Oh wow, I thought it was just me. I used to like Medium several years ago, then due to my work stopped using it, and in the last few months tried to pick it up again. I often found interesting articles, but then every time I wasn’t able to read it because I had to pay. And the issue wasn’t so much paying for it, it was more the way it was presented. I basically got hooked by the title and summary, but then somehow I couldn’t even read the first paragraph of the article... I had to pay to continue reading. This gave me such a bad sentiment that I lost my appetite for the article. If the paying part had been presented or integrated somehow differently, things could have been different I feel.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
231–240 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#232I'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 used medium a lot to read Rust articles back in 2020 when Rust's community was smaller and not much of resources available, except of raw code in github. It worked wonderful for my purposes, and the recommendation algorithm worked very well. For six months i would read 5 articles everyday of Rust articles the algorithm sent me. Then after 6 whole months of reading the recommendations the algorithm stopped sending me Rust articles, or repeating ones i had already read. Well i had finished the whole website at that point!
Medium is a good website in opinion for articles about programming, hardware, gadgets etc. Most of the articles are not that great, but they are not bad either. The algorithm works well.
The paywall is necessary for now, but soon a better solution will become popular for paying on the internet. The pay as you go model will become easier and cheaper. Maybe a solution of reading the article and afterwards clicking like/clap transferring a small amount of money, like 0.1 cent will become a viable solution for writers and the service.
That said, i write my articles on lichess. It has the best website design i have ever seen, and it is fast as hell.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#233I'm just gonna toss in my two cents and say I fucking hate the endless legions of shitty, low quality "towards data science" articles that clog up any DS related google search. That alone has engendered disdain for medium.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#234I'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…
Are there other platforms you'd be willing to name that you see as being grassroots "for users by users"? I may want to look into some of them.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The New York Times's paywall is more than a decade old at this point.
Then something changed recently then as I personally never noticed an annoyance on nytimes til recent years after where it seemed any article required paywall. In addition, there is one important thing that is not being paywalled (yet), the 'news' value of nytimes is still accessible via the headline + summary on the front page. The moment the guys chasing a buck remove that is the day nytimes dies.
The NYT paywall has gotten far more aggressive in recent years.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a huge difference between the NYTimes and Medium. For readers, the content on Medium is fungible: if it goes away today, it's easily replaceable by the 100 other user driven sites like it. I'm not saying that the content on Medium is bad, but it's easily replaceable. The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscripti…
The best of Medium is better than the best of the NYTimes and isn’t fungible at all. That’s not refuting what you see. To get those gems you see too many me too articles. You are right.
That’s going too far. The NYTimes is playing a different game in a different league and a comparison is not apt.
I have read really interesting material on Medium and it’s just not enough to make me want to pay to read _any_ content on Medium. I might pay to remove ads like I do on YouTube but only after developing a habit that is triggered by content I care enough about and visit often enough for the ads experience to detract from it.
In my experience Medium should have been (could still be?) a Wordpress killer and not a publishing play.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, definitely agree, and "enshittification" is a good word for something I've observed for ~25 years. Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so forth: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern of eventual failure. That pattern is: I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however. It's also true that cons…
there's also this old ribbonfarm post on "the locust economy", describing that sort of consumer behaviour: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
Great analogy! I hadn't seen that. I can definitely see that in Groupon (which seems much less popular now?)
Although I would also consider the other side of the "sharing economy" -- IMO sharing like Zipcar makes a lot of economic sense, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for incumbents there (although I guess Zipcar got bought).
Likewise with the taxi and hotel industries -- the incumbents deserve some competition / disruption.
But yeah consumers are certainly fickle
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#238I'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 was a Medium subscriber for a pretty long time. I'd seen some interesting, incisive stuff, so I subscribed. I'm happy to pay for quality. But shortly after I subscribed, the content I found was almost exclusively vapid self-promoters writing many, many words without any value about the latest buzzword they'd heard. It was so strange. The underlying tension between open, democratic platform, quality standards, and engagement is, clearly, not an easy one to resolve. I don't even claim to pretend to have an answer, but I would love to be in a position to pay for quality content on an open(ish) platform again someday.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Are there other platforms you'd be willing to name that you see as being grassroots "for users by users"? I may want to look into some of them.
Patreon still has some of this feel somehow - it feels more connected when I support someone
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#240I 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 subscriptio…
Seems to me that a certain cost should be impressed against the publishers of the content as well, to help prevent that content mill of garbage as well as offset the potential costs to regular readers.