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

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you. I think that's still a form of metered paywall as in it's a regwall as an option to get another article.

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

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these are not the main pain points. The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by u…

I love these. Someone posts a scathing critique of a company. Company representative responds with a mea culpa that misses the mark, and includes plans to fix. Top reply nails the actual problem, why the fix won’t work, and gets massive agreement. Company rep doesn’t respond. You know it hits hard though. Hopefully they take it to heart. I like using medium as an author but HATE the “4 articles remaining” crap. I’ve…

I think it's just cause there's two options.

As the platform goes to shit, keep milking it for all it's worth till the bitter end.

Or

Try and fix it and earn a bit less money for a year or two as it becomes healthy again and thrives.

It's not easy to tell investors that losing money for a year or two is ok and "just trust me".

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

#545
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is if you do that you get outcompeted by the VC-funded competitors who are happy to shovel money into a furnace for the first 1m+ users.

If you are competing with a bigger, better-funded fish, then the odds are very against you anyway as long as you're playing the same game as they are. Your real strength is to play a different game, one that leverages your unique strengths, not to meet them toe-to-toe in a game that leverages theirs. This can be done even if your product is in the same category as theirs. Exactly how to do that is highly dependent on…

It's more like, you're competing against another business on the same footing. Both of you have the option of taking VC investment, which comes with significant downside but will give you a bunch of money in the short term. If your thesis is that the better-funded competitor always wins then the answer is that you should always take the money; I'm not quite that pessimistic, but I do think this specific blitzscaling playbook is something to be aware of.

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

#546
Well once I saw that majority of my feed was becoming either affilate spam disguised as blog posts, reposts with slight paraphrasing from popular "Top 10" lists, or AI generated posts - I started doing the same.

Currently running an automated Medium blog which generates nonsense articles from topics scraped from YouTube trending, make roughly $300 per week.

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

#547
post #32
post #27

Because adblockers have made selling "free" content to astute, tech-literate people extremely difficut, and in 2023 micropayment/subscription models are still hopelessly bad .

Adblockers only caught on because the internet ad industry is incredibly abusive.

Seat belts only caught on because driving is incredibly dangerous.

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

#548
post #295

Earlier 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?

I have a newsletter for CTOs, and I try hard not to link to Substack any more, the number of my readers seem to automatically lock the article behind a pay wall - Substack is lost I think as a website (don't know about the newsletter aspect).

I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.

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

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll interrupt this stream of consensus to note I don't have issues following a link to Medium. Here's how it goes: I open a link, I dismiss a sign-up suggestion screen (if any), I read the stuff, and then I go. If there's a paywall I leave, but I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money. There are low-quality posts but they are plenty on al…

> I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money. Of course but it has to be a balance. Medium does all the things I mention. If they did just one of those to monetize, ok I'd not be happy but I'd give them a pass. A paywall ideally not because I'm really not going to subscribe after reading only 3 articles. But doing all of those makes me feel…

Maybe that's just me or selective geolocation but in my experience Medium almost never hits with a paywall, and because a lot of useful material is there I am not seeing it a problem. Substack links, for example, are significantly more annoying so I actually take a moment and think if I should even bother.
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