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

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

#121

Post by hexage1814 »

This whole thing reminds me of this comment when Tumblr "died":

"I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point."

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

#122

Post by tonystubblebine »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #114

I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving something and being willing to pay for it are very different. The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a little money here and there, or otherwise find…

I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about right. Every startup needs to choose a business model eventually and we botched the rollout of ours.

The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's congruent with anything else we were doing.

Most notably, the subscription implies that we have some premium content to share. But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles. Of course, that's not what we set out to do. But it's effectively what happened. I'm partly through reversing it.

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

#123

Post by urbandw311er »

ptudan wrote: post #74
y42 wrote: post #10

Any "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?

To be fair, YouTube does have a serious problem with millions of dud, autogenerated content videos trying to game the algorithm to generate ad cash.

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

#124

Post by tonystubblebine »

gwbas1c wrote: post #115

I remember seeing a few medium posts on Hacker News a few years ago. They all had good tone management; but when read with a critical eye, they were factually incorrect or had poor comprehension of the subject matter. It got the point where, if I saw "medium.com" next to a link I'd think, "oh, that's a medium post" and not open it. If I accidentally opened a Medium post, I'd close it immediately without reading it. "…

You aren't alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

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

#125

Post by tonystubblebine »

paxys wrote: post #79
nostromo wrote: post #35

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.…

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.

Never had a valuation that high.

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

#126

Post by HWR_14 »

newaccount74 wrote: post #65
zem wrote: post #58

Earlier 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 don't think Kickstarter "doesn't care", they just don't care enough to proactively find out. Indiegogo will keep outright scams up. Kickstarter says "eh, someone will flag it if it is a scam"

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

#127

Post by patrick451 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #115

I remember seeing a few medium posts on Hacker News a few years ago. They all had good tone management; but when read with a critical eye, they were factually incorrect or had poor comprehension of the subject matter. It got the point where, if I saw "medium.com" next to a link I'd think, "oh, that's a medium post" and not open it. If I accidentally opened a Medium post, I'd close it immediately without reading it. "…

I agree that "medium.com" is a stamp of mediocrity, and I tend to have the same kneejerk reaction to never read something posted there.

However, I'm not sure I agree about the good tone management. There's always been something about medium and most of the articles there that is sort of cringe. It feels kind of like linkedin, where everything is superficial self-promotion, everybody is "thrilled" (a word only used in linkedin posts when you change jobs), and there's too many exclamation points everywhere. None if it feels raw or authentic.

Part of this ties into the low technical quality you mention: after reading the n-th generic, un-insightful description of a Kalman filter on medium, you get the sense that grad students are only posting this stuff to build a following, i.e., for the clout.

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

#128

Post by izacus »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #116
JohnFen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big part of it is that users/readers understandably feel that a bait-and-switch has happened. Because it has. I really think the whole idea of "make it free at first, monetize later" is what's broken. If the intention is ultimately to have it generate revenue, the best thing to do is set up the revenue mechanism right from the start.

Well, they can start free, get 1M users, and then try to monetize. Or they can charge up front, get zero users, and then find something else to do with their time.

Or you know... bootstrap a non-predatory sustainable business. If anyone even knows how to do that in 2020s.

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

#129

Post by tonystubblebine »

idlewords wrote: post #43

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…

How's the new management doing?

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

#130

Post by teach »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #114

I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving something and being willing to pay for it are very different. The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a little money here and there, or otherwise find…

Edit: this is such a good take that it's posted as a top-level comment slightly further down! That's what I get for not reading more responses before commenting.

Original:

"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."

from TikTok's Enshittification[0] by Cory Doctorow

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

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