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

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

#251

Post by AlbertCory »

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 writing this, Tony. I had a couple articles on Medium, and now I have a lot more on Substack, even though they're free.

Let me recommend Ted Gioia as someone to listen to. I actually pay for his newsletter, while there are hardly any others I'd pay for. From what I can see, if you are good on Substack, you'll make a lot of money. That does mean writing about something other than your current life and/or romantic involvements, which are, I'm sorry to say, boring. An awful lot of the Substack writers are doing that, too.

Maybe they do have some far left-wing writers, too, but Medium is just loaded with them.

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

#252

Post by wkat4242 »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #234
wkat4242 wrote: post #177

Earlier 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.

You're on one right now. If that wasn't clear from my post.

Also, Reddit still manages ok on this front IMO. The only reason I stopped paying was that they doubled the price when they moved away from gold to whatever it is they call now.

Another one is tweakers.net in Holland.

Boards.ie in Ireland though I left that country years ago and I don't know how that site is fairing now.

Those are the main ones I can think of right now.

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

#253

Post by danbmil99 »

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 someone who has spent time in the C-Suite, I applaud your courage in publicly addressing criticisms head-on. I just hope you are not fighting a losing battle against low employee morale, frustrated writers and angry, impulsive investors. I have a friend who got some traction on Medium, but if I want to write for myself I would choose Substack in a New York minute.

Best of luck!

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

#254

Post by bombcar »

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?

I find there are two types of writers - ones who are working on a massive tome or tomes of perfection (often in their are of expertise) and those who are writing about a ton of different things.

The second definitely improves with consistent output. I assume the first does too, but they often are continually revising their “masterpiece” so it can be harder to see

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

#255

Post by Nifty3929 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #122
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 subscriptio…

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

>>The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us.

You're touching on an Option C or perhaps option B2 here, where the supply and demand curves intersect, but much farther to the left than the current user base. Meaning there ARE enough users who are willing to pay you enough to keep going - but it's many fewer than you currently have. So you settle into a much smaller, but sustainable business. Not necessarily a bad outcome!

Question for you: Suppose that users can pay you $X (say, 5 cents) per article they read, but you are not allowed to know who they are or anything about them, they don't login at all, and you can't show them any ads. That is, it's a "pure" transaction similar to anonymously purchasing a hamburger. Is there some value of X high enough for this to be worthwhile for you? Do you think enough of your users would go for this to make it work?

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

#256

Post by layer8 »

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.

I don’t think this will work out for a site that’s based on user-generated content. What would work is require payment for power-user features. But not for content.

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

#257

Post by Nifty3929 »

bachmeier wrote: post #184
tonystubblebine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort in…

Instead of a subscription, would you pay per article? Like maybe 5 cents or 25 cents or something? Assume it's frictionless. No account with the site, no login, etc. You read the article and magically X cents is removed from your bank account. Would you do it?

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

#259

Post by bombcar »

robswc wrote: post #81
slymerson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form content. Everything points towards short form content being the biggest thing while long form content and text content becomes niche.

This sounds like terribly "old-fashioned" thinking... at the same time, not everything new is good. I'm afraid you're right though. Seems short form is destroying attention spans across the board. I even notice it in myself.

Short form wins on ads is the main reason.

If you read one long article you may see three ads.

But each short article could have the same three ads, multiplied by however many short articles you read.

Long term I think the future is going to be more along the line of direct patronage - if I want to write I can say that at $Xk a month from supporters I’ll quit my day job and just make content for everyone.

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

#260

Post by anenefan »

Still running - is not a greatest way to describe a business who's business plan relies on engaging a large audience.

I don't as practice use an ad blocker just to be polite to the sites I do visit and used to visit medium pages up until two or three years ago for light fluffy insights and I used to groan a little with the high ad load but not the point I wouldn't visit -- as there wasn't any really silly stuff like including a near 100 meg vidio payload with the hundred words I wanted to read. (I'll just say I don't visit Ars any more ... ever.)

At some point two or three years ago I believe I blocked a scraping API site ... I'm unsure what sites used the various apis, but around the same time medium thought it'd be cool to deal out some punishment, load the page and ads and barely two seconds after it finally loaded it was blanked. Yeah I guess I could have wrote a script that detected when it had loaded and taken a snapshot ... but for me it's easier to just ignore the entire site and surf elsewhere.

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