own channel? Why are all the popular syndication channels there for the express purposes of exploiting me to make money for themselves?

That's like having not one pimp, but an entire pyramid of pimps trying to bully my customers and restrict and exploit my work, that I'm happy and willing to do for free.

I'm not going to get into the user interface, which would require writing a hundred page Medium article in itself (that would be promoted to and read by exactly zero readers). I'll just say that at first it was the thing that attracted me, but then once I actually started using it, it was infuriating and frustrating and purposefully lacking obvious and crucial features (not to mention those that I came to depend on that were later removed or hidden).

There are some great things about the ease of writing and editing and formatting articles, but also so many conspicuous trepanations of the skull and lobotomization of the brain that it's obvious it's all part of some dark pattern to brutally control my mind and behavior.

The final straw was when I found myself unable to control the formatting of my images. I was SURE I was able to do that before, but the interface simply was ignoring my mouse clicks that I'd learned to use. At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouse. Then maybe my browser was broken. Or possibly it was my internet connection. And then finally I felt like I was losing my mind and mis-remembering that I used to be able to do this simple obvious thing, and wondering how it was that my previous articles were formatted in ways I couldn't figure out how to apply to my new articles. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I am being gaslighted?

Finally I googled for "why can't I control the formatting of images in my medium articles", and this came up:

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Imag...

>Image formatting feature deprecation

>As of January 2022, Medium no longer supports formatting options for images in the Medium editor.

>All images in stories are now displayed in a single image size. Other features, such as the alt text, captions, grids, and image links, remain unaffected.

>Medium has recently redesigned parts of its website in order to deliver a more browsable, consistent, and faster experience to all users. To that end, we have removed certain design elements on the published story page, along with the ability to format and resize imagery in the story editor.

>We know image sizing matters to many writers. So, why did we remove this feature? Simply put: We removed image sizing to accommodate a new right-hand column that provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading, along with related reads across Medium. Our data shows this new right-hand column benefits writers by presenting their stories to more readers across the network.

Then why the hell don't you program your web site to respond to the mouse clicks on images with a big red popup and loud buzzer that goes "BZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!!" so I know it's MEDIUM and not ME that's at fault?

FUCK Medium's right-hand column. I don't give a shit about it. I don't want Medium to "provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading", I want readers to READ MY STORY. But obviously the only thing Medium cares about is castrating my formatting and gobbling up my precious square centimeters of screen space for the express purpose of diverting and distracting people away from reading my free content that I'm paying them to publish, and sucking them into the click-bait paid content that they actually make money off of.

The patronizing phrase "Our data shows..." is as bad as "I'm not racist, but..." because it tells me beyond doubt that Medium has become yet another data driven Zynga Cow Clicker skinner box.

http://www.cowclicker.com/

Medium's and Zynga's only goal is monetization by metrics, which suck out every drop of human creativity, design, and intent, and incarcerates my readers in the Clockwork Orange Movie Theatre Scene!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg

>I believe in second chances. I want us to work together. I want you to become a valued member of our organization. Surrender, and you will find meaning. Surrender, and you will find release. Take a deep breath. Calm your mind. You know what's best. What's best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply, Agent 33?


Are there other platforms you'd be willing to name that you see as being grassroots "for users by users"? I may want to look into some of them.


You're on one right now. If that wasn't clear from my post.

Also, Reddit still manages ok on this front IMO. The only reason I stopped paying was that they doubled the price when they moved away from gold to whatever it is they call now.

Another one is tweakers.net in Holland.

Boards.ie in Ireland though I left that country years ago and I don't know how that site is fairing now.

Those are the main ones I can think of right now.


Reddit is doing everything they can to kill it though. It's gone from habitually including site:reddit.com in every google search to actively avoiding it on mobile.

I'm not going to install the app. Ever. I will never, ever, ever install reddit's app. No amount of nagging me will ever get me to install it ever.


I still use site:reddit.com for recommendations, I just use a third party app for viewing (rif is fun, aka "reddit is fun").


"reddit is fun is fun for reddit"


Is that Apollo for Reddit on the iOS app store?


How do you get weblinks to open in that app?


Three dots, open in app. You need something that is associated to those links for the menu option to show though. (Firefox)


Good point. I forgot about the incessant app nagging because I use the old mobile interface and I don't really use reddit on mobile that much anymore.

However one of the things I do like is that they don't really interfere with the content. There's some really fringey communities on there like exhibitionists that would be banned by other platforms in 5 minutes because they really don't want to deal with the legal worries and stigmatization. Reddit leaves them alone, the only time they really close communities is when they become toxic.

I'm not a fan of Conde Nast but they could have done a lot worse with Reddit.


I use https://apolloapp.io/ - heck a few weeks ago I realized I used it SO much I paid for it, not because I wanted any of its premium features, just because it has delivered so much value to me I decided to give its author some money.


I use Apollo (paid version) after Alien Blue got unusable and I still have the problem that sometimes links go to the mobile site in a browser within Apollo where I get bombarded with "download the Reddit app".

I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit kill their API in the future.


They're probably sitting back taking notes on the bull in the china shop that is Musk owned Twitter


If you replace the reddit URL with i.reddit.com, you get the old mobile site, which was optimized for 533MHz devices. They sometimes put banners to redirect you to the newer design, but you can dismiss them


That’s great info thanks!


Same… and, yeah, it’s purely out of spite. The more you nag, the less likely I will do the thing.

I use site:reddit.com all day in Google though. It really is still somehow a reliable place for information.


What’s wrong with the app? I’m not using reddit very often, but the app seems ok.


Patreon still has some of this feel somehow - it feels more connected when I support someone


I think that's because not many people use their discovery. They usually end up from somewhere else. So they don't have that part to play with (eg charging money or using algorithms to recommend content that's profitable for them).

Also, their monetisation is pretty seamless because you come there with the intent to pay. So requests for payment don't feel out of place.

I guess for the people you patron it's less great now because I see many people moving to ko-fi.


I don't know if this fits what you were thinking of but I love rateyourmusic.com. Great community, great content, simple website.


Discogs.com


Trakt.tv


Their clickbait-optimized recommendation engine is still a major problem, though.

The main landing page is such a shitshow. The feeling sticks to you no matter what after that.


You nailed it.

The same goes with coding. SO and github are good. Everything else is pretty much garbage.


Yeah, the paywall is also a huge part of it. They basically committed suicide when they locked everything behind a paywall. At least most Substack authors are smart enough to make most their content free.


This x 100000000


+100


I have been conditioned to expect low-effort, surface level, self promotion fluff when I click on a Medium article. The site feels like if Quora and LinkedIn had a baby. I don't know, maybe it's just because I mainly stick to programming posts, and nobody decent is using medium for those anymore (you just can't customize the articles well enough, format code like you want to, have any degree of interactivity). This happened gradually, I didn't always have this association with the site...


> The site feels like if Quora...

Sorry. Quora, to me, is beyond useless. Every once in a while I'll click on a Quora URL only to be let down again. One day I'll do the right thing and blacklist it on my local recursive DNS server so as not to be tempted and waste even more time in the future.


Indeed. I’m tired of the SEO’s rehashes of an MDN page when I just came from the MDN page and am looking for someone’s experience with the given topic.


I’m a writer who used to write on medium, started writing on substack last October. To be honest, I like the business model of medium better. I get paid when people read my stuff. Plus having distribution built in, that’s great. But last year I started posting really thoughtful content that I put a lot of work into, and I would get like dozen views. I had 300 followers and several previously successful articles and I was getting nothing. I get more views on Substack with no distribution at all! So it is just straight up not worth it, in any way, for me to publish on medium. I really feel like it was a bad move to remove the discrete human curation. I really feel like you need a big wheat-chaff separator, so that readers aren’t getting shown clickbait garbage, and writers get distributed if and only if they are actually producing relatively thoughtful, relatively unique content.


> But last year I started posting really thoughtful content that I put a lot of work into, and I would get like dozen views.

I used to be active blogger in 2000s and was a part of blogging community back then. One lesson that I learned back then was that you cannot predict popularity. Those heavy pieces you think will be hits with readers will not be and those that you throw together on a whim about your sock drawer will get more hits than anything else combined. Ymmv, but the effort you put in does not always equal the popularity it'll get.


These aren’t the key problem.

The key problem is that you’ve lost the trust of the authors you want to attract. It’s no longer a place I can post and know that my content will be cleanly accessible to readers. I now think you’ll pepper it with pop ups and account demands.

It went from being a minimalist and trusted place to post, to now a feeling of feeding my own content into someone else’s machine and losing control of it.


Also: if you've been the new CEO since last July and haven't figured this out, you'll fail to save Medium.

You mentioned paying attention to the sentiment and linked to the HN survey where people explained why they don't like Medium. The top comment was someone explaining this exact reason.

It's highly admirable that you are on here trying to listen, communicating issues transparently, and working to fix problems. But I think you need to listen even more deeply.

Unfortunately this will push you into the depths of the business model that you won't want to change, but is the fundamental reason for medium's eventual failure.

Right now is the moment to save it, as you read this note!


For me, it’s more like: if I write on medium, I know my stuff is being put right next to utter shit. I take writing seriously, and it honestly looks bad to be in the platform, because almost everything you see on there is so bad.


I think that’s a pretty good summary. If I write something for the public to enjoy, I’d better to it on my own site. They may never actually find it, but at least they’d be able to access it when they do.


I mean the key problem is surely that most readers don't want to pay to read blogs, so you can't really fund a large business from it. Medium has 180 employees apparently, which tbf is less than I expected. But still, it's a very simple site. Really it should be "finished" and running on like 50 employees at the most. You could then probably find it by relatively reasonable advertising instead of paywalls. Or potentially charge authors for features like image hosting.


There is only one reason medium went down the hole and it's because it annoyed the fuck out of users by demanding sign up (and subscription) just to read content OTHERS had created on the platform.

What the hell did they expect would happen?

Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense.

It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?

They take care of their best content creators, they even send a plaque! And they don't force viewers to subscribe, they show ads and offer a subscription to remove them.

Imagine if youtube tomorrow started telling every visitor that they must login to view any video, and if they view more than 10 videos they need to buy a subscription. Rumble.com would be popping champagne.


Am I misremembering that medium's signup nag screen was just cookie based? I have cookie autodelete after I close a tab, so I haven't seen those since forever.

On the other hand, the low quality content was what made me avoid medium.com links, so my experience perfectly mirrors the comment.

> It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?

It's extremely expensive to run a competitor to a global video platform, the platform is much stickier, the app makes it even more sticky, and they're a billion dollar ad company that can spend giant sums of money on creators? Starting a medium competitor is trivial in comparison, you can do so with Wordpress out of the box. It won't scale to the same size, won't be as nice etc, but it'll work. You can't do the same with Youtube.


That’s another problem - anyone writing on medium who is actually successful and good will end up just writing their own content for their own platform.


The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.


There is a huge difference between the NYTimes and Medium. For readers, the content on Medium is fungible: if it goes away today, it's easily replaceable by the 100 other user driven sites like it. I'm not saying that the content on Medium is bad, but it's easily replaceable.

The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscription works. True there are other journalism sites. But there are also many actors, but only one Tom Cruise; the NYTimes is like Tom Cruise, which is why he is paid so much. Medium is more like an unknown actor that is good but there are 100 waiting to replace him.


The best of Medium is better than the best of the NYTimes and isn’t fungible at all. That’s not refuting what you see. To get those gems you see too many me too articles. You are right.


This is delusional, the best of Medium isn’t exclusive to Medium. The New York Times has over 150 years of reputation built on quality, and its content is available no where else. Medium has a loose collective of bloggers who can easily migrate to a different platform with no requirements on the quality of the content they produce. If you want to compare yourself to the NYT it’s not enough to have a few good articles, every article has to be held to the highest standards of trust and the vast majority must be exclusive.


You probably think too highly of the times. They have access though more than quality. They are the official communication channel of the US government and that alone makes them unique and important. It’s comparable to a subscription to a standards library or government code book


That’s going too far. The NYTimes is playing a different game in a different league and a comparison is not apt.

I have read really interesting material on Medium and it’s just not enough to make me want to pay to read _any_ content on Medium. I might pay to remove ads like I do on YouTube but only after developing a habit that is triggered by content I care enough about and visit often enough for the ads experience to detract from it.

In my experience Medium should have been (could still be?) a Wordpress killer and not a publishing play.


That is a good point...if you had some way of putting this amazing content at the top, then Medium would have a chance. In that regard I think Medium has the same problem as Soureforge.

I've seen tons of medium articles and to me it always seemed like random ranting and a pulpit for leftists, rather than a serious platform. I hope you can do something about it.


Perhaps something like the Top 2/5/whatever medium articles a day/week are absolutely free to everyone - a taste. And then if you subscribe you get a larger amount of similarly good articles right below.

I’ll admit I don’t bother with the NYT or Medium or Subspace, but if I ever were to subscribe it’d be along those lines.


Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. The NYT is THE NYT and Medium is just another Quora/Pinterest/rando website.

Medium has not earned the right to paywall content, the NYT has, apparently.

You need to find another way.

Maybe a pay by the drink subscription model.

Put a button on each article so I can decide how much I want to pay, with zero as an option.

Put a little counter at the top so I can see how much I’ve spent this month and how much has gone to authors vs the company.

If the content is that good, people will pay, I know I would. But I ain’t paying monthly for something I don’t use regularly and I ain’t paying to read something based on a title.


NYTimes is both vetted and timely which completely changes the value proposition.

Medium has a very different and inherently lower value proposition. It needs to get people to read and value old content.


I subscribe to the New York Times because I want to support the journalists who write for the New York Times. I don't want to pay some intermediary.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding where the money for Medium's paywall goes and you've actually been giving the vast majority of subscription revenue to the writers this whole time—but that wasn't obvious to me.


I don’t think this will work out for a site that’s based on user-generated content. What would work is require payment for power-user features. But not for content.


They're not very successful are they? I mean it's a famous paper but are they really succeeding at monetizing their site this way?

I often get linked to a NYT article but as I don't even live in the US I'd never be tempted to pay for it. If I couldn't just use a paywall blocker or archive.is I'd just ignore them altogether. I kinda doubt they get many subscribers from outside their native area (US as they have a bigger reach than just new York)

I think the guardian does this a lot better, they don't paywall but ask for a contribution even if you don't subscribe. I've actually contributed a few times there.


NYTimes is definitely a successful example of the paywall strategy. They just added 180,000 subscribers in their most recent quarter and continue to make a profit: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/business/media/nyt-q3-202...


That implies that NYTimes is thriving after their inclusion of paywall.

It's not.

It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch.

There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.


The NYTimes digital subscription is doing north of $800M/year. That’s successful in my book.


Medium is not the NYT. They have a hundred years of reputation as one of the best newspapers in the world to build a subscription model from. People want them to survive.

Medium.com used to have a good reputation. But it never had anything like the NYT's and right now the only reputation you have is "hot garbage cash grab". Most people want your service to die. I know I did, before reading your responses here at least.

