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

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

#291

Post by swyx »

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…

first of all i appreciate your willingness to own the issue, thats what i would hope any CEO would do.

my main issue as a reader (im the guy who frequently campaigns to just ban all medium.com links on HN) is the authwall that is thrown in our faces before we've had a chance to even read the article. its against the open web and not something i would encourage on HN. i understand youve changed your defaults but i still encounter these walls enough that there is just overall brand damage to Medium as a whole. mr stubblebine, please tear down that wall.

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

#292

Post by camjohnson26 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #201
vouaobrasil wrote: post #195

Earlier 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.

This is delusional, the best of Medium isn’t exclusive to Medium. The New York Times has over 150 years of reputation built on quality, and its content is available no where else. Medium has a loose collective of bloggers who can easily migrate to a different platform with no requirements on the quality of the content they produce. If you want to compare yourself to the NYT it’s not enough to have a few good articles, every article has to be held to the highest standards of trust and the vast majority must be exclusive.

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

#293

Post by anonymouskimmer »

easygenes wrote: post #265
j_crick wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a random HN visitor that clicks links to Medium from here, it’s been a while since visiting Medium has become the following experience for me. 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…

Yes, that's precisely my sentiment as well. As far as fixing it, the obvious first step is to at least be more generous with the article count... and don't show it at all until someone has seen at least 5 articles on separate days that month. Count a session clicking through a few articles on the same day as at most 2 article views (maybe have a separate limit of something like 5 articles in the same day). Don't be a…

Commenting on you and j_crick:

> That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you.

Paywall half of the article so the reader gets an idea on whether or not they want to pay to read more. This would also encourage impulse purchases.

> Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Categorize articles. There's no need to make cliched articles impossible to find for the cliche-interested reader.

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

#294

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

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 second everyone saying the paywall is the actual problem. I used to write on Medium a lot because it was a simple way to blog and share essays with a minimalist UI. Now it just feels like a clown product because you have a paywall between users and reading. I would never subject my writing to an ugly paywall and wouldn't want the experience my readers have with my content to be ugly and broken like that.

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

#295

Post by inerte »

thepasswordis wrote: post #270
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…

This is literally it. Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down. Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant? That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.

I remember a few years ago I started to realize that if I somehow see the link pointed to "medium.com" I would just... nope. Not willing to take the gamble if I can read the page or not.

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

#296

Post by inerte »

thepasswordis wrote: post #271
wkat4242 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Reddit is doing everything they can to kill it though. It's gone from habitually including site:reddit.com in every google search to actively avoiding it on mobile. I'm not going to install the app. Ever. I will never, ever, ever install reddit's app. No amount of nagging me will ever get me to install it ever.

I use https://apolloapp.io/ - heck a few weeks ago I realized I used it SO much I paid for it, not because I wanted any of its premium features, just because it has delivered so much value to me I decided to give its author some money.

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

#297

Post by binwiederhier »

wkat4242 wrote: post #177
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 u…

> 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

I cannot agree more. The brand has destroyed itself by putting everything behind a login/pay-wall. I don't even click on medium.com links anymore, regardless of how interesting the content may be. And if I accidentally click on one, I click the back button in less than a second.

I understand the desire to monetize, but this is not the way.

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

#298

Post by inerte »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #144
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense

What's wrong with GitHub spaces?

From my perspective there's nothing wrong, but most of the population that has ever even heard of Github think of it as a complex programmer's only thing.

I remember a project I did some time ago where we required Github integration, every employee of the company was supposed to have a Github account, it was even part of the onboarding day, there was a very internal knowledge base page on how to setup Github, and EVEN then people would just hear the word "Github" and freak out saying a bunch of people in the company would never ever be able to setup an account there.

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

#299

Post by namelosw »

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…

Thank you for writing this.

I'm convinced the single biggest factor is the wrong incentive leads to poor quality, well beyond other factors like the paywalls, publications, etc. Not only it disinterests reader but more importantly, it push away good writers. Content is the beating heart of your platform.

It started out like a beautiful small town. The residents are nice and talented, the streets are clean and elegant - it attracts tourists.

It went wrong when the incentive encouraged bad actors to resides in town - litters and tea scammers are everywhere. Not only they're hurting tourists, they discourage good actors from residing in - nobody wants to live in dirty neighborhood and live with bad neighbors.

Thus the negative feed back loop, which causing the infinite downward spiral on quality.

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

#300

Post by vinaypai »

"Not to mention the stupid paywall which is infuriating."

"Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well"

Where exactly do you expect the money to come from to pay the writers well?

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