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

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

#21

Post by topynate »

slymerson wrote: post #13
paulpauper wrote: post #2

It did not fail. Medium blogs still generate a lot of traffic. I think rather it got superseded by Substack. Substack has a few benefits over medium, such as being less inclined to censor and writers having more control over payouts and subscribers.

Why is it less inclined to censor? Also, true. They do have more control over their payouts.

The proximate cause is that Substack was founded by people less likely to censor, who have so far kept control of the company. It may be more meaningful to say that Substack was founded in 2017, and Medium was founded in 2012, and the sort of censorship we're talking about was much more salient in 2017 than in 2012, so Substack was in some sense selected to be more against that sort of censorship.

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

#22

Post by awinter-py »

their payment model is really strange

(I looked into this a while ago, may have changed)

I think you get paid in some inscrutable formula of '% of subscription revenue when someone reads your post and then subscribes'

like based on some cursed attribution model

it also has a CMS technology that loads a visible page, then does a bunch of FOUC nonsense, probably messes with my scroll in some way -- heavy + awful presentation tech

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

#24

Post by JohnFen »

I don't know in the big picture. Here's my personal experience, though.

I never really thought that Medium was an attractive place. It had so many annoyances about it that I didn't develop a regular habit of going there. Then, at some point, it became even worse with paywalling and other additional irritations. I rarely even follow links to Medium anymore.

The actual writing quality was OK at first, but it also plummeted.

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

#25

Post by zem »

cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification":

8Here 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 combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

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

#26

Post by y42 »

slymerson wrote: post #16
pastor_bob wrote: post #5

Free Digital Media "Platforms" are unprofitable Look what happened to: 1. Gawker 2. The Awl and The Hairpin 2. PolicyMic 3. Vice subsidiaries like Refinery29 It's funny, all these places tried to reinvent the tech stack too. I remember Medium being a clojure shop

Can't Medium generate revenue through ads? They have the network effects so they should be able to place ads on the website to keep it running like the other social platforms do. They could even split the ad revenue with writers. Just ideas.

If they would add ads, writers would ask for a revenue, too. If they'd do that, they would ask for a fair share, considering their amount of contribution. Means: how many articles they write. And with that you are back to the status quo. Dropping "get rich fast posts" and soul-less "top x lists".

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

#28

Post by slymerson »

jyriand wrote: post #18

When medium decided that, as a writer, you need to have at least 100 followers to be able to get paid, the rules of the game changed. All I saw was articles about how to get your first 100 followers and how somebody made lots of money writing on medium. Clickbait titles, follow-back culture.

Good points

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

#30

Post by JohnFen »

slymerson wrote: post #9
minimaxir wrote: post #4

Two main reasons, IMO: 1. At a point, Medium stopped adding value to blog posts and their network, to the point that they had to strongarm some of the larger networks to try and stay on their platform (e.g. FreeCodeCamp) and failed. Currently, Medium's best value proposition is long-tail SEO which just encourages more low-quality content. 2. In general, the long-form content landscape has shifted more toward short-fo…

Long form content will become more niche, at least when it comes to text. I prefer long form reading content over short form content so it's nice having platforms like Substack and Medium, but IMO there needs to be something better. I would love a new social blogging platform that actually does well at showing you content you'd enjoy AND that ensures the posts are quality. Easier said than done I imagine.

This made me sad. Long form content is the content I get the most value from. Short-form is largely pointless.
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