Too many fake "experts" just regurgitating each others posts re: software how-to articles.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
281–290 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Inv…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#283I'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…
Do you think the name held the site back from becoming any bigger?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I still use site:reddit.com for recommendations, I just use a third party app for viewing (rif is fun, aka "reddit is fun").
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#286I'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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#287Lots 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 in…
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?
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.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#289I'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…
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”
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
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.
I don't know if this fits what you were thinking of but I love rateyourmusic.com. Great community, great content, simple website.