Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slashdot?
lol
Freshmeat?
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
241–250 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#242I'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 recommen…
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 contro…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#243- 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#245I'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 recommen…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 charg…
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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#248I 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…
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.…
Wow that article is a great example of how long-form content really shines. Very well written.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 subscripti…
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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 thr…
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.