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

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

#441

Post by IshKebab »

GraffitiTim wrote: post #226
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…

These aren’t the key problem. The key problem is that you’ve lost the trust of the authors you want to attract. It’s no longer a place I can post and know that my content will be cleanly accessible to readers. I now think you’ll pepper it with pop ups and account demands. It went from being a minimalist and trusted place to post, to now a feeling of feeding my own content into someone else’s machine and losing contro…

I mean the key problem is surely that most readers don't want to pay to read blogs, so you can't really fund a large business from it. Medium has 180 employees apparently, which tbf is less than I expected. But still, it's a very simple site. Really it should be "finished" and running on like 50 employees at the most. You could then probably find it by relatively reasonable advertising instead of paywalls. Or potentially charge authors for features like image hosting.

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

#442

Post by whiplash451 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #122
Nifty3929 wrote: post #114

I 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…

There’s a ton of other things you need to fix.

As a writer, seeing random people (bots?) highlight my article to death, making it essentially illegible, was a show-stopper for me.

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

#443

Post by bluelightning2k »

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 literally couldn't use Medium.

I think I've changed my email since my first Google SSO and you guys haven't dealt with that scenario - but it's probably pretty common

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

#444

Post by sethd »

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 wish you the best of luck. If you can turn Medium around, that will be quite the achievement and will make for a much more interesting read on HN than this thread.

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

#445

Post by berniedurfee »

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…

My personal experience was having written several articles based on my experiences that did get some views and claps or whatever. Hopefully they helped some people out.

Yet, I was below some sort of threshold to be in the club that would get me a few pennies if enough people read them, so I was kicked out of that program.

Not that the program mattered, but getting kicked out for not being popular enough was annoying, so I just stopped using the platform.

I still get a weekly summary that says my articles are being regularly read, which doesn’t seem likely. They appear to be made up numbers.

It feels like the platform quickly became another Quora and is 90% junk.

Not sure how you’ll regain the initial trust and stature Medium seemed to have, but best of luck. FWIW, I do like the site design and reading/writing experience. Keep it simple.

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

#446

Post by josephd79 »

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…

This is the reason.

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

#447

Post by sgerenser »

wkat4242 wrote: post #180
tonystubblebine wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.

They're not very successful are they? I mean it's a famous paper but are they really succeeding at monetizing their site this way? I often get linked to a NYT article but as I don't even live in the US I'd never be tempted to pay for it. If I couldn't just use a paywall blocker or archive.is I'd just ignore them altogether. I kinda doubt they get many subscribers from outside their native area (US as they have a bigg…

NYTimes is definitely a successful example of the paywall strategy. They just added 180,000 subscribers in their most recent quarter and continue to make a profit: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/business/media/nyt-q3-202...

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

#448

Post by raffraffraff »

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.

It's even difficult to read a medium post on archive.org because the page seems to reload every couple of seconds. (I was in archive.org because they banned somebody who thinks things that they don't think... Or something, it mentioned breaking rules but didn't say which rule, or link to the rules)

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

#449

Post by berniedurfee »

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…

Bait and switch is the de facto business model of the internet.

Burn money to bring in users, then monetize and exit.

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

#450

Post by berniedurfee »

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.

Same… and, yeah, it’s purely out of spite. The more you nag, the less likely I will do the thing.

I use site:reddit.com all day in Google though. It really is still somehow a reliable place for information.

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