31–40 of 567 posts
- 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
Because adblockers have made selling "free" content to astute, tech-literate people extremely difficut, and in 2023 micropayment/subscription models are still hopelessly bad .
They went completely crap on every single aspect. See the source code of a page that call itself "minimalist". Then see their business model… (I wrote about it 6 years ago: https://ploum.net/an-open-pay-wall-has-medium-lost-its-mind/... )
A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money.
Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.
But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.
Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users left.
So paying (or registering) for access to view content which was likely to be fluff wasn't attractive.
There was definitely some valuable content on Medium, but it was lost in a sea of noise.
1) Easy to setup
2) Incredibly SEO friendly
3) Most importantly: you own your content.
Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup.
Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up for you for free → https://startablog.com/free-blog
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When Medium instituted their paywall they enshittified the user experience.
Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT in terms of blogging platforms. It's 1) Easy to setup 2) Incredibly SEO friendly 3) Most importantly: you own your content. Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup. Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up f…
It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else people do with it.