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

Also, true. They do have more control over their payouts.

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 that it would be full of intrusive crap one would have to deal with before reading. To the point that people started making [special browser extensions](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab...) just to remove them.

As a writer, whose main interest is in people reading my stuff (rather than, say, monetization), I wanted to move it somewhere where the readers would not be annoyed and maybe refuse to click on the link in the first place because of the domain.

I'm sure the above describes many others' experiences as well.

Not just that, but more and more writers are writing long-form analyses of events and topics which have been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere, long ago. Not really adding anything new.

Some of their most popular authors are legitimately regurgitating the same talking points over and over again. If you read a dozen articles from Umair Haque, you'll have read the basic talking points of every article he's likely to write.

But - it seems to work I guess. Lots of youtubers get popular the same way - by generating the same basic content over and over again, with slight changes. As long as they do so frequently, they maintain their viewers. Granted if you're a cute girl dancing, it's a lot easier to get away with than if you're writing 800 words about how America is a failed state.