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

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

#141

Post by aidos »

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…

Well that’s probably the response that’s most swayed my opinion of a service ever. Good luck with it, I really hope you can turn it around.

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

#142

Post by jrm4 »

lemax wrote: post #86
jrm4 wrote: post #80

Yup. I think a better question that everyone should be asking, is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow people to share information."

Wikipedia is not for profit, the incentives are incomparable.

Right. I don't care about profit, and therefore also not about incentives. I care about the idea of -- hey could there exist something like "Medium" as a non-profit, especially given that pretty much everything that has tried this for profit ends up going the way of (as mentioned below) "enshittification?"

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

#143

Post by wkat4242 »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #29

If you punish me every time I follow a link to your site, I may learn to avoid following links to your site. Medium changed from reader-friendly to reader-hostile over time.

Good point, seeing medium.com in a URL has this response with me now. For sure.

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

#144

Post by neodymiumphish »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #95
jklm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or just read.

None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense

What's wrong with GitHub spaces?

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

#145

Post by neodymiumphish »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #144
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense

What's wrong with GitHub spaces?

Pages*

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

#146

Post by wkat4242 »

nostromo wrote: post #35

It's a common story. A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money. Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue. But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.…

YouTube has become pretty bad IMO.. All the ads and Google data mining.

Without a suite of adblockers and sponsorblock it's unusable now. I hate video content anyway so I wouldn't sign up for a subscription. But every time I get referred there I'm appalled how bad it's become.

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

#147

Post by anigbrowl »

zem wrote: post #25

cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of "enshittification": 8 Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the…

This is just a cool-sounding wrapper on the much older concept of rent-seeking, which has a solid theoretical literature behind it. Doctorow seems to specialize in this.

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

#148

Post by santoshalper »

robswc wrote: post #83
smt88 wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

It reminds me of Microsoft Access in the 90s.

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

#149

Post by death_to_satan »

Lazare wrote: post #104
trieste92 wrote: post #20

- UI has progressively gotten more bloated - too many articles that read like they were written by an LLM - the service provided is easily replaceable At least substack has a niche with conservatives. Medium, not so much

Funny, I subscribe to three Substacks, and they're all left wing, in one case being written by an avowed Marxist. Tell me more about this niche?

[dead]

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

#150

Post by wkat4242 »

patrick451 wrote: post #127
gwbas1c wrote: post #115

I remember seeing a few medium posts on Hacker News a few years ago. They all had good tone management; but when read with a critical eye, they were factually incorrect or had poor comprehension of the subject matter. It got the point where, if I saw "medium.com" next to a link I'd think, "oh, that's a medium post" and not open it. If I accidentally opened a Medium post, I'd close it immediately without reading it. "…

I agree that "medium.com" is a stamp of mediocrity, and I tend to have the same kneejerk reaction to never read something posted there. However, I'm not sure I agree about the good tone management. There's always been something about medium and most of the articles there that is sort of cringe. It feels kind of like linkedin, where everything is superficial self-promotion, everybody is "thrilled" (a word only used in…

The over-happy sugarcoated PR is not specific to LinkedIn. The entire corporate realm is full of that crap. Entire hordes of marcom people excrete this vile Kool-Aid for mindless corporate drones to spread like happy little slaves

It's just that LinkedIn is one of the few places they can do that without being downvoted into oblivion.

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