191–200 of 567 posts
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…
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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.
Wikipedia seems like a weird exception to this rule.
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…
A few personal observations:
1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to LinkedIN [1] (exceptions exist but are invisible). Have you considered paywall to post, even as low as $1/mo as a content quality filter?
2. There is no reason for a 16k character article to require 6.5MB of data to render. (looking at a random article from the home page [2]). I hear that Medium has an optimized writing experience, why not have an optimized reading experience too?
3. Do you wish Medium became what Substack did, and if no, what is your vision for it? Why should one use Medium as an author or as a reader?
[1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn
[2] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/be-present-aff45d6421b4
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…
First I click a couple of, let’s say, “why X is dead” links, then I start getting the message “You have Y free articles left this month”. Then I’m thinking, okay, the “X ded” articles were meh anyway, why would I even subscribe then? Somewhere in this scenario the incentive to subscribe is missing for me. Maybe there’s a world of cool articles out there, but from visiting a random article with the “you have Y articles left” popup they cannot be seen. Just my two cents!
That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you. But I hope you will! Best of luck and thank you for the interesting remarks :)
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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.
The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscription works. True there are other journalism sites. But there are also many actors, but only one Tom Cruise; the NYTimes is like Tom Cruise, which is why he is paid so much. Medium is more like an unknown actor that is good but there are 100 waiting to replace him.
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 u…
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It's been frustratingly slow because our recs system is sprawling. Your main feed is populated differently than the read-more section you are referencing. Plus author behavior lags incentives. We actually had a clickbait about MILFs on a programming story the other day so it's worse than you are reporting. Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when…
You're almost certainly right, of course, and it's interesting how medium fell into the same cycle of amplifying junk. Netflix is another case study here of something where the incentives weren't as obvious as with advertising funded content but still fell into line. But mainly I came here to note the irony of this frank, honest and useful discussion taking place under an "X is dead" headline of its own.
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That implies that NYTimes is thriving after their inclusion of paywall. It's not. It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch. There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.
The NYTimes digital subscription is doing north of $800M/year. That’s successful in my book.
It won't happen over night, of course there will be a temporary boost in revenue when one decides to force everyone that visits the site to pay.
How much of that is from existing NYTimes subscribers, marketing tactics (eg. wordle), shady subscription offer deals, forgotten subscriptions, and lack of suitable competition.
Over time though that withers and once that withering starts, nothing brings it back.
See you in a few years.
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Substack has no paywalls, and Medium does. Makes sense why they took over.
Substack is literally a paywall as a service platform for indie writers.
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…
The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.
In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!