Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"? • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

tomp wrote: post #191

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…

get rid of the "register wall" or you're not even trying

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, we haven't had a register wall in a long time.

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

#502

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:35 AM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #463

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. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noti…

And I've been mad about it for literal years.

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

#503

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:38 AM UTC

Cheezewheel wrote: post #458

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…

>Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the…

Well, the top response on this thread changed after I went to bed. But yes, this is in the mix. People seem to have a long memory about a dark pattern experiment we seemed to have run with regwalls (I never personally saw it and the people behind it are gone). Plus the cruft. A lot of that has been removed. But the volume of comments about quality always seemed louder to me and I've seen quality draw people through a lot of cruft.

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

#504

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:41 AM UTC

flkiwi wrote: post #238

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 was a Medium subscriber for a pretty long time. I'd seen some interesting, incisive stuff, so I subscribed. I'm happy to pay for quality. But shortly after I subscribed, the content I found was almost exclusively vapid self-promoters writing many, many words without any value about the latest buzzword they'd heard. It was so strange. The underlying tension between open, democratic platform, quality standards, and e…

Completely fair. Hopefully we are getting better again. The quality is there, we just need to make sure we show it to you.

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

#505

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

berniedurfee wrote: post #445

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,…

Thank you. And I'm sorry we kicked you out. It was a rough cut and I think too rough. Also, we are stingy with our view counts so I think they are slightly more real than what would be reported elsewhere. For example, they are lower than what Google Analytics would tell you and much, much lower than what Quora or LinkedIn report.

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

#506

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:46 AM UTC

freediver wrote: post #193

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…

Congrats on still sticking to the idea of monetizing via payments vs throwing ads everywhere. This and your reply here is a rare positive signal coming from Medium nowadays. A few personal observations: 1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to Linked…

Re: 3. No but I wouldn't want to speak for them. But the obvious difference is that we want to hear from people that are too busy to be full time on building a mailing list. Someone above called me crazy for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article, but if you think about it at all you realize journalists are relying on sources and Medium is a place where you can just hear directly from the source. (Except when we are hiding those posts in a mound of content mill stuff)

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

#507

Post by ospider » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:47 AM UTC

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 biggest complaint about Medium is the anti-spam policy. I know it's essential for you to take some measures against spammers or crawlers, but I live in China, where Medium is blocked by the Great Firewall, the only way for me to access your site is to use a proxy. At least, it should not stop me from accessing the site when I was already logged in or I was a paying user.

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

#508

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:47 AM UTC

brookst wrote: post #332

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…

> full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about That”s incredibly insightful and explains so much of what’s wrong with, well, everything today. The actual doing has become an afterthought to the pitch, the documentation, the branding, the promotion, the cobranding, the cross-promotion, the synergies, and so on. It’s never been so easy for people with so little…

Yeah, it's time for the curation economy! Did you read Neil Stephenson's book, Fall? There is a concept in there about edit streams that really stuck with me.

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

#509

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:49 AM UTC

fatboy wrote: post #309

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 agree with the sentiment of every response I've read to your comment so far. The agressive tactics, paywall, general sense of sleaze all make me actively avoid following medium links. But even ignoring all that, medium is the worst place for any article about programming because the code blocks do everything to make it harder to read them. There's no syntax highlighting, the lines wrap and the container the code is…

This is years too late, but I did have us had syntax highlighting. So that, plus better recommendations, plus returning incentives for the programming authors that do great work should change things.

Also, not sure if you know but we have the entire back catalog of Pragmatic Programmer books. I need to do a re-import to take advantage of the syntax highlighting, but it's still a pretty good feature. (Unfortunately, I was the programmer who did this import and so it's still on me to redo it)

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

#510

Post by tonystubblebine » Sun, Feb 12, 2023, 4:52 AM UTC

mkarliner wrote: post #412

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…

You've already opened up a Mastodon instance, kudos for that. Why not go the whole hog and join Tumblr as a full Fediverse platform? That way, the smaller players get synergy against the big walled gardens

We've got a lot more planned on Mastodon. Re: Tumblr. I think we just have a different view of how social software works and time is going to tell which one is better. I think the Tumblr approach sounds too much like syndication and that it's not going to end up being that useful. So we took the approach of having an instance and will be letting people in shortly. This way they are fully present and using the same software and exposed to the same norms as most other people. Maybe I'm wrong, and if so, that should be obvious soon enough.