Sorry to be blunt, and I wish you luck in digging back out of that. But I would gently suggest that looking to the NYT as your shining success story is... Well I think there's a parable to match this but it escapes me now. Like an ant looking at an elephant maybe.


Is that the inclusive of the games? I used to pay them for access to the crosswords (they really are the best, but couldn't care less about their "journalism"), and as far as I knew that's under the same umbrella.

Of course, that was before I found out that canceling requires talking to an AOL-like retention droid rather than just clicking a button, and that's when they stopped getting my money permanently.


This is my impression as well, about NYT's business.

The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.

Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.

Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.

Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.

I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.

It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.


I've been thinking about something related to internet paywalls.

In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.

Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.

I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.


I heard AOL was doing great in revenue too.

It won't happen over night, of course there will be a temporary boost in revenue when one decides to force everyone that visits the site to pay.

How much of that is from existing NYTimes subscribers, marketing tactics (eg. wordle), shady subscription offer deals, forgotten subscriptions, and lack of suitable competition.

Over time though that withers and once that withering starts, nothing brings it back.

See you in a few years.


The New York Times's paywall is more than a decade old at this point.


Then something changed recently then as I personally never noticed an annoyance on nytimes til recent years after where it seemed any article required paywall.

In addition, there is one important thing that is not being paywalled (yet), the 'news' value of nytimes is still accessible via the headline + summary on the front page.

The moment the guys chasing a buck remove that is the day nytimes dies.


The NYT paywall has gotten far more aggressive in recent years.


wrong. NYtimes revenue is growing after inclusion of a paywall. After initial years of decline at the start of the digital age, NYTimes finally have their revenue strategy right. It's actually the ad share of their revenue that is decreasing, while subscription is growing faster than ad share is decreasing. Print subscription is now stabilizing. So you are wrong, what the market has shown is that priced appropriately, people will pay for high quality content. Personally I am proof. I pay for both Nytimes, WaPo, and the athletic, and together they cost less than $20/mo


Revenue != Success

Priced appropriately is a key word, you're happy to pay $20/mo for 3 services but will you feel the same when it's $200/mo for 10 services?

Netflix was priced appropriately until it started getting some competition, we all see what happened there.

The irony of the entire situation is that real competition could have been medium, if they didn't fuck it up.


Netflix has more subscribers and revenue now then it ever did when there was less competition, so unclear what “happened”


Short term, yes, but it's had a massive head start, these things take time.

Subscribers recently increased because account sharing was stopped but recently Disney has already passed Netflix in subscribers across all its platforms: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/09/27/disney-surpasses...

Netflix revenue has started to decline and as they start increasing their pricing and removing shows to save a buck, more and more users will leave, it's already happening, just not reflected on the charts yet due to the aforementioned stopping shared accounts.

The Disney+ vs Netflix subscriber growth trajectory says it all: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/netflix-statistics/


As a random HN visitor that clicks links to Medium from here, it’s been a while since visiting Medium has become the following experience for me.

First I click a couple of, let’s say, “why X is dead” links, then I start getting the message “You have Y free articles left this month”. Then I’m thinking, okay, the “X ded” articles were meh anyway, why would I even subscribe then? Somewhere in this scenario the incentive to subscribe is missing for me. Maybe there’s a world of cool articles out there, but from visiting a random article with the “you have Y articles left” popup they cannot be seen. Just my two cents!

That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you. But I hope you will! Best of luck and thank you for the interesting remarks :)


Yes, that's precisely my sentiment as well.

As far as fixing it, the obvious first step is to at least be more generous with the article count... and don't show it at all until someone has seen at least 5 articles on separate days that month. Count a session clicking through a few articles on the same day as at most 2 article views (maybe have a separate limit of something like 5 articles in the same day). Don't be a nag trying to upsell when people haven't even had a chance to get interested yet.

That at least would cut down on the sleazy feeling of the whole site. An easy next step would be hiring someone as an editorial curator. Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Another way to feed a meaningful recommender: Allow users to tag posts (and other more clever things like deriving tags by looking at, e.g., which sub-reddits link to them). Build user profiles that are similar to how StumbleUpon had a "Stumble DNA" for users.

That's what I would be doing, anyway.


I think the issue here might be of a more general nature.

Would it be fair to say that we usually expect blogs to be free to read? I think yes, because that’s how it has been for some time -- somebody wants to share their thoughts, you want to read them, no money involved.

Now, some people run paid newsletters, and can charge you for their content, and you pay them if you feel like you’re getting value out of it. Investment advice, curated content, you name it.

But that’s precisely the thing: if a blog is paywalled, you can decide if you want to pay this exact author. But Medium is a platform. And it’s weird: why should you pay money to some platform on which some author is publishing a seemingly free to read blog? Without the value clearly communicated, it feels like a weird form of extortion.

There might be something to do about it, like along the lines of “hey our crazy AI recommendation engine can find some articles on the same topic for ya, just for three bucks a month”. Okay, but why would you do that if you still have search engines and stackoverflow? Where’s the value? I don’t know vOv


An afterthought: there are platforms with “bunch of bloggers” that we can pay money to, and they are called old school newspapers. But the implication remains: with the newspaper, you know what they do and what you pay money for. What does Medium want to get paid for without being a traditional newspaper, with all the things like editorial policy, journalistic standards (whatever they might be) and so on? To me it’s unclear.


Based on what the CEO said, it sounds like they want to get paid for a recommendation engine that surfaces quality, substantial content. Upping the signal-to-noise ratio. Where traditional newspapers have editorial policy and journalistic standards, you could see that as an authoritative "these are the rules and follow them". I could see medium attempting a more 'free market system' where writers are incentivized to write quality content by getting views and money and the snuff sinks to the bottom. Essentially taking a more 'automated system of incentives' approach to try and fill that newspapery niche.

Especially with the consideration that traditional newspapers typically don't have niche content like programming articles.


Commenting on you and j_crick:

> That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you.

Paywall half of the article so the reader gets an idea on whether or not they want to pay to read more. This would also encourage impulse purchases.

> Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Categorize articles. There's no need to make cliched articles impossible to find for the cliche-interested reader.


Well that’s probably the response that’s most swayed my opinion of a service ever. Good luck with it, I really hope you can turn it around.


Agreed, I think this deserves recognition. This is not the fake self promotion disguised as “brutal honesty” you see in the corporate word, there are actual admissions here that go beyond that, which leads even a cynic like me to take this seriously.

It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this domain would be hated by a lot of people.

Those of us who personally wouldn’t pay for articles aren’t the target audience anyway, and that’s ok. I think throwing rocks at paywalls is a stupid thing to do, especially when the only alternative is ad-tech. I’d rather have competing business models than not.

What doesn’t make sense to me, is that opaque clickbait recommendation engines AND paywall made itself to the same platform. This seems odd, because usually the former is a plague of ad-tech. Perhaps this is the result of cargo-culting from employees who came from ad-tech mindlessly replicating these patterns even where they don’t make sense.


It is still corporate speak. He has posted similar before and been told that the paywall and forced reg is the issue. Then he comes back, doesn’t acknowledge it and gets told the same again. That is not genuine engagement.


The people who hate the paywall above all aren't customers, and frankly, being more concerned about that than whether the content behind it is worthwhile at all seems mixed up. I cant blame him for not prioritizing those things - I personally care way more about whether or not clicking a medium link is likely to lead me to something relevant, the rest can be negotiated.


Customers are the end of a funnel that starts with non-customers/visitors.

if visitors numbers are shrinking you get no new customers.

add to that the risk of other platforms trying to get away your existing users:

- substack: both writers and readers - hashnode: targeting writters and readers from tech - dev.to: the same as hashnode - mastodon: longer posts and with elk and others better syntax - ghost : writers and readers

and many more.

so not paying attention to the base of the funnel is very costly in the long run: and this is what happened to Medium = ignored the base of the funnel (the free users) for a long period and focused on short term goals/income


Maybe not customers, but still part of the audience.


Why should you, I, or anyone else care when that part of the audience is solely concerned with how to make the experience bearable for free at the expense of making it genuinely worthwhile? Its not a coherent position.


I don't care because I'm not Medium.

Medium is trying to be a two-sided marketplace. In any such marketplace, the producers want the audience to be as big as possible, and the consumers want the inventory to be as big as possible. Neither cares about Medium making a profit, except to the extent it incidentally furthers their own goals.

To succeed, either they monetize the transaction as a middleman (e.g. ads when transactions don't involve the exchange of money), or they figure out how to establish a direct financial relationship with the producers and/or consumers (like Costco's annual fee).

Medium has chosen a pathological route of using the two-sided marketplace principally to advertise a fee for their own product. (Yes, "principally" is fair. I believe their conversion rate is low, so the vast majority of impressions represent potential members of the two-sided marketplace that they're OK turning away, even though that frustrates both the producers who wanted the audience to grow, and the consumers who wanted to read the article.)

The fact that they can't figure out a better way to make money than to turn away customers is not my problem. There are plenty of other places for me to read or publish content that have figured out how to be sustainable operations.

My personal viewpoint is that Medium is in a death spiral. If their paywall is abrasive, which I think it is, then I won't join, because I would question which content publishers would be OK being behind an abrasive paywall. Medium's real offer to me -- that they're where to find content from publishers I like -- has failed. That was their one and only job from my perspective. They failed.

I can't be the only one who feels this way.


Yes, this.


Oh, I don't feel like I"m ignoring that, sorry. The regwall is a bit confusing to me personally because we don't have one anymore. People here seem to have a long memory about a time when maybe there was a regwall dark pattern. But I never saw it because I was always logged in during that period and nobody who worked on it is still at the company.

But the paywall, i.e. the metered paywall where some articles are behind a paywall by author choice and an unsusbcribed reader can read three of those a month, is up there. And I'm just coming at it from the opposite side. Many people here don't want to see a paywall. That's fine. But I'd like to see their reaction if the quality of what was behind it changed. A no might still be a no, but I think the tenor would change. So that's how my original take on fix quality first fits into the anti-paywall headline of other people. This model works well enough for us in the worst possible implementation that I believe it will work all the way if we have a better implementation, especially if there is more of a sense of that there's at least something valuable behind it.


How would you do it differently, assuming the same fundamental business model - ie charging users for content. If you don’t run ads, then you have to paywall, no? And if you paywall, you have to register.

Isn’t this the same as how Patreon works? I’m not too familiar with these services, but genuinely curious.


Either way, this still gets to the heart of Mediums problem. Why have a conversation about tweaking the recommendation system when there is this elephant in the room about gating content?

If charging for content is their business model then it's fundamentally flawed in my opinion. Why would people give away high quality content and let medium charge for it? It looks like they do have some revenue share programme, but Substack offer a simple and transparent 90% payment in your favour.


Hopefully you’re reading the replies here too then, because they don’t at all seem to gel with what you’re saying. The replies do reflect a lot of my own experiences though:

- Medium was a good platform for people to publish well formatted content online. - said content ranked quite high on Google. - There’s now a non-trivial amount of content published by myriad authors on there. - I have zero interest in following a particular author. I don’t want recommendations. I end up there as a result of a very specific need at the time. - you’re incessant pop ups to log in or sign up to read the content drastically reduced that value. - I’ve now been conditioned to just avoid any search results that look like they go to a Medium page.

I obviously have no idea how widespread that experience is. The unfortunate reality is that the damage has been done. You could undo all of the things that led to it and I’d never know given the muscle memory that’s been created.


From a non-CEO and non-creator perspective, the bait-and-switch from “come use our awesome tools you’ll love ‘em” to “now you our bitch and we pimping out your content” to me seems like that was the turning point for Medium.


As a subscriber I find it particularly odd that the recommendations got so bad

You can understand the kind of service which lives on ad revenue giving in to conflicts of interest leading to them recommending against the reader's interests, but there's no obvious conflict when you're a subscription service. It ends up being endless formulaic articles of the "5 packages your next project must use" ilk, with questionable grammar and a number of clichéd folksy writing habits common in certain circles.


Exactly. The whole reason we chose a subscription business model was so that we could focus on quality over clicks. I hope you are seeing some improvements. A lot more soon.


Just wanted to say thanks for your transparency - very cool to see you here acknowledging the pain points head on and sharing your plan to address them.


These aren't even the real pain points. Most people using Medium aren't using it to discover new content. The CEO clearly has no clue what they are doing.


I've never liked Medium, and your reasons aren't why. It's always been a primary example of building value on someone else's platform. Why? Why should I spend my time building value for you?

The "huge pile of shit" is a primary example of why authors should invest in tools they control and have a direct relationship with their audience. A portable relationship with their audience. As I see it, Medium is in conflict with that.

I'm really hoping that the Twitter fiasco and Medium's "huge pile of shit" will serve as object lessons why creators, publishers, etc. are better off building their own platforms even if it's slower initially.


I don’t really see why everyone needs to build their own cms. It’s super inefficient to have to maintain all the infrastructure and keep it up to date just so you can publish 6-20 articles a year


Are you sure you're paying attention? Those items fall way down the list of problems people will typically raise here. As others have said we're simply tired of being nagged and made to feel like cash cows, and this is doing serious harm to your brand.

Want to repair some of that damage right now? Stop prompting me to sign in when I try to read an article on Medium.


Are we still prompting you to sign in? I don't think we've done that for a long time. There's a metered paywall but there isn't a regwall on anything that you wouldn't expect (i.e. comments).


still get "Read the rest of this story with a free account." after 5ish articles. Rather than signin i just switch to incognito.


Thank you. I think that's still a form of metered paywall as in it's a regwall as an option to get another article.


I read your previous replies on HN and it seems what you’re doing is more like managing the public image rather than actually listening to what people want.

Medium is still very aggressive data harvesting machine. Look at what sub stack is doing and just do the same, what they’re doing is correct and valuable and what medium had done so far is absolutely full-on reader/writer hostile.


As someone who has spent time in the C-Suite, I applaud your courage in publicly addressing criticisms head-on. I just hope you are not fighting a losing battle against low employee morale, frustrated writers and angry, impulsive investors. I have a friend who got some traction on Medium, but if I want to write for myself I would choose Substack in a New York minute.

Best of luck!


You mentioned Substack, I’d like to question their model. With Medium they help with searching, although it needs an improvement, with Substack there is no such a thing, I have to subscribe to an author and read all his posts, but no human being can produce quality content 100% of time. I think they should change. Medium has better model, IMO


The way I understand it, Substack is literally a platform, more like Wordpress than Medium. It is incumbent on those who publish to do all their marketing, outreach, discovery, virality etc. using their own resources. Substack takes a very reasonable 10% on your revenue, so you don't have to be a programmer to distribute a newsletter, but getting the word out is up to you.


Yeah thanks for your transparency but how do you go about fixing these problems? Like it's great to acknowledge them but the "Why NodeJS is dead" article was in the suggested sidebar for me yesterday


It's been frustratingly slow because our recs system is sprawling. Your main feed is populated differently than the read-more section you are referencing. Plus author behavior lags incentives. We actually had a clickbait about MILFs on a programming story the other day so it's worse than you are reporting.

Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when I think author behavior will change.

That "X is dead" trope will disappear from your recs both because we'll have better things to show and because the new incentives make it not worth writing. An article like that is very sensitive to incentives because there is no authentic reason to have written it. Probably without Medium's payment, it never would have been occurred to the person.


You're almost certainly right, of course, and it's interesting how medium fell into the same cycle of amplifying junk. Netflix is another case study here of something where the incentives weren't as obvious as with advertising funded content but still fell into line.

But mainly I came here to note the irony of this frank, honest and useful discussion taking place under an "X is dead" headline of its own.


Hah. You are right.


Do you see a shift away from clickbait in the long term across the industry? Publishing, search, social media, etc. have been devastated by it (among other factors).


You have to kill it at the funding - if the ad dollars don’t flow to the baiters they won’t bait.

Which for many platforms is a quite difficult thing because that’s they’re revenue and they don’t have the manpower or time to review everything.


Cutting the supply of money will kill the clickbait content alright but it will also kill vast swathes of "content, full stop". Somebody has to pay for hosting no matter what, and if I'm entertaining an idea of writing a fantasy novel in my spare time, I really don't want to be the one to pay. Or rather, I wouldn't want at the time in my life when I entertained such an idea.

I think more dollars is good, as it increases the number of opportunities. This comes with a lot of failed attempts at creating something of value, and that's ok. What we truly need, in a societal sense, is to make next generations recognize the current times as a crazed race after the least demanding content that they are, and to guide them in the direction of articles with enduring value, again. The generation that entered adulthood during these crazy times is probably already lost, the previous generation is busy raising kids, and the previous-previous generation lives in bunkers where only the guys who "go way back" can ever enter. If not the next generation, then we're probably done for, as the IT revolution will eat its children and their children too, like many revolutions before.


Theoretically, a subscription was supposed to be one part because it aligned us to the reader. But then we had a recommendation algorithm that was more aligned to an ad model. We're serious about changing our distribution to reward substance over clickbait and I think we will get there.


>MILFs on a programming story

Go on…


Do you know if Medium offers a verification process for authors to demonstrate that their content is not produced by a content mill?

As a Medium member since 2020, I've been writing articles that reflect real-world use cases and require 2-4 days of research and writing. Despite my efforts, I've only had one article boosted on the platform thus far.

It would be incredibly beneficial for creators like myself if Medium offered a verification process to prove our authenticity and help increase the visibility of our work.


I'm one of those people that don't follow authors and don't explore platforms. I access random pages on random sites from search engines or HN. That kind of solves the problem of quality.

Basically Medium is indistinguishable to me from any of its competitors, except it's quite slow to load so given two similarly promising links I prefer the other one. It's too much JavaScript because Medium can be fast if I turn JavaScript off using either NoScript, uBlock Origin, uMatrix etc.


Made an account to specifically say that I'll give your service a chance again because you actually admitted fault and how to fix it.


Great reply. It's rare to get such straightforward, measured responses from anyone representing anything.


Made clear by your own list, you seem to think Medium has a content issue.

The issue is how annoying it is to experience the content, not the content itself.

And wow, quite a claim to say that creators are too busy to have lives worth writing about.

Reconsider what went wrong with Medium so you can get on the right track.


I think we're seeing a similar problem just from different sides. Why make the experience more seamless if the content at the end isn't also worthwhile? You're working left to right, I'm working right to left.


If it’s not seamless then people won’t see the value to generate content in it. So you will get more garbage content.

If much of the content is garbage but some is good then presumably people will still come for the good stuff and just spend more time filtering out garbage. Most people don’t navigate inside the medium ecosystem anyway. So inner system garbage is less of a problem then landing experience


One thing you missed was the content ownership relationship between an author and their article. Articles posted originally on Medium are partially owned by Medium, which is a big reason why I do not use the service myself.


100% not true. Authors retain their copyright and can revoke their content from our site at any point.


I saw you made a similar post a while back and a whole thread of people who said it was the forced registration after a few views which damaged perception. The stuff above is trivial vs that.

That is by far and away your biggest issue in a community like this.


Can you expand on that? I get irritated by the paywall shit too but its hard to see how it would be reputation damaging in the same way as freeze dried fungible 'content'. The feeling that im getting is that people feel aggrieved and are saying what they think will be most effective in airing that grievance - is there something more substantial there Ive just missed?


get rid of the "register wall" or you're not even trying


This is the only real problem, everything else is noise. If that means Medium can’t have a successful business, “Medium is Dead”


Unless I'm misunderstanding you, we haven't had a register wall in a long time.


I wanted to believe you, but I seem to have just run out of "free stories for this month" and hit the register wall.


If this is what you believe is wrong with Medium, then i don't think you will rescue it.

Medium.com now paywalls even bullshit content. Simple as that.

You limit me to x number of free articles in a month, yet the first 10x articles from medium i see are absolute trash with no quality control and vetting and all so by the time i hit my limit, I am already annoyed by it.

If you are going to paywall me, let the content behind the paywall be from vetted sources that i have some sort of reasonable expectation. You can put a 'Buy Me a Coffee' for the rest of the other unverified sources.

If i am searching for articles on an advanced technique and all i see are articles from newbies who are neither addressing the question nor providing new insights, you can rest assured I will not be paying for your service nor clicking top search links from your site.


I think we agree. Quality is the issue. My points are the underlying reasons why.


Honestly the paywall has trained me to avoid clicking on anything from medium.com… I wish it was more nuanced than that, but the reality is that the content is not essential enough to justify a subscription.

The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.

In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!


It sounds like you have a casual interest in longform articles. These subscription-driven publications are making their content more appealing to people who value longform enough to pay, which means the articles/emails are becoming really longform to appeal to those who like it the most.


That’s probably an accurate assessment—both of the market forces and my interest in longform. I love long reads from traditional media (eg NYT) so perhaps I just haven’t found the right Substacks for me—discovery seems to be a tricky issue in this space.


It’s doubly tricky because a good long form article is a bear to write - but a short article bloated up to look like a long form isn’t that bad.

Even reading enough of the long form magazine and newspaper articles you start to notice certain patterns.


Same for me. I end up subscribing through a lot and then picking through feeds with keyboard shortcuts and keyword filters to speed it up. Could be better--and those methods aren't solutions for large subscriber bases.


I was a Medium subscriber for a pretty long time. I'd seen some interesting, incisive stuff, so I subscribed. I'm happy to pay for quality. But shortly after I subscribed, the content I found was almost exclusively vapid self-promoters writing many, many words without any value about the latest buzzword they'd heard. It was so strange. The underlying tension between open, democratic platform, quality standards, and engagement is, clearly, not an easy one to resolve. I don't even claim to pretend to have an answer, but I would love to be in a position to pay for quality content on an open(ish) platform again someday.


Completely fair. Hopefully we are getting better again. The quality is there, we just need to make sure we show it to you.


my 50 cents, medium.com is a page I consciously avoid, a link to medium.com is a link I won't click.

medium.com has the feel of a dystopian internet that bugs you on every click. There is this classic Sci-Fi short story where the protagonist had to insert a coin in to the door to his apartment every time he wanted to use it. This is how medium has felt.


> full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about

That”s incredibly insightful and explains so much of what’s wrong with, well, everything today. The actual doing has become an afterthought to the pitch, the documentation, the branding, the promotion, the cobranding, the cross-promotion, the synergies, and so on.

It’s never been so easy for people with so little to say to say so much. Curation has not kept up with creation. I hope Medium recovers.


Yeah, it's time for the curation economy! Did you read Neil Stephenson's book, Fall? There is a concept in there about edit streams that really stuck with me.


I have rarely seen a CEO speak so candidly about their company in public. Kudos for doing that.

You are drinking koolaid, though. Look at the comments. A lot of them are spot on.


>1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

You say this but this went on for literal years.


And I've been mad about it for literal years.


>Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.

Honest question, how can you, on one hand, link to the previous discussion surrounding the stigma of being a "medium.com" article, but fail to address the literal top response to both that thread and even the top response to your own comment? Is it one of those "CEO's are not allowed to speak plainly in public" things or do you not parse/agree with the information?


Well, the top response on this thread changed after I went to bed. But yes, this is in the mix. People seem to have a long memory about a dark pattern experiment we seemed to have run with regwalls (I never personally saw it and the people behind it are gone). Plus the cruft. A lot of that has been removed. But the volume of comments about quality always seemed louder to me and I've seen quality draw people through a lot of cruft.


My personal experience was having written several articles based on my experiences that did get some views and claps or whatever. Hopefully they helped some people out.

Yet, I was below some sort of threshold to be in the club that would get me a few pennies if enough people read them, so I was kicked out of that program.

Not that the program mattered, but getting kicked out for not being popular enough was annoying, so I just stopped using the platform.

I still get a weekly summary that says my articles are being regularly read, which doesn’t seem likely. They appear to be made up numbers.

It feels like the platform quickly became another Quora and is 90% junk.

Not sure how you’ll regain the initial trust and stature Medium seemed to have, but best of luck. FWIW, I do like the site design and reading/writing experience. Keep it simple.


Thank you. And I'm sorry we kicked you out. It was a rough cut and I think too rough. Also, we are stingy with our view counts so I think they are slightly more real than what would be reported elsewhere. For example, they are lower than what Google Analytics would tell you and much, much lower than what Quora or LinkedIn report.


Thank you for taking the time to respond!


I've been a paid subscriber to Medium for a few years now (I have a lot of writer friends and it seemed a way to support the art) and I think it's great (I'm not afiliated to the company in anyway and not one of their creators) - I read it every day and there's always at least 2-4 interesting articles which is pretty standard compared to other more pricey publications eg. the Financial Times (I read about 20 online titles every day) - I'm not sure why a lot of these commenters seem to think removing a paywall or increasing read free limits will help improve the company, if anything the reverse will happen and these people will probably never pay for anything. I would actually wouldn't mind sensible text style ads added to articles (think eary 21st century Adwords style) if only because if an article gives me an idea then it would be great to then find a relevant solution provider - if YouTube can stuff 2-4 ads in every video then I think you can safely run non intrusive ads though I guess the army of ad blockers might cause issues (something YouTube videos seem immune to) - oh and reopen the API as that would help data driven content generators


"I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile"

Everyone here is debating what went wrong. But how would knowing that help?

I would like a CEO to articulate what exactly will be "worthwhile" to each stakeholder in the future, and not just to clean up the mess. Instead I fear we have a generation of leaders who tell investors that the good times will come back and tell employees to tighten their belts - crisis managers instead of visionaries.

I think rough times are precisely when visionaries should have their greatest impact, because people are open to change. The question is not what went wrong, but where to go now?


Congrats on still sticking to the idea of monetizing via payments vs throwing ads everywhere. This and your reply here is a rare positive signal coming from Medium nowadays.

A few personal observations:

1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to LinkedIN [1] (exceptions exist but are invisible). Have you considered paywall to post, even as low as $1/mo as a content quality filter?

2. There is no reason for a 16k character article to require 6.5MB of data to render. (looking at a random article from the home page [2]). I hear that Medium has an optimized writing experience, why not have an optimized reading experience too?

3. Do you wish Medium became what Substack did, and if no, what is your vision for it? Why should one use Medium as an author or as a reader?

[1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

[2] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/be-present-aff45d6421b4


Re: 3. No but I wouldn't want to speak for them. But the obvious difference is that we want to hear from people that are too busy to be full time on building a mailing list. Someone above called me crazy for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article, but if you think about it at all you realize journalists are relying on sources and Medium is a place where you can just hear directly from the source. (Except when we are hiding those posts in a mound of content mill stuff)


> for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article

That does not matter. What decides if people pay for a publication is the median article quality.

On Medium it is a 2 (on a scale 1-10) while NYT is at least 7.

Would you buy a car that is occasionaly (once in in a month) great, but rest of the time is crap, or a car that is very good all the time? Good luck!


You've already opened up a Mastodon instance, kudos for that. Why not go the whole hog and join Tumblr as a full Fediverse platform? That way, the smaller players get synergy against the big walled gardens


We've got a lot more planned on Mastodon. Re: Tumblr. I think we just have a different view of how social software works and time is going to tell which one is better. I think the Tumblr approach sounds too much like syndication and that it's not going to end up being that useful. So we took the approach of having an instance and will be letting people in shortly. This way they are fully present and using the same software and exposed to the same norms as most other people. Maybe I'm wrong, and if so, that should be obvious soon enough.


Thank you for taking the time to reply.

You'll be welcome in the ecosystem whatever path you choose


Tony let me say it's super brave for you to come here and share this information. The critics are harsh but Medium is still a great resource and I continue to use it for my own personal writing. I think my only personal knock on it right now is things that would prompt the user to sign-up or hit a paywall. That's friction. That's friction that a lot of users don't like and I get that you're running a business but this is real what becomes the barrier to entry and then turns off an existing crowd.

My comment might get lost amongst many, you may not see it, but Medium still has the reach. I think as a blogging platform you can support a lot more customisation and become an actual platform that is the staple for where people put their content. I have a personal blog hosted on GitHub with Jekyll. I'd much prefer to use mediums tools but I'm reluctant to because of the experience for end users. Just my thoughts.


Thank you. FWIW, I think the case for Medium over Github + Jekyll is solid. We are a little more user friendly, we have syntax highlighting now, you do not have to put your own articles behind the paywall, potentially we will help with discovery/distribution.


Thanks for sharing this. What's your current view of Substack?

We've gone through many cycles of publishing platforms/trends. What catches your eyes in this space today (in general)?


Great service. It's our stagnation that created any confusion or sense of competition. Our sweet spot is completely different than theirs.


My biggest complaint about Medium is the anti-spam policy. I know it's essential for you to take some measures against spammers or crawlers, but I live in China, where Medium is blocked by the Great Firewall, the only way for me to access your site is to use a proxy. At least, it should not stop me from accessing the site when I was already logged in or I was a paying user.


Any chance you've written more about the system design and incentives side of it somewhere (whether about medium in particular, a previous biz, or just the mechanisms in general)? If so, I'd absolutely love to dig in... It's got big overlap w/ some stuff I'm trying to figure out for building useful communities, and it's not so common to find folks with a deep view on it ;)


No. But you could email me.


I agree with the sentiment of every response I've read to your comment so far. The agressive tactics, paywall, general sense of sleaze all make me actively avoid following medium links.

But even ignoring all that, medium is the worst place for any article about programming because the code blocks do everything to make it harder to read them. There's no syntax highlighting, the lines wrap and the container the code is in pads the text to make a narrower column than the body of the article.

That's the opposite of what I want. Especially on mobile! It's one of the sites that make me wonder if its developers have ever tried using it.

https://postimg.cc/zbY3jQqc


This is years too late, but I did have us had syntax highlighting. So that, plus better recommendations, plus returning incentives for the programming authors that do great work should change things.

Also, not sure if you know but we have the entire back catalog of Pragmatic Programmer books. I need to do a re-import to take advantage of the syntax highlighting, but it's still a pretty good feature. (Unfortunately, I was the programmer who did this import and so it's still on me to redo it)


Thank you for being so candid. FWIW I think you are bang on with your assessment and I'm really hopeful that I can get back to using Medium again.


