For me it seemed like medium posts were always a bit too self aggrandizing vs quality content.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
421–430 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
How do they monetize? I never tried to register. Do they ask money to actually read the content they did not even produce themselves? I'd expect for them to monetize on ads. And ads show up regardless of registration status.
I was looking at Medium yesterday for the first time after a long break.
"X free articles." OK. Fine.
How much does a subscription cost? No idea. That info isn't available without a signup. [1]
This is so fucking stupid. With other content sites I can see a price and I can decide if I think it's worth it.
With Medium it feels like they have something to hide.
Obviously I didn't sign up and I didn't click through.
If the content was good enough and if it was worth the money I would. But they way Medium is now, neither of those important details is visible.
[1] Or by Googling. Which works, but...
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#423I'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…
Do you think the name held the site back from becoming any bigger?
Sorry I laughed.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#424Poor execution and the lack of a moat have caused medium to get pushed in a mode where the measures they put in place to generate revenue ended up throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of alienating both writers and readers from their platform. Which is of course disastrous for any content platform.
Better execution might have prevented some of that but not all of it because without revenue, it was not a sustainable company. So, they had to do something given the level of investment and the mediocre revenue. Better execution would have not done anything to prevent competitors from stepping up. That was always going to happen.
But fundamentally, they are just a blogging platform. There are many blogging platforms out there and it's not rocket science to create some more. Blogging platforms are a commodity. It doesn't matter that much if theirs is nice to use, beautifully designed and comes with a great UX. And I would actually dispute it is that good to begin with. Either way, it's still a commodity. Easy to imitate, clone, copy, whatever. The value of that was always relatively low. And I don't think medium ever had a good plan for addressing that.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#425I'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…
Exactly, at the risk of repeating the same word that many other sibling comments begin with.
After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.
I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.
But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.
I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.
But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because of the possibility of making money off of Medium (even if I opted out), that gave them free license to make money off of me, so of course their pursuit of exploiting me of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of my own labor and content unless I systematically and enthusiastically played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.
I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.
I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.
If I write an article about ray tracing lime jello, then why can't I submit it for syndication to three specialty groups about ray tracing, jello, and limes, without restricting everyone on the internet from discovering and reading it for free in my own channel? Why are all the popular syndication channels there for the express purposes of exploiting me to make money for themselves?
That's like having not one pimp, but an entire pyramid of pimps trying to bully my customers and restrict and exploit my work, that I'm happy and willing to do for free.
I'm not going to get into the user interface, which would require writing a hundred page Medium article in itself (that would be promoted to and read by exactly zero readers). I'll just say that at first it was the thing that attracted me, but then once I actually started using it, it was infuriating and frustrating and purposefully lacking obvious and crucial features (not to mention those that I came to depend on that were later removed or hidden).
There are some great things about the ease of writing and editing and formatting articles, but also so many conspicuous trepanations of the skull and lobotomization of the brain that it's obvious it's all part of some dark pattern to brutally control my mind and behavior.
The final straw was when I found myself unable to control the formatting of my images. I was SURE I was able to do that before, but the interface simply was ignoring my mouse clicks that I'd learned to use. At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouse. Then maybe my browser was broken. Or possibly it was my internet connection. And then finally I felt like I was losing my mind and mis-remembering that I used to be able to do this simple obvious thing, and wondering how it was that my previous articles were formatted in ways I couldn't figure out how to apply to my new articles. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I am being gaslighted?
Finally I googled for "why can't I control the formatting of images in my medium articles", and this came up:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Imag...
>Image formatting feature deprecation
>As of January 2022, Medium no longer supports formatting options for images in the Medium editor.
>All images in stories are now displayed in a single image size. Other features, such as the alt text, captions, grids, and image links, remain unaffected.
>Medium has recently redesigned parts of its website in order to deliver a more browsable, consistent, and faster experience to all users. To that end, we have removed certain design elements on the published story page, along with the ability to format and resize imagery in the story editor.
>We know image sizing matters to many writers. So, why did we remove this feature? Simply put: We removed image sizing to accommodate a new right-hand column that provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading, along with related reads across Medium. Our data shows this new right-hand column benefits writers by presenting their stories to more readers across the network.
Then why the hell don't you program your web site to respond to the mouse clicks on images with a big red popup and loud buzzer that goes "BZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!!" so I know it's MEDIUM and not ME that's at fault?
FUCK Medium's right-hand column. I don't give a shit about it. I don't want Medium to "provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading", I want readers to READ MY STORY. But obviously the only thing Medium cares about is castrating my formatting and gobbling up my precious square centimeters of screen space for the express purpose of diverting and distracting people away from reading my free content that I'm paying them to publish, and sucking them into the click-bait paid content that they actually make money off of.
The patronizing phrase "Our data shows..." is as bad as "I'm not racist, but..." because it tells me beyond doubt that Medium has become yet another data driven Zynga Cow Clicker skinner box.
Medium's and Zynga's only goal is monetization by metrics, which suck out every drop of human creativity, design, and intent, and incarcerates my readers in the Clockwork Orange Movie Theatre Scene!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg
>I believe in second chances. I want us to work together. I want you to become a valued member of our organization. Surrender, and you will find meaning. Surrender, and you will find release. Take a deep breath. Calm your mind. You know what's best. What's best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply, Agent 33?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#426Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#427I'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…
Any chance you've written more about the system design and incentives side of it somewhere (whether about medium in particular, a previous biz, or just the mechanisms in general)? If so, I'd absolutely love to dig in... It's got big overlap w/ some stuff I'm trying to figure out for building useful communities, and it's not so common to find folks with a deep view on it ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#428I 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…
I like your honest answers here. It's refreshing to hear in the tech space after a decade of wanna-be Jobs copycats. Good luck with the business.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this. A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.) Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement. I don't know what anal…
For me the bar is that a site has to work in incognito. That's how I open all links, so login is out of the question. Medium actually works very well that way, I didn't even know they still have the paywall -- or I might have disabled some scripts?
Maybe you have the Bypass Paywalls extension (https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome) installed?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this. A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.) Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement. I don't know what anal…
No argument. But how do they make money without these measures? Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker, the vast majority of their labor—moderators—work for nothing.
> But how do they make money without these measures?
By inserting ads every few posts in the feeds, letting users pay for bonus features and letting users pay for bonus features for others as a show of approval.
People don't generally go to Reddit to read one single thing that was linked from another site, so the kind of "engagement" platforms like Medium are struggling to achieve through incessant nagging happens a little more naturally. It doesn't have to dedicate a third of the screen area to links and thumbnails of totally unrelated articles, because I'm already in e.g. /r/StarWars where people voluntarily organize exactly what I was interested in reading about when I went there.
You also don't have to be as wary of the hustle because unlike Medium, as there's really no straight forward way to make money off of "engagement" with your Reddit posts and replies. You aren't there arguing about some detail in Star Trek TNG S03E14 with /u/dickmonger in order to boost your LinkedIn profile either. Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled—it has a sense of honesty and realness that you don't get when people are deliberately trying to culture profitable personas and turning every semblance of original thought into revenue streams.
> Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker,
Is Medium? I don't know that either of these companies make their profit public, but I have a hard time believing that Reddit performs worse than Medium. As someone who ends up reading an article here and there on Medium very occasionally, the changes I see between the visits tell of a company desperately struggling to keep investors happy.