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

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

#301

Post by programmarchy »

inerte wrote: post #295
thepasswordis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. I have no patience for this type of shameless spamming anymore. One thing I hate about Medium is that it puts a paywall across everything, as if they’re The NY Times. If anything, I care about the author I’m reading, not Medium. With Substack I can subscribe to an individual author and they are the ones deciding what to paywall. Sure Substack gets a cut if I subscribe but that’s in the background.

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

#302

Post by JohnFen »

lmm wrote: post #276
izacus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know... bootstrap a non-predatory sustainable business. If anyone even knows how to do that in 2020s.

The problem is if you do that you get outcompeted by the VC-funded competitors who are happy to shovel money into a furnace for the first 1m+ users.

If you are competing with a bigger, better-funded fish, then the odds are very against you anyway as long as you're playing the same game as they are. Your real strength is to play a different game, one that leverages your unique strengths, not to meet them toe-to-toe in a game that leverages theirs. This can be done even if your product is in the same category as theirs.

Exactly how to do that is highly dependent on you, so very individual (which is part of why it's so effective).

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

#303

Post by tanng »

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…

Also, Medium were blocked in some countries including Vietnam. Here we can't access Medium so need to find alternatives.

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

#304

Post by doctor_eval »

pixodaros wrote: post #269
doctor_eval wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re saying is true in terms of where the money comes from, but it doesn’t explain why customers are being screwed. The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency. It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you…

Which customers are getting screwed? Posters or viewers on 'free' hosting sites are the products not the customers. Online ad buyers everywhere get cheated, but that is another story. Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime"). I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one s…

Well, I disagree with your previous assertion that Facebook makes money from selling ads.

Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads.

The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.

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

#305

Post by glenngillen »

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…

Hopefully you’re reading the replies here too then, because they don’t at all seem to gel with what you’re saying. The replies do reflect a lot of my own experiences though:

- Medium was a good platform for people to publish well formatted content online. - said content ranked quite high on Google. - There’s now a non-trivial amount of content published by myriad authors on there. - I have zero interest in following a particular author. I don’t want recommendations. I end up there as a result of a very specific need at the time. - you’re incessant pop ups to log in or sign up to read the content drastically reduced that value. - I’ve now been conditioned to just avoid any search results that look like they go to a Medium page.

I obviously have no idea how widespread that experience is. The unfortunate reality is that the damage has been done. You could undo all of the things that led to it and I’d never know given the muscle memory that’s been created.

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

#306

Post by fragmede »

doctor_eval wrote: post #304
pixodaros wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which customers are getting screwed? Posters or viewers on 'free' hosting sites are the products not the customers. Online ad buyers everywhere get cheated, but that is another story. Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime"). I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one s…

Well, I disagree with your previous assertion that Facebook makes money from selling ads. Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads. The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.

we'll have to agree to disagree then. There are many other properties outside of Facebook.com where their ads run, in competition with Google.

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

#307

Post by 72mena »

Question related to this: Is there a tool out there that let's you spin a Medium-like text editor for your personal site? Curious to hear about HN's recommendation about whether a tool like this exists or if someone has considered building one.

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

#308

Post by jrumbut »

codechicago277 wrote: post #285
thepasswordis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s crazy to me that they seem completely blind to the root problem. When I pick a blogging platform I don’t want popups, paywalls, required logins, or anything other than the content. Medium took off because it had a simple clean UI and good posts, and seemed like the lowest friction way to blog. Now Medium has huge amounts of friction and feels like yet another business trying to pump money out of users, so Substa…

I assume the plan from day one was make a very appealing platform at a loss, gain a moat from a huge library of good content, then squeeze the profit out of it.

It's a deceptive business model, and people feel deceived and no longer want to do business with that company (surprise!).

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

#309

Post by fatboy »

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 agree with the sentiment of every response I've read to your comment so far. The agressive tactics, paywall, general sense of sleaze all make me actively avoid following medium links.

But even ignoring all that, medium is the worst place for any article about programming because the code blocks do everything to make it harder to read them. There's no syntax highlighting, the lines wrap and the container the code is in pads the text to make a narrower column than the body of the article.

That's the opposite of what I want. Especially on mobile! It's one of the sites that make me wonder if its developers have ever tried using it.

https://postimg.cc/zbY3jQqc

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

#310

Post by culopatin »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #257
bachmeier wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Absolutely not. I finish probably 15% of the articles I encounter. I click links all the time. If that’s what I’ll pay, I’ll expect much more expertise than some random dude writing “Vue vs X” or whatever.

I’d rather pay for convenience. Like you can read all the articles but to subscribe to someone you have to be a premium user.

Basically like Spotify did it.

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