51–60 of 567 posts
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here 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…
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.
That's why nearly every content creator that normally relies on ads has additional revenue sources. (Patreon/Sponsorships)
It's a common story. 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.…
The short answer is that the founder is an introverted guy who sort of weathervanes around when it comes to his vision for the product, he had enough prior success to get lots of funding for his project, and there was no one with enough authority to say "no" to his shifting ideas or replace him with a more effective boss. You see this pattern a lot with successful people. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a brilliant guy, but…
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here 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…
- 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
That's a strange characterization because none of my substacks are anywhere near being conservative.
I agree with you, it’s far from a conservative platform. It’s more so a challenge to traditional media, which I think is threatening to the prominent news types on Twitter.
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here 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…
Are there examples of sites/platforms that are doing it "right"? (however you interpret 'right' to be, I guess). Ones that have been around for a while and haven't enshittified?
it would require a really strong mission statement baked into the company to say "we are here to provide value to our users and everything else has to come second to that". if nothing else you eventually get acquired, e.g. tumblr, and everything goes to hell then.
cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here 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…
Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so forth:
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern of eventual failure. That pattern is:
I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however. It's also true that consumers have predictable behavior patterns -- they want free stuff, and they will stick around to get that, and then move to the next thing.
On the other hand, we want free stuff because we don't want to sign up for subscriptions, and companies are always making that annoying -- betting on us forgetting to cancel, making it hard to cancel, tacking on hidden fees (banks do a lot of this), etc.
I wish that money could just be exchanged for goods and services, as Homer Simpson once noted ...
I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work. 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…
Where did you move to? Self hosting?