Also, Medium were blocked in some countries including Vietnam. Here we can't access Medium so need to find alternatives.


1. The paywall killed your product. When I google something, and it leads to Medium, and I then see that it is not accessible, I CURSE and immediately go away. Let this happen three times and in my mind it is cemented that Medium is "that shit platform that wastes my time clicking on inaccessible content" - same like Quora, by the way. As long as the paywall exists, you will not get rid of that stench.

2. Substack killed you. I know that HN is mostly populated by extremely left leaning people who wholeheartedly believe in all the Current Things that MSM feeds them, so this argument will fall on deaf ears, but I will write it here anyways because it is the truth and if you aren't just a Woke CEO, you might actually care: During the pandemic, Substack was the only news source where I could get proper information about what is going on. Virtually everything that got people cancelled on Twitter and labelled as conspiracy theorists eventually turned out to be the truth. These people all moved to Substack. Thanks to Elon we all know now that Twitter was infested by deep state actors abusing the platform to spread disinformation and manipulate elections - I'm not sure if this is still true but I somehow remember that Medium emerged as a sub-company from Twitter, so I must assume that the exact same ways of censorship and propaganda that brought Twitter to its knees are also in place at Medium. If that is true, and as long as that is true, I can guarantee that you will have zero chance whatsoever against Substack.


FWIW, the idea that Medium is progressive is kind of ridiculous if you look at the view numbers. The vast majority of people are reading about apolitical topics, namely professional development, hobbies, personal stories.


As a libertarian conservative myself, I agree with martin and mostly read Substack along with WSJ now. I'm sure your data is good enough though and it doesn't matter. Good luck :)


Another pain point for me: no syntax highlighted code blocks

I see a lot of people using GitHub gists to embed code blocks for this reason, this means that writing any article code related is a pain

Edit: i think it's available now but definitely too late


Yes. We added them recently.


first of all i appreciate your willingness to own the issue, thats what i would hope any CEO would do.

my main issue as a reader (im the guy who frequently campaigns to just ban all medium.com links on HN) is the authwall that is thrown in our faces before we've had a chance to even read the article. its against the open web and not something i would encourage on HN. i understand youve changed your defaults but i still encounter these walls enough that there is just overall brand damage to Medium as a whole. mr stubblebine, please tear down that wall.


There are two types of writers - professionals and amateurs. Professionals want to earn money on their writing - so they are happy with paywalls. Amateurs have no hope to earn money but want their writing to be distributed as wide as possible - so paywalls make them sad. Professionals also want their work to be read - but they understand that paywalls are the only way to make people pay for their work.

Medium tried to make two of these groups happy and that is difficult. Both need many of the same tools - like nice looking templates, easy editing, comments and also recommendations - so there is a lot of investments that could be used by both groups and there is also a lot of synergy between these two - but they need to be monetized differently.

I think it is too early to say that Substack has found the good model - they managed to attract the cool guys - but Medium was also fashionable for a little while. But right now Medium needs a total rebranding.


On the positive side, the mobile app was amazing for writing. I can't think of a nicer interface to write a blog post on a phone.


I literally couldn't use Medium.

I think I've changed my email since my first Google SSO and you guys haven't dealt with that scenario - but it's probably pretty common


Do you think the name held the site back from becoming any bigger?


Sorry I laughed.


I wish you the best of luck. If you can turn Medium around, that will be quite the achievement and will make for a much more interesting read on HN than this thread.


Thank you for writing this.

I'm convinced the single biggest factor is the wrong incentive leads to poor quality, well beyond other factors like the paywalls, publications, etc. Not only it disinterests reader but more importantly, it push away good writers. Content is the beating heart of your platform.

It started out like a beautiful small town. The residents are nice and talented, the streets are clean and elegant - it attracts tourists.

It went wrong when the incentive encouraged bad actors to resides in town - litters and tea scammers are everywhere. Not only they're hurting tourists, they discourage good actors from residing in - nobody wants to live in dirty neighborhood and live with bad neighbors.

Thus the negative feed back loop, which causing the infinite downward spiral on quality.


You're clearly out of touch. Are you even paying attention? None of those are the main reasons people hate your website.


While it's normal for a CEO to focus on engagement statistics and whether the company focused on the right way to monetize, Medium is also read by quite a lot of technical and professional folks, and the pain points I encountered are:

1. Paywalls. Some people don't mind. Make it obvious in the link itself that this blog is monetized. I want to know if it's worth navigating away from what I am doing right now.

2. Site it slow. Ask yourself why did Medium scraper websites (that strip tracking) had to come into existence. If the market actively tries to circumvent you then it means you are not in connection with the users who you would want to spend time on Medium. This Silicon Valley mentality of "extract money, we'll think of performance maybe one day next century" is driving away the professional users who would pay for your service.

3. Too much trackers (likely related to #2). If that's your monetization model then the business is already on its way out.

You can do a lot with Medium. You can be the specialized Facebook for small club of readers and authors. You can help people organize events. You can provide a platform for book writers to draft and store chapters. You can put a paywall like "early access to my book's new chapter", too.

These things are not what drives insanely huge engagements that investors love but they absolutely will be bringing some money.

This hyper-growth mindset has to go. There are good ways to make money and not make your product suck.

I loved the idea of Medium when it first came out and consumed it a lot. For no less than two years now though, I use various scrapers and read stuff ad-free and tracker-free. Think of why it has came to it.


I used medium a lot to read Rust articles back in 2020 when Rust's community was smaller and not much of resources available, except of raw code in github. It worked wonderful for my purposes, and the recommendation algorithm worked very well. For six months i would read 5 articles everyday of Rust articles the algorithm sent me. Then after 6 whole months of reading the recommendations the algorithm stopped sending me Rust articles, or repeating ones i had already read. Well i had finished the whole website at that point!

Medium is a good website in opinion for articles about programming, hardware, gadgets etc. Most of the articles are not that great, but they are not bad either. The algorithm works well.

The paywall is necessary for now, but soon a better solution will become popular for paying on the internet. The pay as you go model will become easier and cheaper. Maybe a solution of reading the article and afterwards clicking like/clap transferring a small amount of money, like 0.1 cent will become a viable solution for writers and the service.

That said, i write my articles on lichess. It has the best website design i have ever seen, and it is fast as hell.


I second everyone saying the paywall is the actual problem. I used to write on Medium a lot because it was a simple way to blog and share essays with a minimalist UI. Now it just feels like a clown product because you have a paywall between users and reading. I would never subject my writing to an ugly paywall and wouldn't want the experience my readers have with my content to be ugly and broken like that.


> And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

Deboosting those content-mill authors is a good step! However changing the recommendation system is not enough. With Google, everyone interacts with it through the search box so them changing the search results is enough to influence what SEO junk is on the front page. But with Medium, anyone can promote their junk articles on Reddit and on other platforms and it will still result in a click and a paywall, which contributes to people avoiding medium.com links. You need to stop incentivizing these content-mill authors altogether (or prominently blackmark these posts/blogs so everyone knows to avoid them).


Thanks for writing this, Tony. I had a couple articles on Medium, and now I have a lot more on Substack, even though they're free.

Let me recommend Ted Gioia as someone to listen to. I actually pay for his newsletter, while there are hardly any others I'd pay for. From what I can see, if you are good on Substack, you'll make a lot of money. That does mean writing about something other than your current life and/or romantic involvements, which are, I'm sorry to say, boring. An awful lot of the Substack writers are doing that, too.

Maybe they do have some far left-wing writers, too, but Medium is just loaded with them.


Hello, What do 6021 employees do in a medium?


What made me go away, as a reader and writer, was the paywalls. It's not a very smart idea to put a paywall over text when your business modal is providing content.

I'm sure there are better ways of monetizing it.


Look at how feedly does it.


I stopped visiting the site after greedy publishers started to destroy links with useful information.

There should be a penalty for a free page going behind a paywall. Paywall pages also appear at the top of google searches because they were left there as a bait for indexing bots for months and then got paywalled. Not cool, medium.


so, marketing did it again


I must say that the hook and lede of Medium articles are very effective. They are sticky and grabs your interest. The frustration comes with the paywall. There must be another way, like a free summary (maybe use ChatGPT) that will compel me to pay.


Most other metered paywalls move the paywall much lower in the page. That would be a simple way--let you get 1/3 of the way so you are more confident in what you are getting. Or move the location of the paywall.

In general though, we love being subscription driven rather than ad driven and I don't expect that to change.


> let you get 1/3 of the way so you are more confident in what you are getting

It's really interesting to see different perspectives here (especially yours, as the CEO). To me, I feel the opposite: I would rather know immediately on page load if I'm going to be allowed to read the whole article or not. If I get 1/3 of the way through and then get hit with a paywall, I get really frustrated, and even if I would consider subscribing, that frustration pushes me away.


Paywalls are difficult to get right.

For the consumer, it's very much not like "see 5 articles and now you got me as a subscriber".

I'm not sure what your ratio of free-to-premium content is, but I have a feeling it needs to skew more towards the free side to build engagement again. I hardly ever go on Medium now, but I used to a lot.


the sketchy SEO tactics(at least at the beginning), invasive paywalls, clickbaiting, etc…

medium was doomed from the start. but being myself a detractor from the start i’m probably too much biased


You put up a paywall dude and forced creators behind it. Stop deluding yourself that the failures are elsewhere.


I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work.

Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused, and afterwards, it meant that it would be full of intrusive crap one would have to deal with before reading. To the point that people started making [special browser extensions](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...) just to remove them.

As a writer, whose main interest is in people reading my stuff (rather than, say, monetization), I wanted to move it somewhere where the readers would not be annoyed and maybe refuse to click on the link in the first place because of the domain.

I'm sure the above describes many others' experiences as well.


Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.


Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up are annoying though.


Yeah that's the problem. I don't want a newsletter, I want a blog.

And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.


For me one problem with the newsletter is that everybody and his brother and his sister and his other brother wants to send me email spams several times a day. The only way I can keep it manageable is to remove myself from every list as soon as I can.

I've been building my own smart RSS reader so I'd much rather add a feed to by reader which puts me, the reader, in control.


Genuine question. Isn’t HN what you are looking for then? What else would you need from a blog?


Good question!

I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture. The reading format is also not suitable for long form, and it makes the post text kinda grey which makes it even harder to read.

So, no. The community is great but it's not a blogging platform. I could self host my blog and post links here for discovery but self-promotion is generally frowned upon. I don't want to abuse the community.


"I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture."

... which is, in my opinion, an overlooked and extremely powerful filter.


It's a great way to reduce the moderation burden.

If people can upload images people will upload atrocity pictures (with the caption POST A STUPID IMAGE MEME... U DIE!), lewd pictures, CSAM pictures, and other things that will waste your time to manage if they don't get you in trouble outright. (It was super easy to get a basically G rated site demonetized with a 10⁻⁴ fraction of problem images ten years ago, it must be much worse now.)


None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense


> never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs

Isn’t the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People don’t want to pay and people don’t want ads. Where would you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?


Write a book or become an e-celeb and go on tour. 90% of blog/newsletter content (which are basically the same thing) is just self-promotion anyway.


Yeah man, the popups on blogs feel a lot like being forced to watch commercials before a movie trailer


I think there's monitization models somewhere there. Off the top of my head, you could go the email route and charge for "premium" features. Analytics, custom domains etc.

Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service


The thing is there's no money in charging writers, really. There's just not enough of them, and they aren't going to pay you enough (certainly not to reach golden egg territory). You must monetize on a per reader basis if you want real revenue.


There is a market but how big, I'd assume that these are real offers

https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing

that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.

The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.


This would be a good service for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide, IMO.


What's wrong with GitHub spaces?


From my perspective there's nothing wrong, but most of the population that has ever even heard of Github think of it as a complex programmer's only thing.

I remember a project I did some time ago where we required Github integration, every employee of the company was supposed to have a Github account, it was even part of the onboarding day, there was a very internal knowledge base page on how to setup Github, and EVEN then people would just hear the word "Github" and freak out saying a bunch of people in the company would never ever be able to setup an account there.


Pages*


companies have to make money at some point, it's not coincidence all these same types of sites do the same thing once they've burned through their VC money and have to make money. Hosting this type of stuff is a commodity service, it's why you constantly see a churn of people from each VC subsidized service


As an author, you can turn this off in the settings


It's done that as long as I can remember - the "let me read it first" thing, right? Or did they change something recently?


Substack has RSS feeds.


https://bearblog.dev seems like a good alternative for simple, clean, good looking blogs. Prioritizes quick loading and efficient web design.


https://hashnode.com/ is close to what medium used to be, I suppose. Hope it will stay like that.


Is there a way to confirm whether hashnode is VC-funded or not?

Because if it is VC-funded, enshittification is inevitable.


It's VC funded, but maybe Salesforce and Sequoia don't care about investor return (ha): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hashnode/company_fin...


Where did you move to? Self hosting?


Static Pelican site hosted on bitbucket.io. I'd use GitHub Pages if I were doing it today.


I moved to Hugo and then built prose.sh


Do you like Svbtle?


I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving something and being willing to pay for it are very different.

The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a little money here and there, or otherwise find some way to monetize.

Then the site realizes that all those users that love them so much, don't really love them enough to pay or to tolerate other irritating forms of monetization.

So then the site has a choice: A. Continue losing money forever B. Keep up the monetization efforts, despite knowingly irritating and losing your customers, partners, content producers, etc.

And most reasonably choose option B, even though they know it's the death knell.


I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about right. Every startup needs to choose a business model eventually and we botched the rollout of ours.

The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's congruent with anything else we were doing.

Most notably, the subscription implies that we have some premium content to share. But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles. Of course, that's not what we set out to do. But it's effectively what happened. I'm partly through reversing it.


> But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles.

I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort into the article content as they put into getting me to click.

I hope you get it turned around; this is largely a market that isn't served. Subscribing to newsletters is pretty dang expensive with anything less than a FAANG salary.


Instead of a subscription, would you pay per article? Like maybe 5 cents or 25 cents or something? Assume it's frictionless. No account with the site, no login, etc. You read the article and magically X cents is removed from your bank account. Would you do it?


Absolutely not. I finish probably 15% of the articles I encounter. I click links all the time. If that’s what I’ll pay, I’ll expect much more expertise than some random dude writing “Vue vs X” or whatever.

I’d rather pay for convenience. Like you can read all the articles but to subscribe to someone you have to be a premium user.

Basically like Spotify did it.


That’s the opposite of what I want.

It’s directly incentivizing clickbait headline crap based on views. If I click on something and hate it I’d be annoyed I paid them anything.

Substack’s model is better. I pay for quality writing I like that deserves my attention.


Like with...cryptocurrency?


Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

>>The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us.

You're touching on an Option C or perhaps option B2 here, where the supply and demand curves intersect, but much farther to the left than the current user base. Meaning there ARE enough users who are willing to pay you enough to keep going - but it's many fewer than you currently have. So you settle into a much smaller, but sustainable business. Not necessarily a bad outcome!

