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

The enshittification cycle has always been here, but progress continues. It just feels like things are getting worse as the programs we grew up on enter the shit-zone part of their lifecycle.

> Substack isn't a technology platform - it's a business model. They paid a bunch of well known writers a bunch of money to come to their platform and it paid off. I think they have wisely bet that there is no shortage of content on the internet, and focusing on curation is more important than access.

I would say Substack is both a technology platform and a business model, but I think the point you're making is the technology platform is very simple and easy to replicate, so not the focus of their success or lack of it? Which I'd agree with.

What I would not agree with is that Substacks business model has anything to do with curation. I do subscribe to a couple of writers on Substack, but my decision to subscribe to each was independent of the fact that the other one was on Substack, or who else was on Substack. The Substack brand isn't reader facing at all.

And in fact, Substack doesn't actually do curation. Anyone can sign up, and when they were signing their advance deals, they were fairly clearly offering them to anyone who their models predicted would bring in enough subscribers to bring a profit. Which in turn later harmed them, as people imputed some sort of editorial opinion to the deals.

In short, I'd say their suceeding so far because of their business model. but the business model is that there's a lot of content out there that people are willing to pay for, so they'll offer a technology platform with zero curation that lets people pay for content.

Competition doesn't generally apply because these are usually venture-backed companies in the first few stages. The point is to prevent competition in the third stage by using the first two stages to lock in both sides of the market.

Ah Medium. Ignoring the technical and business issues caused by ever heavier pages, unavoidable paywalls, etc, the main reason it failed was simple:

Because it attracted an audience that didn't care for quality, and saw blogging as a 'get rich quick' scheme.

And that's something that tends to happen whenever a service provides a way to 'monetise' user created content without any sort of quality filter. The people who write/make content about things they care about get flooded out by folks jumping on the bandwagon and trying to get to make easy money.

Hence all the vapid lifestyle garbage and beginner tutorials for basic tech topics and political rants and whatever else. The folks writing them didn't have anything meaningful to say, but wanted to become full time bloggers making money on the internet.

You can see this in a lot of fields in general too. Amazon lowered the requirements for selling there, so it became flooded with dropshippers and questionable companies selling dubious or counterfeit products. YouTube allows you to make money from your work, so in addition to all the great creators, you see a lot of scammers, thieves and people trying to make a quick buck from controversy content.

See also Steam (with lots of asset flips and questionably done games), the iOS and Android app stores and (in real life) Airbnb.

As for why Medium failed when the others didn't on a finacial level/popularity level?

Because unfortunately, it's really hard to get people to pay for text based content, and (fortunately) equally hard to get authors to stick with your platform when it goes to crap.

YouTube sticks around because it's free and videos take up a lot of disc space, bandwidth, etc. The app stores and most gaming ones stick around because it's often the only way for users of those products to play your games/use your apps, at least without a decent amount of technical knowledge and jailbreaking. Amazon has a kick ass logistics network and brand recognition on par with Google or Facebook (and running your own online shop is more finicky/expensive than hosting blog posts).

What exactly does Medium have?

Not much, hence all the folks who genuinely care about what writing can (and did) go elsewhere, whereas the folks who want easy money still cling to it like a lottery ticket that might potentially work out in some universe or another.

Because users who read stuff actually want to turn on their brain, rather than turn it off like on YT. This means users can't get caught in an endless downward spiral of bad content, and are happy to look elsewhere for interesting content.