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

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

#481

Post by bee_rider »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #168
bee_rider wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

#482

Post by rsync »

wkat4242 wrote: post #453
whiplash451 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abus…

"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.

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

#483

Post by illumin8 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #177
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 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…

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.

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

#484

Post by twic »

inerte wrote: post #295
thepasswordis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Medium is the Pinterest of text.

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

#485

Post by ploum »

rchaud wrote: post #475
JeremyNT wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I already do.

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

#486

Post by XajniN »

thepasswordis wrote: post #271
wkat4242 wrote: post #252

Earlier 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.

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

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

#487

Post by ploum »

smsm42 wrote: post #374
raincole wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#488

Post by trieste92 »

Lazare wrote: post #104
trieste92 wrote: post #20

- 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

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 :)

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

#489

Post by fsckboy »

rchaud wrote: post #477
yellowapple wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#490

Post by pornel »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #29

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.

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