Question for you: Suppose that users can pay you $X (say, 5 cents) per article they read, but you are not allowed to know who they are or anything about them, they don't login at all, and you can't show them any ads. That is, it's a "pure" transaction similar to anonymously purchasing a hamburger. Is there some value of X high enough for this to be worthwhile for you? Do you think enough of your users would go for this to make it work?


I like your honest answers here. It's refreshing to hear in the tech space after a decade of wanna-be Jobs copycats. Good luck with the business.


Seems to me that a certain cost should be impressed against the publishers of the content as well, to help prevent that content mill of garbage as well as offset the potential costs to regular readers.


There’s a ton of other things you need to fix.

As a writer, seeing random people (bots?) highlight my article to death, making it essentially illegible, was a show-stopper for me.


Edit: this is such a good take that it's posted as a top-level comment slightly further down! That's what I get for not reading more responses before commenting.

Original:

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

from TikTok's Enshittification[0] by Cory Doctorow

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/


Wow that article is a great example of how long-form content really shines. Very well written.


As a reader i perceive Option B, keep up the mobilization efforts, as corrosive, like rust, or mold. There is no limit, and so you feel you’re always getting tricked. I’m not saying this of Medium specifically. I’m just react to this Option B idea.

This irks me because scammers are always trying to trick me. Legit companies are trying to trick me with dark patterns to spend micro amounts of money (Square is my current nemesis). For me there is always a level of opposition to these efforts.

Mentioned here was the New York Times. It’s always a subscription. You may be able to find a discount, or a special deal, but it’s always a subscription.


We lived through kind of a strange time thanks to low interest rates. For awhile you basically could get free lunch on these VC companies dime because they were willing to do everything at a loss. As soon as they tightened the purse strings, you just moved on to the next party. But hopefully things get more sane going forward...


cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification":

8<------------------------------

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/


Yes, definitely agree, and "enshittification" is a good word for something I've observed for ~25 years.

Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so forth:

https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern of eventual failure. That pattern is:

I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however. It's also true that consumers have predictable behavior patterns -- they want free stuff, and they will stick around to get that, and then move to the next thing.

On the other hand, we want free stuff because we don't want to sign up for subscriptions, and companies are always making that annoying -- betting on us forgetting to cancel, making it hard to cancel, tacking on hidden fees (banks do a lot of this), etc.

I wish that money could just be exchanged for goods and services, as Homer Simpson once noted ...


there's also this old ribbonfarm post on "the locust economy", describing that sort of consumer behaviour: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/


Great analogy! I hadn't seen that. I can definitely see that in Groupon (which seems much less popular now?)

Although I would also consider the other side of the "sharing economy" -- IMO sharing like Zipcar makes a lot of economic sense, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for incumbents there (although I guess Zipcar got bought).

Likewise with the taxi and hotel industries -- the incumbents deserve some competition / disruption.

But yeah consumers are certainly fickle


This definitely seems like at least half of it.

With blogging platforms, an additional aspect: I don’t really care to read the opinions of people who are mostly interested in blogging about a topic. I want to read from actual practitioners. As soon as a platform becomes well known, the non-practicing bloggers show up and it turns into a crapshoot whether what I’m reading is first or third hand information.

And that’s during the early still-OK-ish phase. After a while the natural tendency is that the non-practicing folks will produce more content because they’ve got more spare time!


I'll agree; we're just getting to the "Substacks writing about writing Substacks" phase now. Up until now all those people were on Medium.


Love that post. Sadly, every major tech platform is going thru "enshittification".


The enshittification cycle has always been here, but progress continues. It just feels like things are getting worse as the programs we grew up on enter the shit-zone part of their lifecycle.


Wikipedia seems like a weird exception to this rule.


They are super successful at gathering donations, right? I think their goal is fundamentally well-scoped to the sort budget they can hope to get just from donations.

I mean most of the value there is in text written by volunteers, which must not be so expensive to host (compared to, say, an image hosting site for example).


wikipedia isn't a "platform" in that sense of the term, they don't make money by being a middleman between producers, consumers and advertisers.


Terrific and succinct observation. How does competition not prevent this? Does lock-in prevent competition? e.g. Medium's suck-factor will always hover at the level where it's just not quite worth it to use something else if you already have many posts on Medium. New users will still pick Medium because it sucks, but is still popular/accepted.


The remarkable thing about Medium was that it went downhill so quickly, or, compared to other platforms like Twitter, it started trying to make money early in the process of gathering an audience, which limited it's growth.

In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2) technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog. In principle Medium took (2) and (3) out of your hands so you could focus on (1) but I think Medium attracted a person who was too lazy to blog before and who is interested in working on (1) as little as they are on (2) and (3).

In principle you might make some money blogging on Medium but a lot of people blog to promote themselves or their business and the registration wall reduced their reach and actually damaged their personal brand because I think a lot of people felt it was annoying to have to register to read articles on a blogging platform that is just a bit worse than the rest of the web as opposed to just a bit better. (Certainly anyone whose Medium blog posts connected with someone has received an email telling them it's a shame that a good blogger is blogging on Medium)


> Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot...

How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?


In the case of blogging, writing is (typically) one's product. Writing is relatively cheap and depending on the subject is highly commoditized, so you need to write a lot to incentivize audiences to return and to continue to consume, and presumably pay you somehow.

This isn't always the case. You might be an otherwise famous individual who will have an audience regardless of your publishing frequency. But I think for most bloggers, you have to have enough material that people will visit, and continue to make more so people will come back.

I published between 1 and 3 times a year on my blog/website. But then I'm not doing it for income.


Blogger here.

Quite a bit. I would say my blog has been successful, but it only happened after I had written a lot, which was about 100 posts and about 150 posts in a blog that now doesn't exist.

To be successful, your need to get an audience. To get an audience, you have to either build one over time or go viral at least once. I've done both.

To build an audience over time, you need to give them a lot to read so that they won't forget you and will keep coming back.

Going viral is a luck thing, but you sure do get better chances of going viral the more you post.

My first viral post was posted on Hacker News at a time when I thought it wouldn't go viral for sure: on Saturday night (my time). I didn't want that one to go viral, but I thought I would post it anyway to attract some readers.

Oh boy.

I woke up the next morning to a headache.

Since then, when I want to make an impact, I post during my nighttime. Turns out, posting that on a Saturday night was perfect because my most viral posts have been, with one or two exceptions.

But I wouldn't have been able to sample that enough to know if I didn't have 50-100 (tech-oriented) blog posts to try with.

So yeah, it's true.


I find there are two types of writers - ones who are working on a massive tome or tomes of perfection (often in their are of expertise) and those who are writing about a ton of different things.

The second definitely improves with consistent output. I assume the first does too, but they often are continually revising their “masterpiece” so it can be harder to see


Its an empirical rule of thumb that to build an audience online, post at least once a week (more often for low-effort posts for smartphones). If you can think of any well-known online writers who do not post a lot, I think you will find they generally had an existing audience (eg. Paul Graham is a venture capitalist with a crowd of admirers). Rules of thumb are not laws of nature, but this one matches my experience and my observations.


There's a wonderful blog post I want to find from years back about Starbucks switching from manual to automatic espresso machines, saying how the next generation of good coffee shops are probably getting their start by buying those manual machines cheap. And more generally, the cycle is that for a new brand having a few people who love you is more important than having people who don't hate you, so you take risks, and then at some point you're mainstream and that flips and it's more important to not be hated.

I'd add to that that brand reputation is monetisable and monetised. It's almost a playbook at this point: sell something high quality to people who are really into that thing, get a good reputation, then dilute the quality down and you can coast on that reputation for a while while selling cheaper versions at the original high prices to a much wider audience.

I don't know what the counter to this is, other than customers paying much more attention to when a brand changes their products, which would not be free for them.


Competition doesn't generally apply because these are usually venture-backed companies in the first few stages. The point is to prevent competition in the third stage by using the first two stages to lock in both sides of the market.


Are there examples of sites/platforms that are doing it "right"? (however you interpret 'right' to be, I guess). Ones that have been around for a while and haven't enshittified?


https://NeoCities.org, free static hosting, $5/mo for higher storage/traffic limits.

https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).


Bandcamp, although many are holding their breath since the Epic takeover.


Not sure if it counts, but Steam maybe?


Hacker News


http://Wordpress.com (not.org)


hm, maybe the crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter and indiegogo? as far as I know those haven't started down the curve yet. but I would guess it's inevitable once you take vc money and are beholden to your investors to squeeze out every drop of revenue you can :(

it would require a really strong mission statement baked into the company to say "we are here to provide value to our users and everything else has to come second to that". if nothing else you eventually get acquired, e.g. tumblr, and everything goes to hell then.


Kickstarter and Indiegogo have quite a few charlatans selling a tech version of snake oil, and they don't care because they get 10% (or whatever their fees are).


I don't think Kickstarter "doesn't care", they just don't care enough to proactively find out. Indiegogo will keep outright scams up. Kickstarter says "eh, someone will flag it if it is a scam"


I am not sure how much vetting you want the platform to do? If someone says they can synthesize gasoline from air for $.02/liter, should Kickstarter shut it down? Send a guy to investigate? Where does the arbitrary this-is-probably-wrong line land?


Well that example wouldn't be allowed on Kickstarter, because they require a prototype to exist for electronics campaigns. I think that's a fairly reasonable arbitrarily chosen line.


Craigslist


Slashdot?


lol


I wasn't joking, actually. I still visit Slashdot, though not as often. Ownership has changed over the years, but in principle, the site its features haven't changed.


Freshmeat?


This is just a cool-sounding wrapper on the much older concept of rent-seeking, which has a solid theoretical literature behind it. Doctorow seems to specialize in this.


it's more like a specialisation of "rent-seeking" when applied to this particular case and pattern. nothing wrong with inventing a more specific term when the pattern behind it gets common enough.


It is like rocket stages or a maggot turning into a fly: each stage bootstraps the next but cannot last forever


do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.


It's a sort-of inevitable thing when your focus becomes earnings and growth rather than whatever your actual business is. Facebook's business was providing a common platform for people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's business was a billboard to share what they're doing. Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the web.

Unfortunately, none of those things is particularly easy to charge money for. So you take Venture Capital to fund your development, and then you try to find a way to pay that VC through other means - Advertising mostly, it turns out. Then you have to keep pushing that because your investors want returns, and it funds the party.


None of those things was Facebook or Twitter's business, because none was how they make money. Facebook and Twitter are for-proffit businesses, and for almost all of their history the money has come from selling advertising and surveillance (its pretty clear that birdsite guy never understood that twitter users are his products and advertisers are his customers). There are not many alternatives if you want to provide a centralized global service for tens of millions of users. So my web presence focuses on things hosted by small companies or run by community members, not on giant 'free' corporate services.


What you’re saying is true in terms of where the money comes from, but it doesn’t explain why customers are being screwed.

The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency.

It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you are the product”. But these companies still need a quality product or, eventually, the advertising and data collection is not valuable to those with money.

Which is what we seem to be seeing with Twitter.

Abusing end users is a very short sighted strategy, even if they’re not paying.


Which customers are getting screwed? Posters or viewers on 'free' hosting sites are the products not the customers. Online ad buyers everywhere get cheated, but that is another story.

Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime").

I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one side is paying cash and the other is not. Its like calling dating a marketplace, a bad metaphor.


Well, I disagree with your previous assertion that Facebook makes money from selling ads.

Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads.

The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.


we'll have to agree to disagree then. There are many other properties outside of Facebook.com where their ads run, in competition with Google.


We are specifically talking about the user visible pages of these companies and their “enshitification”

> Facebook's business was providing a common platform for people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's business was a billboard to share what they're doing. Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the web.

They may have other businesses in banner ads but I’m specifically responding to the question,

> do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.

by trying to make the point that if their business is selling attention, then pissing off end users - thereby reducing the supply of attention - is bad management.


Lots of answers point to the user experience of Medium becoming worse. This misses the bigger picture: the economics of free blog hosting don't work.

V1 of Medium was great because they weren't concerned with monetization. The product was built fully in the interests of the user. Once the company grew, they saw that the bottom line was not sustainable, and so started adding features that would possibly increase revenue. These features were built in the company's interest, not the user's interest, so the user experience got worse.

This isn't their fault, it's just a fact of business. People wouldn't pay enough to make the project worthwhile (either directly or indirectly in the form of ads/other monetization avenues).

Maybe Substack has found a different model that genuinely does work, or maybe they will follow a similar trajectory to Medium.


I think a big part of it is that users/readers understandably feel that a bait-and-switch has happened. Because it has.

I really think the whole idea of "make it free at first, monetize later" is what's broken. If the intention is ultimately to have it generate revenue, the best thing to do is set up the revenue mechanism right from the start.


Agreed. Many people who have the means don't mind paying for things that bring them value, and they would much rather just pay for consistency than have that value eroded over time.


Good example: The Information.


Well, they can start free, get 1M users, and then try to monetize.

Or they can charge up front, get zero users, and then find something else to do with their time.


Or you know... bootstrap a non-predatory sustainable business. If anyone even knows how to do that in 2020s.


The problem is if you do that you get outcompeted by the VC-funded competitors who are happy to shovel money into a furnace for the first 1m+ users.


If you are competing with a bigger, better-funded fish, then the odds are very against you anyway as long as you're playing the same game as they are. Your real strength is to play a different game, one that leverages your unique strengths, not to meet them toe-to-toe in a game that leverages theirs. This can be done even if your product is in the same category as theirs.

Exactly how to do that is highly dependent on you, so very individual (which is part of why it's so effective).


It's more like, you're competing against another business on the same footing. Both of you have the option of taking VC investment, which comes with significant downside but will give you a bunch of money in the short term. If your thesis is that the better-funded competitor always wins then the answer is that you should always take the money; I'm not quite that pessimistic, but I do think this specific blitzscaling playbook is something to be aware of.


Or they can make the charging process and fees very clear, and give out free trials. Or, if the funding mechanism is to be ads, include them from day 1.


Right. If they charge up front and get zero users then their business model is wrong.


I agree that UX complaints miss the bigger picture. Lots of the highest-traffic sites have terrible UX. Lots of people will put up with poor UX if it delivers the content/product they want. Poor UX does not help -- but it's not the main failing of Medium, in my opinion.

Medium has been plagued with endless "pivots" -- not sure if it was wimpy yes-men who had to give in to every U-turn from the founder or if it was just fundamentally bad ideas. They also let the Substack idea pass them by, which can only be described as embarrassing.

On the other hand, your point about Medium flailing away trying different features to add to the bottom line is poignant. Very few written-content publications have figured out monetization. There's always a tension between ads, which yuck up the experience, and paywalls, which hobble virality and penalize your most passionate users.


The short answer is that the founder is an introverted guy who sort of weathervanes around when it comes to his vision for the product, he had enough prior success to get lots of funding for his project, and there was no one with enough authority to say "no" to his shifting ideas or replace him with a more effective boss.

