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

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

#171

Post by tonystubblebine »

raywu wrote: post #156
tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…

Thanks for sharing this. What's your current view of Substack? We've gone through many cycles of publishing platforms/trends. What catches your eyes in this space today (in general)?

Great service. It's our stagnation that created any confusion or sense of competition. Our sweet spot is completely different than theirs.

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

#173

Post by nmstoker »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…

As a subscriber I find it particularly odd that the recommendations got so bad

You can understand the kind of service which lives on ad revenue giving in to conflicts of interest leading to them recommending against the reader's interests, but there's no obvious conflict when you're a subscription service. It ends up being endless formulaic articles of the "5 packages your next project must use" ilk, with questionable grammar and a number of clichéd folksy writing habits common in certain circles.

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

#174

Post by gavinhoward »

Eduard wrote: post #100
PaulHoule wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remarkable thing about Medium was that it went downhill so quickly, or, compared to other platforms like Twitter, it started trying to make money early in the process of gathering an audience, which limited it's growth. In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2) technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog. In principle Medium took (2) a…

> Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot... How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?

Blogger here.

Quite a bit. I would say my blog has been successful, but it only happened after I had written a lot, which was about 100 posts and about 150 posts in a blog that now doesn't exist.

To be successful, your need to get an audience. To get an audience, you have to either build one over time or go viral at least once. I've done both.

To build an audience over time, you need to give them a lot to read so that they won't forget you and will keep coming back.

Going viral is a luck thing, but you sure do get better chances of going viral the more you post.

My first viral post was posted on Hacker News at a time when I thought it wouldn't go viral for sure: on Saturday night (my time). I didn't want that one to go viral, but I thought I would post it anyway to attract some readers.

Oh boy.

I woke up the next morning to a headache.

Since then, when I want to make an impact, I post during my nighttime. Turns out, posting that on a Saturday night was perfect because my most viral posts have been, with one or two exceptions.

But I wouldn't have been able to sample that enough to know if I didn't have 50-100 (tech-oriented) blog posts to try with.

So yeah, it's true.

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

#175

Post by throw009 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…

Made an account to specifically say that I'll give your service a chance again because you actually admitted fault and how to fix it.

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

#176

Post by tonystubblebine »

nmstoker wrote: post #173
tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…

As a subscriber I find it particularly odd that the recommendations got so bad You can understand the kind of service which lives on ad revenue giving in to conflicts of interest leading to them recommending against the reader's interests, but there's no obvious conflict when you're a subscription service. It ends up being endless formulaic articles of the "5 packages your next project must use" ilk, with questionabl…

Exactly. The whole reason we chose a subscription business model was so that we could focus on quality over clicks. I hope you are seeing some improvements. A lot more soon.

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

#177

Post by wkat4242 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #119

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222 It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it: 1. Lost our way on recommen…

I think these are not the main pain points.

The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.

Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.

The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.

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

#178

Post by mulmen »

Centralization is always destined to failure because growth requires catering to an ever lower common denominator. When services are new they are exclusive and content quality is high, if narrow. As they scale their standards drop, it is a mathematical certainty.

This is the fundamental mistake of Web 2.0. It's impossible to be everything to everyone.

In other words content moderation is a feature and if you can't do it while keeping your audience happy you are too big.

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

#179

Post by qudat »

dark__paladin wrote: post #44
michaelhoffman wrote: post #15

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?

I moved to Hugo and then built prose.sh

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

#180

Post by wkat4242 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #169
zepolen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one reason medium went down the hole and it's because it annoyed the fuck out of users by demanding sign up (and subscription) just to read content OTHERS had created on the platform. What the hell did they expect would happen? Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense. It has nothing to do with 1 and 2.…

The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.

They're not very successful are they? I mean it's a famous paper but are they really succeeding at monetizing their site this way?

I often get linked to a NYT article but as I don't even live in the US I'd never be tempted to pay for it. If I couldn't just use a paywall blocker or archive.is I'd just ignore them altogether. I kinda doubt they get many subscribers from outside their native area (US as they have a bigger reach than just new York)

I think the guardian does this a lot better, they don't paywall but ask for a contribution even if you don't subscribe. I've actually contributed a few times there.

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