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

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

#491

Post by fsckboy »

jrumbut wrote: post #330
raincole wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same logic applies to Youtube. Do you think Youtube is going to fail soon?

The thing is video hosting at scale is still a pain, I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one, and almost all their content is still free in unlimited amounts. I'm not sure I've ever paid YouTube a dollar directly even though I watch it daily. There may be some similarities (like when they used to let people upload full movies and TV shows), but it is a big stretc…

>I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one

hmm, not sure what you mean. I have a gmail account from early early days, and I've never created a youtube account. I would've accepted it if they forced it on me, but given the choice I've never seen a reason to create one. They nag me to create one if I forget and try to upvote, or comment, and they nag me for subscribing on the regular also.

perhaps if I created a gmail account later on it would come with youtube?

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

#492

Post by zepolen »

yibg wrote: post #336
zepolen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Short term, yes, but it's had a massive head start, these things take time.

Subscribers recently increased because account sharing was stopped but recently Disney has already passed Netflix in subscribers across all its platforms: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/09/27/disney-surpasses...

Netflix revenue has started to decline and as they start increasing their pricing and removing shows to save a buck, more and more users will leave, it's already happening, just not reflected on the charts yet due to the aforementioned stopping shared accounts.

The Disney+ vs Netflix subscriber growth trajectory says it all: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/netflix-statistics/

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

#493

Post by martin82 »

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…

1. The paywall killed your product. When I google something, and it leads to Medium, and I then see that it is not accessible, I CURSE and immediately go away. Let this happen three times and in my mind it is cemented that Medium is "that shit platform that wastes my time clicking on inaccessible content" - same like Quora, by the way. As long as the paywall exists, you will not get rid of that stench.

2. Substack killed you. I know that HN is mostly populated by extremely left leaning people who wholeheartedly believe in all the Current Things that MSM feeds them, so this argument will fall on deaf ears, but I will write it here anyways because it is the truth and if you aren't just a Woke CEO, you might actually care: During the pandemic, Substack was the only news source where I could get proper information about what is going on. Virtually everything that got people cancelled on Twitter and labelled as conspiracy theorists eventually turned out to be the truth. These people all moved to Substack. Thanks to Elon we all know now that Twitter was infested by deep state actors abusing the platform to spread disinformation and manipulate elections - I'm not sure if this is still true but I somehow remember that Medium emerged as a sub-company from Twitter, so I must assume that the exact same ways of censorship and propaganda that brought Twitter to its knees are also in place at Medium. If that is true, and as long as that is true, I can guarantee that you will have zero chance whatsoever against Substack.

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

#494

Post by tonystubblebine »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #326
klabb3 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I think this deserves recognition. This is not the fake self promotion disguised as “brutal honesty” you see in the corporate word, there are actual admissions here that go beyond that, which leads even a cynic like me to take this seriously. It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this…

It is still corporate speak. He has posted similar before and been told that the paywall and forced reg is the issue. Then he comes back, doesn’t acknowledge it and gets told the same again. That is not genuine engagement.

Oh, I don't feel like I"m ignoring that, sorry. The regwall is a bit confusing to me personally because we don't have one anymore. People here seem to have a long memory about a time when maybe there was a regwall dark pattern. But I never saw it because I was always logged in during that period and nobody who worked on it is still at the company.

But the paywall, i.e. the metered paywall where some articles are behind a paywall by author choice and an unsusbcribed reader can read three of those a month, is up there. And I'm just coming at it from the opposite side. Many people here don't want to see a paywall. That's fine. But I'd like to see their reaction if the quality of what was behind it changed. A no might still be a no, but I think the tenor would change. So that's how my original take on fix quality first fits into the anti-paywall headline of other people. This model works well enough for us in the worst possible implementation that I believe it will work all the way if we have a better implementation, especially if there is more of a sense of that there's at least something valuable behind it.

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

#495

Post by tonystubblebine »

tjpnz wrote: post #333
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…

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.

Are we still prompting you to sign in? I don't think we've done that for a long time. There's a metered paywall but there isn't a regwall on anything that you wouldn't expect (i.e. comments).

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

#496

Post by tonystubblebine »

pjot wrote: post #189
tonystubblebine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been frustratingly slow because our recs system is sprawling. Your main feed is populated differently than the read-more section you are referencing. Plus author behavior lags incentives. We actually had a clickbait about MILFs on a programming story the other day so it's worse than you are reporting. Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when…

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).

Theoretically, a subscription was supposed to be one part because it aligned us to the reader. But then we had a recommendation algorithm that was more aligned to an ad model. We're serious about changing our distribution to reward substance over clickbait and I think we will get there.

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

#497

Post by tonystubblebine »

mrcwinn wrote: post #338
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…

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.

I think we're seeing a similar problem just from different sides. Why make the experience more seamless if the content at the end isn't also worthwhile? You're working left to right, I'm working right to left.

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

#498

Post by devinprater »

I decided to stop supporting Medium with my articles due to the disregard for accessibility, and would urge any accessibility writers to do the same. Why support a company that can't even create a good writing experience for the blind? Or even a nice reading experience? And no, having a text to speech thing doesn't help, it's just more bullcrap browsers have to load, and infantalizes us further since aww de poor widdle blindie can't even read the Internet! Of course, it's nice for those who don't know about built-in tools like speak screen and such, but using built-in TTS engines would surely be better than calling out to Google or whatever the crap Medium uses.

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

#499

Post by tonystubblebine »

martin82 wrote: post #493
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…

1. The paywall killed your product. When I google something, and it leads to Medium, and I then see that it is not accessible, I CURSE and immediately go away. Let this happen three times and in my mind it is cemented that Medium is "that shit platform that wastes my time clicking on inaccessible content" - same like Quora, by the way. As long as the paywall exists, you will not get rid of that stench. 2. Substack ki…

FWIW, the idea that Medium is progressive is kind of ridiculous if you look at the view numbers. The vast majority of people are reading about apolitical topics, namely professional development, hobbies, personal stories.

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

#500

Post by tonystubblebine »

chirau wrote: post #362
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…

If this is what you believe is wrong with Medium, then i don't think you will rescue it. Medium.com now paywalls even bullshit content. Simple as that. You limit me to x number of free articles in a month, yet the first 10x articles from medium i see are absolute trash with no quality control and vetting and all so by the time i hit my limit, I am already annoyed by it. If you are going to paywall me, let the content…

I think we agree. Quality is the issue. My points are the underlying reasons why.
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