You see this pattern a lot with successful people. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a brilliant guy, but his later books are unreadable because he won't consent to have an editor. Your favorite band takes five years to release a follow-up to their breakthrough album. Pundits get a sinecure at a major news outlet on the strength of their insightful thinking and then start producing drivel.

Ev Williams had the misfortune of being given a limitless budget and the freedom to realize his vision. Medium with three developers and a half million dollar budget might have been unstoppable.


How's the new management doing?


interesting point


This whole thing reminds me of this comment when Tumblr "died":

"I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point."


Cory Doctorow calls this enshittification[0], and it applies to more than just social media companies. But social media is the most obvious representative of this cycle.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys


Substack stole their thunder.

Superficially Substack looks a lot like Medium, to the point where I'd say Substack was forced to prove it was something much better than Medium from the very beginning.

Substack gets much better engagement with subscribers because each Substacker has to earn each subscription. A Substacker can get a passionate audience that rewards good writing.

Substack though has the serious problem that somebody can make their own email newsletter + credit card gateway script for $20,000 or less so the kind of person who makes $1,000,000 a year on Substack can go their own way and keep more money. Substack makes almost all their money off two handfuls of writers so having the best ones walk out is a constant threat -- they are saying "we aren't a mailing list company" and would like to have a richer engagement platform, like OnlyFans, that substackers would find harder to replicate, but it's never easy to get people who play game A interested in playing game B, and if they do play game B they are as likely to do it on a "best of breed" platform for that game.


Substack has no paywalls, and Medium does. Makes sense why they took over.


Substack is literally a paywall as a service platform for indie writers.


They let each indie writer choose whether there will be no paywall, a partial one (for some articles), or a full one.


What's great about it is that it changes the psychology.

People are resentful about the paywall at The New York Times, which feels like they took something away.

Somehow the average Substack seems like they are giving away a lot for free but you can get even more if you support the creator. It helps that the creator is in charge of what requires payment so they can use the paywall to help, not hinder their personal brand.


Two main reasons, IMO:

1. At a point, Medium stopped adding value to blog posts and their network, to the point that they had to strongarm some of the larger networks to try and stay on their platform (e.g. FreeCodeCamp) and failed. Currently, Medium's best value proposition is long-tail SEO which just encourages more low-quality content.

2. In general, the long-form content landscape has shifted more toward short-form content in terms of things like Twitter and TikTok. Even Substack, which is a reasonable Medium alternative and superior if trying to build a readerbase, hasn't received as much buzz as it did years ago.


Long form content will become more niche, at least when it comes to text. I prefer long form reading content over short form content so it's nice having platforms like Substack and Medium, but IMO there needs to be something better. I would love a new social blogging platform that actually does well at showing you content you'd enjoy AND that ensures the posts are quality.

Easier said than done I imagine.


This made me sad. Long form content is the content I get the most value from. Short-form is largely pointless.


I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form content. Everything points towards short form content being the biggest thing while long form content and text content becomes niche.


I don't agree. It's not young people as such, it's the mainstream that love shallow short form content.

However the more intelligent, curious and thoughtful people that hopefully become our leaders, are more into long form content which simply has much more to offer than cheap one-liners.

Unfortunately selecting those leaders is where we are going wrong right now. Referring to a lot of leaders (politics and industry alike) that just love blasting cheap shots on short form services like Twitter.


This sounds like terribly "old-fashioned" thinking... at the same time, not everything new is good. I'm afraid you're right though. Seems short form is destroying attention spans across the board. I even notice it in myself.


Short form wins on ads is the main reason.

If you read one long article you may see three ads.

But each short article could have the same three ads, multiplied by however many short articles you read.

Long term I think the future is going to be more along the line of direct patronage - if I want to write I can say that at $Xk a month from supporters I’ll quit my day job and just make content for everyone.


It's a common story.

A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money.

Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.

But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.

Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users left.


Exactly this. Medium was great at what it did, but having raised $160M+ in funding and being valued at several billion dollars they simply could not continue to be a simply blogging platform while also making enough money to keep investors happy. And all their bets to become profitable just ended up alienating their users and writers.


Never had a valuation that high.


YouTube has become pretty bad IMO.. All the ads and Google data mining.

Without a suite of adblockers and sponsorblock it's unusable now. I hate video content anyway so I wouldn't sign up for a subscription. But every time I get referred there I'm appalled how bad it's become.


that's very true


If you punish me every time I follow a link to your site, I may learn to avoid following links to your site.

Medium changed from reader-friendly to reader-hostile over time.


From a reader perspective I thought the value of medium was a clean, simple reading experience, unlike popup-laden attention-seeking articles on news sites.

But then medium added all the same popups and nags.

I don't wanta sticky cookie popup (which is probably also illegal since it lacks a reject-all button). I don't want to sign in with Google for both of you to track me. I don't want any JavaScript doodads, sticky toolbars, floaty buttons, or messing with text selection.

I expect substack to end up exactly the same. It's not the fault of the site, just inevitability of the grow-capture-monetize playbook.


Good point, seeing medium.com in a URL has this response with me now. For sure.


When medium decided that, as a writer, you need to have at least 100 followers to be able to get paid, the rules of the game changed. All I saw was articles about how to get your first 100 followers and how somebody made lots of money writing on medium. Clickbait titles, follow-back culture.


Good points


I remember seeing a few medium posts on Hacker News a few years ago. They all had good tone management; but when read with a critical eye, they were factually incorrect or had poor comprehension of the subject matter.

It got the point where, if I saw "medium.com" next to a link I'd think, "oh, that's a medium post" and not open it. If I accidentally opened a Medium post, I'd close it immediately without reading it.

"Medium.com" is a stamp of mediocracy, IMO. I just won't read them.


I agree that "medium.com" is a stamp of mediocrity, and I tend to have the same kneejerk reaction to never read something posted there.

However, I'm not sure I agree about the good tone management. There's always been something about medium and most of the articles there that is sort of cringe. It feels kind of like linkedin, where everything is superficial self-promotion, everybody is "thrilled" (a word only used in linkedin posts when you change jobs), and there's too many exclamation points everywhere. None if it feels raw or authentic.

Part of this ties into the low technical quality you mention: after reading the n-th generic, un-insightful description of a Kalman filter on medium, you get the sense that grad students are only posting this stuff to build a following, i.e., for the clout.


The over-happy sugarcoated PR is not specific to LinkedIn. The entire corporate realm is full of that crap. Entire hordes of marcom people excrete this vile Kool-Aid for mindless corporate drones to spread like happy little slaves

It's just that LinkedIn is one of the few places they can do that without being downvoted into oblivion.


Yes. It never feels like the authors primary purpose is the article or self expression.


You aren't alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222


Yeah, after looking through that thread I began to understand my frustration with Medium.com.

The problem is Medium.com lowers the barrier to entry for writing a technical blog that appears correct at a glance. The barrier to entry for operating your own blog is marginally high enough to keep out people who misunderstand core concepts in technical writing.


Medium.com has great SEO but terrible UX. Loved by people who post their stuff there, loathed by readers. It succeeded because it was one of the few free traditional blogging platforms of its era. Many Medium users were kids when blogger was popular, so they don't know any better.


Everybody and their siblings is putting up 'Subscribe now' begging bowls. Who's going to do all that subscribing? Some of them show you a couple paragraphs, as if that was enough to get the purses open?

Give it up. Give. It. Up. Subscriptions were for the mailing of paper magazines a century ago. Back when, you know, the whole world wasn't opened-wide on the net. Who subscribes to non-org mags anymore?

The best podcasters have patreon accounts. Some even actually, and personally, thank contributors by name. People even send them stuff.

Or get a bunch of big-media companies to get some kind of micropayment options online. Not for the 2 paragraphs but the whole article. A quarter is not $5 but ten-thousand quarters a day might just keep you afloat.


First off, I do get recommendations from substack whenever I subscribe to a substack It gives me a recommendation list.

I'll take your question even further back: Why did Blogger drop the ball? Was it just that Google lost interest? (most likely, google loses interest pretty quickly - it's kind of an ADHD company)


Because it sold "legitimacy" of your blog as a subdomain.

Being a legit tech blogger is not about the domain, it is about having a significant repository of articles over many years, and for the majority of those articles to be at least insightful or entertaining, if not educational or maybe even introduce something completely novel.

You can't achieve that by signing up at a website which instantly nags its users to sign up to your mailing list. Substack sucks for the same reason.

If you want to be a legit tech blogger, get writing, and write well. See how you're going in a few years.


“Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?”

To me, this is the essential question. I’ve been writing on medium since May of 2019 and for a while there was a real sense of community and camaraderie. I met some of my closest writing friends and mentors there. But there was a growing sense of gaming the system in the writing communities that made me increasingly uncomfortable. Share threads where writers were supposed to read (and clap for and comment on ) everyone else’s pieces if they expected to be able to share theirs. But what it ended up amounting to was mostly a circle jerk of writers reading other writers’ stuff, quality be damned.

The curation engine was good for awhile and drove worthwhile engagement and earnings, but then it fell apart, too. I make less than $10/month from my two accounts now, enough to offset the cost of my 2 memberships.

Back to the original question, I don’t know how a media company could pay editors to spend the eyes-on time it takes to judge quality and also pay writers a reasonable amount without becoming a traditional media company that hires freelance writers to hodgepodge it up. All those standalone stories with no organization makes my head spin. And consumers (who are able) are increasingly unwilling to pay for a subscription to such a company, especially to a media business with a lack of focus that has not proven its value.

I always thought Medium was written for readers and exploited the hell out if its writers, but then their business model started being about neither readers nor writers.

I truly do believe Substack’s model is superior in that readers pay to support authors or creators they find worthwhile rather than paying the platform ant large and trying to wade through the morass of indefensibly low quality work (or, more likely, forgetting you subscribed in the first place until the renewal email comes). It’s a different kind of platform, but more versatile and feels more homey.


Long time ago, seeing medium.com links made me think "oh nice, a clean reading experience ahead".

Soon afterwards, it switched to "oh no, not this annoying site again".

I would be surprised to see it thrive.


I blogged on Medium for a while. My most read article hit like 170k reads and the front page here on HN.

The UX on Medium kept deteriorating for readers. Slow loads, annoying modals, etc.

And then Medium did some shitty things with Freecodecamp.

I ended up deleting my account and moving some of the articles to my own blog. In retrospect this wasn't a good move since I broke the URLs and I regret it. But what's done is done.


For me I followed programming posts etc but they went from high quality to things like 'how to turn your computer on' and just the most basic shit imaginable, the flood of garbage drowned out any good posts.


I recommend https://write.as if you just want a clean, minimalist blog platform with photo hosting and minimal effort. Integrates with RSS, mail, even ActivityPub/Mastodon. Write in Markdown. No ads. Or self-host this software as F/OSS with WriteFreely if you want full control or think $6/mo is kinda steep. You can add interaction (blog post comments) via e.g. Commento if you dislike the invasive Disqus, as you should...

It reminds me of Medium before all the bullshit.


I realized that I never read anything on Medium. I use it solely as my private travel blog, which is then read by family members, close friends and my nostalgic future me. The reason I like to use medium for that is that it is very easy to add content. The two biggest issues I have with Medium is that pictures can not be set fullsize anymore and that there is a (for me) useless sidebar. Not only are you now limited on how to present your content, but it adds a lot of distraction.


There are extremely low barriers to entry. Both against becoming a Medium blogger, and against companies putting together competing platforms to draw talent. So you are left with a pretty diluted pool of content.

Substack isn't a technology platform - it's a business model. They paid a bunch of well known writers a bunch of money to come to their platform and it paid off. I think they have wisely bet that there is no shortage of content on the internet, and focusing on curation is more important than access.


> Substack isn't a technology platform - it's a business model. They paid a bunch of well known writers a bunch of money to come to their platform and it paid off. I think they have wisely bet that there is no shortage of content on the internet, and focusing on curation is more important than access.

I would say Substack is both a technology platform and a business model, but I think the point you're making is the technology platform is very simple and easy to replicate, so not the focus of their success or lack of it? Which I'd agree with.

What I would not agree with is that Substacks business model has anything to do with curation. I do subscribe to a couple of writers on Substack, but my decision to subscribe to each was independent of the fact that the other one was on Substack, or who else was on Substack. The Substack brand isn't reader facing at all.

And in fact, Substack doesn't actually do curation. Anyone can sign up, and when they were signing their advance deals, they were fairly clearly offering them to anyone who their models predicted would bring in enough subscribers to bring a profit. Which in turn later harmed them, as people imputed some sort of editorial opinion to the deals.

In short, I'd say their suceeding so far because of their business model. but the business model is that there's a lot of content out there that people are willing to pay for, so they'll offer a technology platform with zero curation that lets people pay for content.


Poor execution and the lack of a moat have caused medium to get pushed in a mode where the measures they put in place to generate revenue ended up throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of alienating both writers and readers from their platform. Which is of course disastrous for any content platform.

Better execution might have prevented some of that but not all of it because without revenue, it was not a sustainable company. So, they had to do something given the level of investment and the mediocre revenue. Better execution would have not done anything to prevent competitors from stepping up. That was always going to happen.

But fundamentally, they are just a blogging platform. There are many blogging platforms out there and it's not rocket science to create some more. Blogging platforms are a commodity. It doesn't matter that much if theirs is nice to use, beautifully designed and comes with a great UX. And I would actually dispute it is that good to begin with. Either way, it's still a commodity. Easy to imitate, clone, copy, whatever. The value of that was always relatively low. And I don't think medium ever had a good plan for addressing that.


Because users who read stuff actually want to turn on their brain, rather than turn it off like on YT. This means users can't get caught in an endless downward spiral of bad content, and are happy to look elsewhere for interesting content.


Have you ever walked into a car dealership and the dealer seems to have already made up their mind that you're looking to buy a car NOW and you want to drive out with a car NOW and you're ready to make a decision NOW..? Yeah, that's how Medium feels. When I click a link to a Medium article, it seems like it's assumed that I really desperately need to read this article, I'm a huge fan of the author, and I'm ready to pay any price. I'm so ready, that I don't even care to know the price before I create an account. Just sign me up! I'm ready!

But I'm not ready. I clicked this post because it has a controversial headline. Maybe it'll be the best blog post I read all year, but more often than not it's someone who only made a Medium.com account because they think it'll make them rich. But I can't read it because I'm not a member, or I hit my limit of "free" articles (which is confusing because they didn't feel like they were valuable), or whatever the limiting factor is now.

I'm not sure what the solution is.


Still running - is not a greatest way to describe a business who's business plan relies on engaging a large audience.

I don't as practice use an ad blocker just to be polite to the sites I do visit and used to visit medium pages up until two or three years ago for light fluffy insights and I used to groan a little with the high ad load but not the point I wouldn't visit -- as there wasn't any really silly stuff like including a near 100 meg vidio payload with the hundred words I wanted to read. (I'll just say I don't visit Ars any more ... ever.)

