431–440 of 567 posts
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Medium is not Economist.
Point me to where I said "Medium is Economist" or cease. I can count on my fingers the number of Economist articles I read per year while my history is full of recent Medium visits, mostly related to work so stuff that translates in productivity and earnings. They're not even in the same ballpark.
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…
1. Paywalls. Some people don't mind. Make it obvious in the link itself that this blog is monetized. I want to know if it's worth navigating away from what I am doing right now.
2. Site it slow. Ask yourself why did Medium scraper websites (that strip tracking) had to come into existence. If the market actively tries to circumvent you then it means you are not in connection with the users who you would want to spend time on Medium. This Silicon Valley mentality of "extract money, we'll think of performance maybe one day next century" is driving away the professional users who would pay for your service.
3. Too much trackers (likely related to #2). If that's your monetization model then the business is already on its way out.
You can do a lot with Medium. You can be the specialized Facebook for small club of readers and authors. You can help people organize events. You can provide a platform for book writers to draft and store chapters. You can put a paywall like "early access to my book's new chapter", too.
These things are not what drives insanely huge engagements that investors love but they absolutely will be bringing some money.
This hyper-growth mindset has to go. There are good ways to make money and not make your product suck.
I loved the idea of Medium when it first came out and consumed it a lot. For no less than two years now though, I use various scrapers and read stuff ad-free and tracker-free. Think of why it has came to it.
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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.
Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.
Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.
The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.
Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.
But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.
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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, it is the enshittifying of the service by corrupting it’s original promise and replacing it with “make more money”. Nobody comes to use your service just because you want more money. People come to get value, and that has been sniffed out. P.S. props to Corey doctorow for his fantastic “enshittification” posts. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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…
You are drinking koolaid, though. Look at the comments. A lot of them are spot on.
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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?
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…
The same goes with coding. SO and github are good. Everything else is pretty much garbage.
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…
The main landing page is such a shitshow. The feeling sticks to you no matter what after that.
https://www.drupal.org/project/taxonomy_tree
It would also need to be useful for posting high resolution cat pictures and videos (or whatever), to replace Flickr. Mastodon shrinks and clips images, and I don't know how to make it a large full sized stream of image posts. Is that possible somehow, or is there a special version of Mastodon oriented towards photography or simply cloning the best parts of Flickr?
And it should not only make it easy to embed youtube and other videos, but also easily publish and incrementally enhance time-synchronized multimedia and link enriched transcripts and commentary on videos, with synchronized time scrolling and searching.
Maybe even a time based discussion tree that starts by importing the chat transcripts of live broadcasts, and lets you reply to the real time comments with later comments, and insert now top level comments later at particular points in time (or segments of time).
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Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up are annoying though.
Yeah that's the problem. I don't want a newsletter, I want a blog. And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.