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

There’s no competition for Wikipedia yet. As soon as search is killed by AI and AI starts providing answers of similar quality without driving traffic to sources, Wikipedia will either completely fade to irrelevance or will be quasi-acquired by AI providers, which will see it as a training ground for AI and fund it on such terms that allow this use case.

I agree that it feels like Medium failed, but I think it's hard to say exactly why because it's hard to say exactly what Medium failed at.

Several iterations of their (often changing) business model seemed to focus around creating a high-prestige magazine (or close equivalent). And for a period of time, it seemed to be working; the Medium domain was often a sign that I was going to read something interesting and insightful, to the extent that I would be more likely to follow a link to Medium than to a domain I didn't recognise.

But launching a magazine is expensive; it requires money for high quality content, and money to pay for the editorial staff to run it. (And although I don't think Medium suffered from this especially, when that editorial staff makes editorial decisions, you run the risk of being sucket into the culture war, and the moment you deeply offend a large fraction of your audience because you censored/refused to censor Topic X, your economics suddenly get much much worse.)

And as a host of existing magazines have found out recently, there's no money in running a magazine anyhow, which I imagine explains why the quality of Medium content fell off a cliff, even as they started more and more aggressively trying to monetize things.

Adding to that, the UI was passable to start with, but actively deteriorated under their monetization efforts. At certain times, arriving at an article hosted on Medium with a small screensize could result in your browser being overwhelmingly filled with Medium UI, with little or no actual content visible.

If the content isn't reliably good, and the UX is reliably bad, what's left?

> Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?

I think there is, it's just fantastically hard. If you look around, there are a small handful of newspapers, magazines, etc. that are still suceeding, putting out content while paying the bills. So it's like asking "can my home town paper be economically viable?" On the one hand, yes, the NYT has done it, so your local paper can too! On the other hand, 99% of newspapers are disasterous failures, and your local paper probably isn't going to be the NYT.

It's worth underlining the incredible ambition of what Medium wanted to do (in most of their business models anyhow). Failure wasn't inevitable, but it wasn't surprising.

(Also, the constant pivoting probably didn't help.)

None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense

Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up are annoying though.

Some writers were attracted to Medium because it was easy get started. It was frustrating to me as a reader, because I was getting enough links there each month to hit the limit. I wished that writers would just set up their own site, which is also better for building their personal brand.

One interesting aspect of the Medium business model is that it can really deliver money for writers who get a lot of traffic. Medium effectively shares some part of the paid user subscriptions with all the sites they visit. So if you only visit one site in a month, they get all the money for that month. If that's a popular post, the writer might make a lot of money. But it depends on the subscriber not visiting many sites.

There is a theory that people will discover the writer's content just because it's on Medium, but that's certainly not how I find things. I follow links from social media or web searches.

If a writer consistently has a lot of good content, they will make more money at Substack, as they keep a larger percentage.

So the business model of users having a subscription to Medium as a destination site for discovery doesn't work particularly well. It doesn't benefit writers with consistently good content, and it doesn't benefit readers. So you end up with medium-value content that might get a windfall. It's kind of an SEO game.

Reminds me that I have hardly seen any interesting links to Medium lately, and I should cancel my subscription.