At some point two or three years ago I believe I blocked a scraping API site ... I'm unsure what sites used the various apis, but around the same time medium thought it'd be cool to deal out some punishment, load the page and ads and barely two seconds after it finally loaded it was blanked. Yeah I guess I could have wrote a script that detected when it had loaded and taken a snapshot ... but for me it's easier to just ignore the entire site and surf elsewhere.


They went completely crap on every single aspect. See the source code of a page that call itself "minimalist".

Then see their business model…

(I wrote about it 6 years ago: https://ploum.net/an-open-pay-wall-has-medium-lost-its-mind/... )


Great blog. You made good points and I'm sure many of us feel the same way.


Any "service" that offers money for content will fail eventually.

Take most news portals: they fill their sites with "news" to favor search engines, to deploy ads or affiliate links.

Take search engines itself: They lead to SEO which leads to "silly" and packed "WordPress" like websites whose only goal is to drop affiliate links.

And so on....


Youtube? Tiktok? Twitch?


To be fair, YouTube does have a serious problem with millions of dud, autogenerated content videos trying to game the algorithm to generate ad cash.


Those are all excellent examples of how a content platform descends into empty hollow entertainment if monetized too much.


I think that the internet is overpopulated.

It creates ephemeral platforms that strives for a little while and become slave to the imperatives that drives revenu (ads, data) instead of staying true to themselves they corrupt their core in the name of viability, effectively rendering them shitty.


Oh wow, I thought it was just me. I used to like Medium several years ago, then due to my work stopped using it, and in the last few months tried to pick it up again. I often found interesting articles, but then every time I wasn’t able to read it because I had to pay. And the issue wasn’t so much paying for it, it was more the way it was presented. I basically got hooked by the title and summary, but then somehow I couldn’t even read the first paragraph of the article... I had to pay to continue reading. This gave me such a bad sentiment that I lost my appetite for the article. If the paying part had been presented or integrated somehow differently, things could have been different I feel.


It did not fail. Medium blogs still generate a lot of traffic. I think rather it got superseded by Substack. Substack has a few benefits over medium, such as being less inclined to censor and writers having more control over payouts and subscribers.


Why is it less inclined to censor?

Also, true. They do have more control over their payouts.


The proximate cause is that Substack was founded by people less likely to censor, who have so far kept control of the company. It may be more meaningful to say that Substack was founded in 2017, and Medium was founded in 2012, and the sort of censorship we're talking about was much more salient in 2017 than in 2012, so Substack was in some sense selected to be more against that sort of censorship.


Slight offtopic, I didn’t even realize that medium has a frontpage and recommendations. Like in, you can sign up not only to pay money for views. Also, the average post quality itself is irrelevant when you read it occasionally only through shared links (e.g. on HN). But what’s annoying is that low-quality medium articles dominate SERPs. “I see it, I skip it” is common in my circle. Brand damage done. But it’s not the worst offender, tbh. A whole horde of blogs like “I apt-installed foo and tried to run it with some arguments, voila” is also there.

edit: I mean if it wasn’t there in SERPs, I wouldn’t even associate it with low-quality posts.


Some writers were attracted to Medium because it was easy get started. It was frustrating to me as a reader, because I was getting enough links there each month to hit the limit. I wished that writers would just set up their own site, which is also better for building their personal brand.

One interesting aspect of the Medium business model is that it can really deliver money for writers who get a lot of traffic. Medium effectively shares some part of the paid user subscriptions with all the sites they visit. So if you only visit one site in a month, they get all the money for that month. If that's a popular post, the writer might make a lot of money. But it depends on the subscriber not visiting many sites.

There is a theory that people will discover the writer's content just because it's on Medium, but that's certainly not how I find things. I follow links from social media or web searches.

If a writer consistently has a lot of good content, they will make more money at Substack, as they keep a larger percentage.

So the business model of users having a subscription to Medium as a destination site for discovery doesn't work particularly well. It doesn't benefit writers with consistently good content, and it doesn't benefit readers. So you end up with medium-value content that might get a windfall. It's kind of an SEO game.

Reminds me that I have hardly seen any interesting links to Medium lately, and I should cancel my subscription.


This might not be relevant to medium's downward spiral, but as a reader I find that medium is a marker for content of very low quality.

I follow a lot of personal blogs and over the years less than 3 medium posts (not even whole blogs) made it into my bookmarks.

When searching the web, medium content is often times just 1 or 2 steps above the worst SEO spam sites.

In short: I avoid medium.com links most of the time. It's basically the site for people that just want to write tons of clickbait low quality content to "build their brand".


I'd like something like a long-form Mastodon server, with a way to organize content with keywords kind of like Drupal's taxonomy tree (keywords can be arranged in trees, and tags produce feeds of articles, so an article tagged with a specific tag also shows up in the more abstract tag feeds).

https://www.drupal.org/project/taxonomy_tree

It would also need to be useful for posting high resolution cat pictures and videos (or whatever), to replace Flickr. Mastodon shrinks and clips images, and I don't know how to make it a large full sized stream of image posts. Is that possible somehow, or is there a special version of Mastodon oriented towards photography or simply cloning the best parts of Flickr?

And it should not only make it easy to embed youtube and other videos, but also easily publish and incrementally enhance time-synchronized multimedia and link enriched transcripts and commentary on videos, with synchronized time scrolling and searching.

Maybe even a time based discussion tree that starts by importing the chat transcripts of live broadcasts, and lets you reply to the real time comments with later comments, and insert now top level comments later at particular points in time (or segments of time).


Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT in terms of blogging platforms. It's

1) Easy to setup

2) Incredibly SEO friendly

3) Most importantly: you own your content.

Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup.

Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up for you for free → https://startablog.com/free-blog


No one here hates WordPress because people use it for blogging. We hate it because other people use it as a complex, insecure, messy, un-versioned CMS that some of us had to inherit.

It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else people do with it.


Seeing what "low-code" people can accomplish with WordPress is both horrifying and amazing.


It reminds me of Microsoft Access in the 90s.


This is accurate. I laughed :).


Self-promotion spam aside, all of those points are stronger arguments for static site genetation like with Jekyll or Hugo. There, the site is faster and you don't have to pay much hosting fees if any.


I stopped using (self-hosted) Wordpress because it became too much of a hassle and worry over security issues. Life is just easier without all of that.


- Sunk cost fallacy everywhere you look. - An engineering culture of reinventing the wheel and maze of internal tools that only a select few understand. - No grass roots innovation - all ideas come from founders of recently acquired companies. - Highly politicized culture with rampant wokeness paralyzing decisions at every level. - Refusal to acknowledge Substack exists. - Too many non-builders and non-engineers running the company. - Lots and lots of misallocated talent.


Sounds like you worked there and had a bad experience. Sorry to hear that. It’s somewhat different now.


Centralization is always destined to failure because growth requires catering to an ever lower common denominator. When services are new they are exclusive and content quality is high, if narrow. As they scale their standards drop, it is a mathematical certainty.

This is the fundamental mistake of Web 2.0. It's impossible to be everything to everyone.

In other words content moderation is a feature and if you can't do it while keeping your audience happy you are too big.


I'm a paid subscriber, I even gifted the membership to my friends.

The recommendation system needs to improve to find the true great articles, maybe some famous and well respected domain bloggers shall get a higher score than a newbie from nowhere with a clickbait title. You need a quality rating system. Maybe some icon to show the blogger's level(expert, random blogger, newbie,etc)

Personally I also like a text-oriented theme more, I mean I don't need those fancy pictures to distract me when what I want is to broaden my tech skills. In general Medium articles seem too verbose to me. In this twitter/Axios era, nobody has the time and patience to read those slow articles. Can you provide a text-mode option?

Talking about this, maybe Medium can learn one thing or two from Axios, how about put summary and conclusion to the top of each blog? so I know ahead what I am getting into before I have to scroll all the way down, to decide if I should dive into the thing at all?


> Substack doesn't have an algorithm that recommends you content

Which is a good thing. I don't really need a robot doing to me "you read an article about 'Instagram influencer mauled by a bear', so you are clearly into Instagram influencers and bears, here are 9000 blogs from Instagram influencers and another 9000 from people collecting teddy bears". In fact, I have an RSS feed which is composed of I lost count how many blogs, which I constantly fail to read half of them - and those I selected manually for being the most interesting to me, do you really thing I need another hyper-noisy channel to suggest me more content? If there's something relevant to the article, the article author would likely suggest it anyway. Or other thousand of authors would. Or it wasn't that important anyway, and my 2k+ messages unread in Feedly are calling to me.


"Why don't I use Medium?" is the question I asked from this, as I actually use HN as my chosen outlet for material that comes from a short lifetime in what I'd call "semi-pro" level writing. That is, I'd be writing professionally, but really, why?

The appeal of Substack is the appeal of good writing, and in particular, its necessary ingredient, conflict. What Substack offered, and Medium didn't have, was a bet on edginess that guaranteed them high quality writing, and to attract high quality writers. What I used Medium for was basically as long form LinkedIn, where that necessary essence of good writing is the one thing the platform is designed to dull. On LinkedIn, you have to look like everyone else, but with some slight variation and nothing remarkable or unconventional. To be a writer, you need to blow peoples fucking minds. This means taking risks, challenging conventions, knowing all the rules and then breaking them in the right order to produce something beautiful. To me, Medium is blandness as a service. Its entire brand is an expression of its quality, medium. Their market niche is to be the Olive Garden of content but without all the spiciness.

Taking risk in writing means I'm risking all the future money I am making on the platform, and the potetntial scandal-cost against finding other work because of the reputational hit of being booted. Together they mean I can't add the necessary degree of conflict to my writing that will edify an audience. The other thing about writing nobody tells you is that the world forgives you when you win and you can say anything you want when you are riding high, but if you lose publicly because of some insane political situation, you don't eat lunch in this global town again.

The genius of the substack launch was offering security to writers via their open political policy, which enabled great writers to take risks. Their work turned the platform into a desirable and elite brand, and the policy of openness guaranteed the platform would never stop writers from doing the one thing they have to do to live, which is writing. They gave writers a home and the artists turned it into a neighbourhood.

Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Camille Paglia, H. L. Mencken, Michel Houellebec, Glen Greenwald or really anyone's name I remember for being a great writer - does not survive on Medium. Hell, Matt Taibbi doesn't survive on Medium. It's content for people who buy celebrity scented candles.

Maybe they could launch a new site for experiemental ideas and provocative work, and some forums with rules that challenge twitter and reddit dominance. They can call it: medium.rare


> The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm reading the same posts over and over again.

Not just that, but more and more writers are writing long-form analyses of events and topics which have been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere, long ago. Not really adding anything new.

Some of their most popular authors are legitimately regurgitating the same talking points over and over again. If you read a dozen articles from Umair Haque, you'll have read the basic talking points of every article he's likely to write.

But - it seems to work I guess. Lots of youtubers get popular the same way - by generating the same basic content over and over again, with slight changes. As long as they do so frequently, they maintain their viewers. Granted if you're a cute girl dancing, it's a lot easier to get away with than if you're writing 800 words about how America is a failed state.


Yup. I think a better question that everyone should be asking, is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow people to share information."


Wikipedia is not for profit, the incentives are incomparable.


Right. I don't care about profit, and therefore also not about incentives. I care about the idea of -- hey could there exist something like "Medium" as a non-profit, especially given that pretty much everything that has tried this for profit ends up going the way of (as mentioned below) "enshittification?"


Maybe this is exactly the difference that makes it work.


There’s no competition for Wikipedia yet. As soon as search is killed by AI and AI starts providing answers of similar quality without driving traffic to sources, Wikipedia will either completely fade to irrelevance or will be quasi-acquired by AI providers, which will see it as a training ground for AI and fund it on such terms that allow this use case.


I decided to stop supporting Medium with my articles due to the disregard for accessibility, and would urge any accessibility writers to do the same. Why support a company that can't even create a good writing experience for the blind? Or even a nice reading experience? And no, having a text to speech thing doesn't help, it's just more bullcrap browsers have to load, and infantalizes us further since aww de poor widdle blindie can't even read the Internet! Of course, it's nice for those who don't know about built-in tools like speak screen and such, but using built-in TTS engines would surely be better than calling out to Google or whatever the crap Medium uses.


I'm just gonna toss in my two cents and say I fucking hate the endless legions of shitty, low quality "towards data science" articles that clog up any DS related google search. That alone has engendered disdain for medium.


I agree that it feels like Medium failed, but I think it's hard to say exactly why because it's hard to say exactly what Medium failed at.

Several iterations of their (often changing) business model seemed to focus around creating a high-prestige magazine (or close equivalent). And for a period of time, it seemed to be working; the Medium domain was often a sign that I was going to read something interesting and insightful, to the extent that I would be more likely to follow a link to Medium than to a domain I didn't recognise.

But launching a magazine is expensive; it requires money for high quality content, and money to pay for the editorial staff to run it. (And although I don't think Medium suffered from this especially, when that editorial staff makes editorial decisions, you run the risk of being sucket into the culture war, and the moment you deeply offend a large fraction of your audience because you censored/refused to censor Topic X, your economics suddenly get much much worse.)

And as a host of existing magazines have found out recently, there's no money in running a magazine anyhow, which I imagine explains why the quality of Medium content fell off a cliff, even as they started more and more aggressively trying to monetize things.

Adding to that, the UI was passable to start with, but actively deteriorated under their monetization efforts. At certain times, arriving at an article hosted on Medium with a small screensize could result in your browser being overwhelmingly filled with Medium UI, with little or no actual content visible.

If the content isn't reliably good, and the UX is reliably bad, what's left?

> Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?

I think there is, it's just fantastically hard. If you look around, there are a small handful of newspapers, magazines, etc. that are still suceeding, putting out content while paying the bills. So it's like asking "can my home town paper be economically viable?" On the one hand, yes, the NYT has done it, so your local paper can too! On the other hand, 99% of newspapers are disasterous failures, and your local paper probably isn't going to be the NYT.

It's worth underlining the incredible ambition of what Medium wanted to do (in most of their business models anyhow). Failure wasn't inevitable, but it wasn't surprising.

(Also, the constant pivoting probably didn't help.)


Has it ever been the go-to platform? I don't read on Medium at all, nor on Substack (which I view as basically Medium v1.1).

Monetization is why we got here.

Edit:

What Medium has is what I call the "Pornhub Paradox". Nobody (very rarely) pays for porn nowadays. Bloggers and the blogosphere has established that no one pays for blogs. YouTube suffers from their own success. Nobody wants to pay for YT videos, they tried to monetize it behind a paywall and it failed (multiple times).

You'd think that having all this content is just a surefire way to pull in money. But nobody wants to pay for porn - so pornhub puts them up for free.


My main gripe is that the quality really has gone down. I see many people posting on stuff that just isn't worth blogging about.

For example: https://tirthyakamaldasgupta12.medium.com/visualize-the-flow...

How is this important?

