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

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

#361

Post by doctor_eval »

fragmede wrote: post #306
doctor_eval wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#362

Post by chirau »

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…

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.

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

#363

Post by GrooveSAN »

jrumbut wrote: post #330
raincole wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stretc…

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.

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

#364

Post by klabb3 »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #326
klabb3 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#365

Post by w10-1 »

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 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?

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

#366

Post by deafpolygon »

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.

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

#367

Post by deafpolygon »

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…

Look at how feedly does it.

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

#368

Post by RScholar »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #234
wkat4242 wrote: post #177

Earlier 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.

Trakt.tv

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

#369

Post by user_named »

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.

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

#370

Post by charlie0 »

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.
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