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Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#271

Post by thepasswordis »

wkat4242 wrote: post #252
Winsaucerer wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#272

Post by 1123581321 »

turnsout wrote: post #223
1123581321 wrote: post #212

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#273

Post by shusaku »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #114

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…

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...

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#274

Post by Waterluvian »

sammnaser wrote: post #208
tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

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 recommen…

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 h…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#275

Post by lmm »

xnx wrote: post #63
zem wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#276

Post by lmm »

izacus wrote: post #128
Nifty3929 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#277

Post by nnurmanov »

danbmil99 wrote: post #253
tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

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 recommen…

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

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#278

Post by j_crick »

easygenes wrote: post #265
j_crick wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#279

Post by tonystubblebine »

mychael wrote: post #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 runn…

Sounds like you worked there and had a bad experience. Sorry to hear that. It’s somewhat different now.

Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?

#280

Post by simonsarris »

jklm wrote: post #75
michaelhoffman wrote: post #15

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…

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.

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