It's going the same way as the StackOverflow answers, which, like Quora, are being posts about self-promotion and filled with 'if this answer is correct please don't forget to mark it as such'.


that actually had the seeds of a really good blog post in there - "you may not know about this, but there's a really cool tool called mermaid that can help you embed diagrams in your markdown files. if you don't see why that's so cool, here are some examples of readme.md files where a mermaid diagram really adds a lot of value". instead it decided to take a turn into a mermaid tutorial, which (a) already exists and (b) if the author wanted to write a better one this was not the venue or format for it. but really it was a failure of execution; the "here is something you might not have even realised was possible or desirable" bit is genuinely valuable.


Ah Medium. Ignoring the technical and business issues caused by ever heavier pages, unavoidable paywalls, etc, the main reason it failed was simple:

Because it attracted an audience that didn't care for quality, and saw blogging as a 'get rich quick' scheme.

And that's something that tends to happen whenever a service provides a way to 'monetise' user created content without any sort of quality filter. The people who write/make content about things they care about get flooded out by folks jumping on the bandwagon and trying to get to make easy money.

Hence all the vapid lifestyle garbage and beginner tutorials for basic tech topics and political rants and whatever else. The folks writing them didn't have anything meaningful to say, but wanted to become full time bloggers making money on the internet.

You can see this in a lot of fields in general too. Amazon lowered the requirements for selling there, so it became flooded with dropshippers and questionable companies selling dubious or counterfeit products. YouTube allows you to make money from your work, so in addition to all the great creators, you see a lot of scammers, thieves and people trying to make a quick buck from controversy content.

See also Steam (with lots of asset flips and questionably done games), the iOS and Android app stores and (in real life) Airbnb.

As for why Medium failed when the others didn't on a finacial level/popularity level?

Because unfortunately, it's really hard to get people to pay for text based content, and (fortunately) equally hard to get authors to stick with your platform when it goes to crap.

YouTube sticks around because it's free and videos take up a lot of disc space, bandwidth, etc. The app stores and most gaming ones stick around because it's often the only way for users of those products to play your games/use your apps, at least without a decent amount of technical knowledge and jailbreaking. Amazon has a kick ass logistics network and brand recognition on par with Google or Facebook (and running your own online shop is more finicky/expensive than hosting blog posts).

What exactly does Medium have?

Not much, hence all the folks who genuinely care about what writing can (and did) go elsewhere, whereas the folks who want easy money still cling to it like a lottery ticket that might potentially work out in some universe or another.


Lots of things, but mostly misaligned incentives.

On medium you’re a commodity as a writer and you have to drive traffic for ads. Your brand is devalued in favor of the “medium” brand and medium’s interests only loosely align with yours (mostly they conflict).

With Substack you retain your audience’s emails and Substack is fully aligned with helping you grow that audience and convert to paid. Everything they build is about that. It’s a much better model.

This is the core of it imo. The general crappiness of the medium site is extra.


Well once I saw that majority of my feed was becoming either affilate spam disguised as blog posts, reposts with slight paraphrasing from popular "Top 10" lists, or AI generated posts - I started doing the same.

Currently running an automated Medium blog which generates nonsense articles from topics scraped from YouTube trending, make roughly $300 per week.


Here's my take, from January 2017.

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/we-need-mediums-editor-not-m...

Basically, the incentives are misaligned, which will inevitably make it worse for writers as time goes on.


I drifted away from Medium five years ago when I built by own site with interactive features Medium lacked. But I still continued publishing non-interactive pieces there. However, last March, when Facebook and Twitter started hunting down russian bots, Medium became the last safe haven for them. I blocked quite a few but eventually gave up and deleted the account along with a few dozen posts.


Walled gardens suck. Once we had “the blogosphere” and it was great, and then Medium came along and did their best to ruin it. I tend to avoid any post on Medium and will never give them a dime. And as the OP points out, there’s tons of mediocre content there anyway. It’s almost always possible to find better content elsewhere, just needs a bit more search tweaking.


It's the result of investment capital. They demand growth and this is more important than long term sustainability.

Some of us were around when people abandoned their blogs and moved to Medium and we predicted this back then. We predict this with substack too.

It's inevitable for all of these startup social sites.

The way these sites should now be used are as temporary and try to move your audience every few years.


Everything On Medium.com Looks Like An Ad

I'm surprised it's taken this long for more people to realise this. I don't care about reading techbros' opinions on everything when most of the time it boils down to them doing shameless self-promotion.

While I'm on this topic, Quora is pretty bad too. I hope no explanation is necessary.


I'm surprised that Medium hasn't tried to capitalize on exiles from Twitter.

I can understand not wanting to go through the effort of hosting your own blog, but why don't more people use Blogger? Is Blogger's problem that it allows too much customization (e.g. MySpace v. Facebook situation)?


The real reason is that on Medium you don't own your audience. You do on Substack because you have their email addresses. You also have more ways of monetizing and can more easily communicate with readers by spending promotional emails. And of course all the content goes out by email which is great.


One factor is that I think Medium, at one point, lent a certain gravitas (in the minds of some) to people publishing there. It was more like a magazine article or a book than a personal blog. I'd cross-post there if my company wanted to link to content I had written independently.

Was never true of course.

At some point, I stopped bothering.


Management by metrics is what leads companies astray. [1]

Right now it’s happening on Twitter and the process has just started on Substack.

[1] https://jakobgreenfeld.com/metrics


It got stuffed full of low quality content, much of which felt like assignments from developer boot-camp students... and then the paywall arrived.

So paying (or registering) for access to view content which was likely to be fluff wasn't attractive.

There was definitely some valuable content on Medium, but it was lost in a sea of noise.


i only see posts from freecodecamp and other organizations now, it sucks. medium back in the day had some great posts.


I used to go to Medium because of the high quality articles on tech and programming on how to do things. Now it's just low quality SEO/self-promotion garbage. I've since long stopped using it and can very easily see using something like ChatGPT to answer my questions.


It was nice at first but as usual it had to satisfy the shareholders/VC profit margin and for something as mundane as a blog platform, this means annoying the users at unacceptable levels. So the readers fled, and so did now the content creators.

Lets see how long Substack will take to wither away…


What's the point of setting up a blog on medium rather then setting up a WordPress website in minutes?

Or course in short term you win with Medium and similar platforms, but long term you lose, moreover bearing risks of platform-locking


One thing medium did well was SEO. Medium articles were/are often top 1-5 links in Google search. This was a win but it turned into a loss because of the many issues mentioned in other comments on this thread.


Question related to this: Is there a tool out there that let's you spin a Medium-like text editor for your personal site? Curious to hear about HN's recommendation about whether a tool like this exists or if someone has considered building one.


Something like CKEditor[1]?

[1]: https://ckeditor.com/


I have a love and hate relationship with Medium.com. On one hand has a very nice design and it was is really nice and comfortable to read. On the other hand limiting the amount of reads per month while putting that stupid popup to read is absolutely dumb.


Speaking about the technical content: it seemed to max out at intermediate-level content, at best. And then trended downward down towards beginner-level content after writers started racing to get paid.


They log shit ton of user data as well (visitors and creators). My advise is to use a private frontend like scribe[0].

0. https://scribe.rip


Medium doesn't allow you to keep people who like your work invested.


Because adblockers have made selling "free" content to astute, tech-literate people extremely difficut, and in 2023 micropayment/subscription models are still hopelessly bad.


Adblockers only caught on because the internet ad industry is incredibly abusive.


Seat belts only caught on because driving is incredibly dangerous.


What you write becomes a very big word document with all the staff editing the same document. That is why authors leave the platform and keep their precious texts in office apps.


It prompts me to login before I can read an article, which I solve by pressing back and not reading that content. In my mind it’s garbage indistinguishable from Quora at this point.


Free Digital Media "Platforms" are unprofitable

Look what happened to:

1. Gawker

2. The Awl and The Hairpin

2. PolicyMic

3. Vice subsidiaries like Refinery29

It's funny, all these places tried to reinvent the tech stack too. I remember Medium being a clojure shop


Can't Medium generate revenue through ads? They have the network effects so they should be able to place ads on the website to keep it running like the other social platforms do. They could even split the ad revenue with writers.

Just ideas.


If they would add ads, writers would ask for a revenue, too. If they'd do that, they would ask for a fair share, considering their amount of contribution. Means: how many articles they write. And with that you are back to the status quo. Dropping "get rich fast posts" and soul-less "top x lists".


The current economics of ads on the internet are such at "just add ads" is no longer viable alone like it was a decade ago.

That's why nearly every content creator that normally relies on ads has additional revenue sources. (Patreon/Sponsorships)


For me medium posts are boring

I mean they all look the same (visually)


Yeah there isn't much variety. There would have to be some way to make the app "pop" more so that it gives it life. What would you recommened?


The push for growth killed everything good about it.


Substack did recommend stuff to me, based on who I'm already subscribed to, but the recommendations were not great.


Too many fake "experts" just regurgitating each others posts re: software how-to articles.


Medium failed because "words on the internet" isn't a business model. People are writing to be seen, not to advertise for Medium.com. Over time, that means Medium becomes a halfway house for the "published on Inc.com / Entrepreneur.com" army of freelance content writers in between jobs.

For Medium to make money, it will always come down to pumping "user growth" and advertising to help the site owners sell it off to some bloated media conglomerate like Conde Nast.

BTW, all the issues with Medium.com that you've described are things I am already seeing on Substack.

- Lots of interesting writers gathering at the latest "for writers" venue

- Everybody remarking how different the clean interface is compared to the ugly popup-bar filled mess that they came from

- Some achieve overnight success, pulling other writers into the platform

- Platform starts running out of VC funding runway and starts tweaking the site to deliver more 'conversions'. Instead of a clean design, you'll now see a "sign up" popup that has to be dismissed. Writers are also encouraged to paywall early, so that great article link that you sent to your friend is no longer accessible because it's for paid subscribers only.


For me it seemed like medium posts were always a bit too self aggrandizing vs quality content.


Medium content turned more click bait because of the readership model and made it less popular


> pads locks the front door > trashes the place

Why doesn't anyone want to come here anymore?


I don't know in the big picture. Here's my personal experience, though.

I never really thought that Medium was an attractive place. It had so many annoyances about it that I didn't develop a regular habit of going there. Then, at some point, it became even worse with paywalling and other additional irritations. I rarely even follow links to Medium anymore.

The actual writing quality was OK at first, but it also plummeted.


interesting. i wish there was a social blogging platform that had interesting posts to learn about things, and a way to compensate writers without ruining the whole experience.


I decided to run my startup's blog on Medium for two primary reasons:

1) Having someone else already put in the work to get a clean, readable design is a big win

2) The chief reason for blogging is to make people aware of the company. A self-hosted blog isn't realistically going to have the reach or discoverability of a dedicated service

But over time it's just got worse and worse.

1) The redesign is just weird. When it first hit I thought the logo image had failed to download properly. But turns out that's deliberate.

2) Dark patterns for subscriber-only content. It's really unclear when publishing whether the article is going to be hit by the paywall

3) Having login tied to Twitter is a business risk. I don't want to wake up one day to find space karen has broken signin and I can no longer access my company's blog

There's definitely room in the market for someone to come along and do blogging+discoverability better. Unfortunately I don't see Medium as having the chops to be that answer.


Too focus on monetizing. Just not worth the all the hassle to be there.


Same thing that happened to reddit and digg etc, the keep trying to improve a finished product and with each revision the site becomes more bloated, difficult to use, and riddle with nasty things like paywalls and fullscreen ads in a pathetic attempt to generate revenue.


It's a bad market. It's really that simple.


Because writers have to write for the lowest denominator.

edit: spelling


no -- in previous eras, the brand name of the publication built expectation from the readers. If you want long form, high brow content then you look for it; if you are browsing for entertainment and not an intellectual, then ad-filled publications are pushed at you.. lots in between with topic-focused publications. The magazine rack of 1984 has not been replaced and readers are suffering for it... IMO


It committed suicide at the altar of ad revenue.


their payment model is really strange

(I looked into this a while ago, may have changed)

I think you get paid in some inscrutable formula of '% of subscription revenue when someone reads your post and then subscribes'

like based on some cursed attribution model

it also has a CMS technology that loads a visible page, then does a bunch of FOUC nonsense, probably messes with my scroll in some way -- heavy + awful presentation tech


They pay for member reading time. In other words, when a paying member reads your piece, a part of their $5 goes to you based on the number of minutes they read. Outside views give nothing. So even if your article goes viral on HN or somewhere else, if the readers aren’t subscribers you make nothing. (It ends up being something like 1-3¢/min)


I mostly see a paywall when I visit it. It's funny they've done all that effort to get me there, then once every day or so I see their paywall and leave.

I'm only talking from my perspective, but I'm bounced away from it most of the time.

I don't feel like I get that with Substack? I usually just click "no thanks" on the newsletter box, and go back and sign up if I like it. I very occasionally subscribe and pay for a substack feed I particularly like.


I stopped clicking on Medium links a looong time ago, I simply can't stand the X-views paywall. It's not worth it.

More recently I started using https://scribe.rip/ (via the Redirector browser plugin) when I absolutely want to read a Medium article, though not on Medium. Once ScribeRIP fails to work I'll just stop reading Medium articles again.


"Not to mention the stupid paywall which is infuriating."

"Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well"

Where exactly do you expect the money to come from to pay the writers well?


Slow (the code sections take a while to load), annoying (the copy and paste thing again) and paywalled. I feel dirty when I accidentally click a medium.com link. I, unfairly, devalue the devs who use the platform.


For me it's just the paywall. I pay for my local newspaper, pay for the NY Times, pay for The New Yorker, but I'm not made of money and I know of nothing at medium.com worth paying for.


> The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm reading the same posts over and over again.

Paywall, authors are indistinguishable to casual readers, not different enough from Blogspot.


Easy - they tried (more-or-less "successfully") to take the IP of every contributor and hide it behind their own paywall


Too many fR right blogs posted only to havkernews


- UI has progressively gotten more bloated

- too many articles that read like they were written by an LLM

- the service provided is easily replaceable

At least substack has a niche with conservatives. Medium, not so much


That's a strange characterization because none of my substacks are anywhere near being conservative.


It seems to have become a meme because a handful of notable conservatives made a big stink about moving from traditional media to sub stack, and liberal Twitter followed on by attempting to paint substack as the gab of publishing or something.

I agree with you, it’s far from a conservative platform. It’s more so a challenge to traditional media, which I think is threatening to the prominent news types on Twitter.


Substack having a notable conservative presense doesn't imply that all or even most are conservative


Funny, I subscribe to three Substacks, and they're all left wing, in one case being written by an avowed Marxist.

Tell me more about this niche?


Sample size is 3, sampling isn't random :)


good points


My view on it: 1. Paywall 2. Algorithm rewarded hyperbolic / echo chamber posts 3. Changing content consumption tastes


(1) Paywalls.

(2) Fucked up the "Editors" or content aggregators.

The CEO won't admit the first one tho.


When Medium instituted their paywall they enshittified the user experience.


100%. That was the worst mistake Medium made.


PAYWALL_NOT_GOOD


Censorship


Why does that happen? Why can't Medium allow writers to publish whatever they want without being worried of censorship?




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