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

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

#511

Post by freediver »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #506
freediver wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article

That does not matter. What decides if people pay for a publication is the median article quality.

On Medium it is a 2 (on a scale 1-10) while NYT is at least 7.

Would you buy a car that is occasionaly (once in in a month) great, but rest of the time is crap, or a car that is very good all the time? Good luck!

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

#512

Post by wkat4242 »

rchaud wrote: post #476
nixpulvis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But medium isn't the one that does the writing here, so does that really matter?

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

#513

Post by wkat4242 »

lenkite wrote: post #345
codechicago277 wrote: post #285

Earlier 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…

Substack doesn't even support markdown yet, right ?

As far as I can see markdown is very popular in developer circles only - I guess due to GitHub popularizing it.

So I could imagine it's not on their radar for something aimed at bloggers - of course some will be developers too but not too many.

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

#514

Post by wkat4242 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #422
vbezhenar wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they monetize? I never tried to register. Do they ask money to actually read the content they did not even produce themselves? I'd expect for them to monetize on ads. And ads show up regardless of registration status.

I was looking at Medium yesterday for the first time after a long break. "X free articles." OK. Fine. How much does a subscription cost? No idea. That info isn't available without a signup. [1] This is so fucking stupid. With other content sites I can see a price and I can decide if I think it's worth it. With Medium it feels like they have something to hide. Obviously I didn't sign up and I didn't click through. If…

That subscription cost thing is a really good point, totally forgot about that when I wrote the original comment, I also ran into that myself and I still don't know because I never created an account.

This is also a bad idea IMO because it brings up the feeling of "if you have to ask..."

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

#515

Post by wkat4242 »

bombcar wrote: post #239
Winsaucerer wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there other platforms you'd be willing to name that you see as being grassroots "for users by users"? I may want to look into some of them.

Patreon still has some of this feel somehow - it feels more connected when I support someone

I think that's because not many people use their discovery. They usually end up from somewhere else. So they don't have that part to play with (eg charging money or using algorithms to recommend content that's profitable for them).

Also, their monetisation is pretty seamless because you come there with the intent to pay. So requests for payment don't feel out of place.

I guess for the people you patron it's less great now because I see many people moving to ko-fi.

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

#516

Post by smsm42 »

ploum wrote: post #487
smsm42 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it the same model? I have been watching YT videos for years and was never denied access to any content.

"This video has been removed because of youtube policies". This is the exact same thing: shitification. Make a cool product at a loss then make it shitier to use to bring as much money as you can before enough users exit to break your network effect. You can even make it last longer by making it as hard as possible for your users to leave. If the process is not entirely clear to you, look at Twitter. (Elon Musk is in…

Censorship is a different issue. It is a political/culture war related, not denying me content because they want money from me, but denying me content because they think this content should not be available to anyone. It is a horrible thing, much worse than paywalling tbh, but completely different thing.

> I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"

Mostly true, but that isn't that bad tbh. Grandparents have income, grandparents have time to spend, and grandparents aren't prone as much to jump to the next new shiny thing. True, they will eventually go away, but it's not going to happen very soon. So if that is true, Facebook has at least a decade, and maybe more because my generation (which would roughly be "parents" to your students) also uses FB, though much less now.

> I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.

Is there? I see two tweets links, and none of the "toots" (I will never get over the fact that this word means "fart"). I am no fan of twitter, but I am not sure how Mastodon would be better - all censorship fans are already there. I mean, you could use it as a blog, I guess, but why not just use a blog then?

> Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades

I was thinking that too, for a while. Until culture warriors started attacking the free software. Now I am not so sure. I mean, they probably won't be able to take down a huge project like Linux - too many people depend on it being there - but I am pretty sure they could destroy any smaller project. Think about it - how much abuse would a person be willing to take based on something they don't even get paid for?

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

#517

Post by mkarliner »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #510
mkarliner wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

You'll be welcome in the ecosystem whatever path you choose

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

#518

Post by _betty_ »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #495
tjpnz wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

still get "Read the rest of this story with a free account." after 5ish articles. Rather than signin i just switch to incognito.

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

#519

Post by xmorse »

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…

Another pain point for me: no syntax highlighted code blocks

I see a lot of people using GitHub gists to embed code blocks for this reason, this means that writing any article code related is a pain

Edit: i think it's available now but definitely too late

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

#520

Post by tonystubblebine »

xmorse wrote: post #519
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…

Another pain point for me: no syntax highlighted code blocks I see a lot of people using GitHub gists to embed code blocks for this reason, this means that writing any article code related is a pain Edit: i think it's available now but definitely too late

Yes. We added them recently.
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