It committed suicide at the altar of ad revenue.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
471–480 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#472Medium failed because "words on the internet" isn't a business model. People are writing to be seen, not to advertise for Medium.com. Over time, that means Medium becomes a halfway house for the "published on Inc.com / Entrepreneur.com" army of freelance content writers in between jobs.
For Medium to make money, it will always come down to pumping "user growth" and advertising to help the site owners sell it off to some bloated media conglomerate like Conde Nast.
BTW, all the issues with Medium.com that you've described are things I am already seeing on Substack.
- Lots of interesting writers gathering at the latest "for writers" venue
- Everybody remarking how different the clean interface is compared to the ugly popup-bar filled mess that they came from
- Some achieve overnight success, pulling other writers into the platform
- Platform starts running out of VC funding runway and starts tweaking the site to deliver more 'conversions'. Instead of a clean design, you'll now see a "sign up" popup that has to be dismissed. Writers are also encouraged to paywall early, so that great article link that you sent to your friend is no longer accessible because it's for paid subscribers only.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one here hates WordPress because people use it for blogging. We hate it because other people use it as a complex, insecure, messy, un-versioned CMS that some of us had to inherit. It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else people do with it.
Seeing what "low-code" people can accomplish with WordPress is both horrifying and amazing.
This is accurate. I laughed :).
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#474I'm surprised that Medium hasn't tried to capitalize on exiles from Twitter.
I can understand not wanting to go through the effort of hosting your own blog, but why don't more people use Blogger? Is Blogger's problem that it allows too much customization (e.g. MySpace v. Facebook situation)?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Substack does this too, though. In fact I feel like it's incredibly similar to medium in many ways. Why has substack "won" this market? Or has it really? Is it just due to the newsletter publishing tools and subsidising some big name bloggers?
> Why has substack "won" this market?
Medium "won" this market a few years back as well. The reason it sucks now is because investors aren't paying them to make the internet reading experience nice. And in any case, readers aren't willing to pay a subscription fee for 'nice'.
Substack is now the leader because investors haven't pressured them to turn more newsletters into paid products. They will, they just haven't now. And just like Medium, the really good writers will have enough capital to run their own newsletters, and use Substack only for SEO. Sound familiar?
Soon, we'll begin to see "name.substack.com" with the same kind of suspicion that we now see "medium.com".
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#476Earlier 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.
Fundamentally, it's hard to build a profitable blogging platform we'll like, because all you really need to do is render markdown/HTML with a decent stylesheet. Most features on top of that should either be browser extensions or shouldn't exist at all. Everything else is platforming, which we will also argue should be separated from the blog itself. This is why we have URLs and links. Just as in the restaurant exampl…
It's hard to build a profitable blogging platform because the economics of writing itself makes it unworkable.
The tech stack isn't even on the top 100 hindrances to profitability.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And Substack's already starting to feel the same way; the incessant prompts to create an account and subscribe to something are the telltale first red flags heralding an intention to put monetization first and utility second.
The point where once-enjoyable services start turning to shit to make a buck is inevitable; it was the VCs footing the bill, but now it's the user's turn. The illusion of 'startup disruption' collapses once it reaches what I call the "somebody has to pay for all this shit" phase.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#478Same thing that happened to reddit and digg etc, the keep trying to improve a finished product and with each revision the site becomes more bloated, difficult to use, and riddle with nasty things like paywalls and fullscreen ads in a pathetic attempt to generate revenue.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you see a shift away from clickbait in the long term across the industry? Publishing, search, social media, etc. have been devastated by it (among other factors).
You have to kill it at the funding - if the ad dollars don’t flow to the baiters they won’t bait. Which for many platforms is a quite difficult thing because that’s they’re revenue and they don’t have the manpower or time to review everything.
Cutting the supply of money will kill the clickbait content alright but it will also kill vast swathes of "content, full stop". Somebody has to pay for hosting no matter what, and if I'm entertaining an idea of writing a fantasy novel in my spare time, I really don't want to be the one to pay. Or rather, I wouldn't want at the time in my life when I entertained such an idea.
I think more dollars is good, as it increases the number of opportunities. This comes with a lot of failed attempts at creating something of value, and that's ok. What we truly need, in a societal sense, is to make next generations recognize the current times as a crazed race after the least demanding content that they are, and to guide them in the direction of articles with enduring value, again. The generation that entered adulthood during these crazy times is probably already lost, the previous generation is busy raising kids, and the previous-previous generation lives in bunkers where only the guys who "go way back" can ever enter. If not the next generation, then we're probably done for, as the IT revolution will eat its children and their children too, like many revolutions before.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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
A lot of communities are not like this though. There's a lot of good ones too.