Long time ago, seeing medium.com links made me think "oh nice, a clean reading experience ahead".
Soon afterwards, it switched to "oh no, not this annoying site again".
I would be surprised to see it thrive.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
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Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
hm, maybe the crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter and indiegogo? as far as I know those haven't started down the curve yet. but I would guess it's inevitable once you take vc money and are beholden to your investors to squeeze out every drop of revenue you can :( 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 c…
Kickstarter and Indiegogo have quite a few charlatans selling a tech version of snake oil, and they don't care because they get 10% (or whatever their fees are).
I am not sure how much vetting you want the platform to do? If someone says they can synthesize gasoline from air for $.02/liter, should Kickstarter shut it down? Send a guy to investigate? Where does the arbitrary this-is-probably-wrong line land?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#73Medium content turned more click bait because of the readership model and made it less popular
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#74Any "service" that offers money for content will fail eventually. Take most news portals: they fill their sites with "news" to favor search engines, to deploy ads or affiliate links. Take search engines itself: They lead to SEO which leads to "silly" and packed "WordPress" like websites whose only goal is to drop affiliate links. And so on....
Youtube? Tiktok? Twitch?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#75I 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…
Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#76My view on it:
1. Paywall
2. Algorithm rewarded hyperbolic / echo chamber posts
3. Changing content consumption tastes
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#77I 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…
https://hashnode.com/ is close to what medium used to be, I suppose. Hope it will stay like that.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#78One factor is that I think Medium, at one point, lent a certain gravitas (in the minds of some) to people publishing there. It was more like a magazine article or a book than a personal blog. I'd cross-post there if my company wanted to link to content I had written independently.
Was never true of course.
At some point, I stopped bothering.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#79It'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.…
Exactly this. Medium was great at what it did, but having raised $160M+ in funding and being valued at several billion dollars they simply could not continue to be a simply blogging platform while also making enough money to keep investors happy. And all their bets to become profitable just ended up alienating their users and writers.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#80Yup. I think a better question that everyone should be asking, is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow people to share information."