What you write becomes a very big word document with all the staff editing the same document. That is why authors leave the platform and keep their precious texts in office apps.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
331–340 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#332I'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…
> full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about
That”s incredibly insightful and explains so much of what’s wrong with, well, everything today. The actual doing has become an afterthought to the pitch, the documentation, the branding, the promotion, the cobranding, the cross-promotion, the synergies, and so on.
It’s never been so easy for people with so little to say to say so much. Curation has not kept up with creation. I hope Medium recovers.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#333I'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…
Are you sure you're paying attention? Those items fall way down the list of problems people will typically raise here. As others have said we're simply tired of being nagged and made to feel like cash cows, and this is doing serious harm to your brand.
Want to repair some of that damage right now? Stop prompting me to sign in when I try to read an article on Medium.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#334Earlier 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've never used these commercial blogging platforms, so the answer to this question may be obvious.
Do these platforms provide something useful compared to something like write.as which is based on an open source solution? Is their tools so much better than the open source alternatives?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I use Apollo (paid version) after Alien Blue got unusable and I still have the problem that sometimes links go to the mobile site in a browser within Apollo where I get bombarded with "download the Reddit app".
I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit kill their API in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
wrong. NYtimes revenue is growing after inclusion of a paywall. After initial years of decline at the start of the digital age, NYTimes finally have their revenue strategy right. It's actually the ad share of their revenue that is decreasing, while subscription is growing faster than ad share is decreasing. Print subscription is now stabilizing. So you are wrong, what the market has shown is that priced appropriately…
Revenue != Success Priced appropriately is a key word, you're happy to pay $20/mo for 3 services but will you feel the same when it's $200/mo for 10 services? Netflix was priced appropriately until it started getting some competition, we all see what happened there. The irony of the entire situation is that real competition could have been medium, if they didn't fuck it up.
Netflix has more subscribers and revenue now then it ever did when there was less competition, so unclear what “happened”
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#337Earlier 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.
Discogs.com
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#338I'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…
Made clear by your own list, you seem to think Medium has a content issue.
The issue is how annoying it is to experience the content, not the content itself.
And wow, quite a claim to say that creators are too busy to have lives worth writing about.
Reconsider what went wrong with Medium so you can get on the right track.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you replace the reddit URL with i.reddit.com, you get the old mobile site, which was optimized for 533MHz devices. They sometimes put banners to redirect you to the newer design, but you can dismiss them
That’s great info thanks!
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 still use site:reddit.com for recommendations, I just use a third party app for viewing (rif is fun, aka "reddit is fun").
How do you get weblinks to open in that app?