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

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

#181

Post by luckylion »

zepolen wrote: post #165
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…

There is only one reason medium went down the hole and it's because it annoyed the fuck out of users by demanding sign up (and subscription) just to read content OTHERS had created on the platform. What the hell did they expect would happen? Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense. It has nothing to do with 1 and 2.…

Am I misremembering that medium's signup nag screen was just cookie based? I have cookie autodelete after I close a tab, so I haven't seen those since forever.

On the other hand, the low quality content was what made me avoid medium.com links, so my experience perfectly mirrors the comment.

> It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?

It's extremely expensive to run a competitor to a global video platform, the platform is much stickier, the app makes it even more sticky, and they're a billion dollar ad company that can spend giant sums of money on creators? Starting a medium competitor is trivial in comparison, you can do so with Wordpress out of the box. It won't scale to the same size, won't be as nice etc, but it'll work. You can't do the same with Youtube.

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

#182

Post by zepolen »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #169
zepolen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one reason medium went down the hole and it's because it annoyed the fuck out of users by demanding sign up (and subscription) just to read content OTHERS had created on the platform. What the hell did they expect would happen? Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense. It has nothing to do with 1 and 2.…

The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.

That implies that NYTimes is thriving after their inclusion of paywall.

It's not.

It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch.

There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.

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

#183

Post by subarctic »

jklm wrote: post #75
michaelhoffman wrote: post #15

I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount of work. Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused, and afterwards, it meant…

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.

It's done that as long as I can remember - the "let me read it first" thing, right? Or did they change something recently?

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

#184

Post by bachmeier »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #122
Nifty3929 wrote: post #114

I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving something and being willing to pay for it are very different. The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a little money here and there, or otherwise find…

I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about right. Every startup needs to choose a business model eventually and we botched the rollout of ours. The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's congruent with anything else we were doing. Most notably, the subscriptio…

> But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles.

I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort into the article content as they put into getting me to click.

I hope you get it turned around; this is largely a market that isn't served. Subscribing to newsletters is pretty dang expensive with anything less than a FAANG salary.

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

#186

Post by tonystubblebine »

zepolen wrote: post #182
tonystubblebine wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.

That implies that NYTimes is thriving after their inclusion of paywall. It's not. It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch. There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.

The NYTimes digital subscription is doing north of $800M/year. That’s successful in my book.

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

#187

Post by safog »

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…

Thank you for being so candid. FWIW I think you are bang on with your assessment and I'm really hopeful that I can get back to using Medium again.

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

#188

Post by jddj »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #164
bburnett44 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thanks for your transparency but how do you go about fixing these problems? Like it's great to acknowledge them but the "Why NodeJS is dead" article was in the suggested sidebar for me yesterday

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…

You're almost certainly right, of course, and it's interesting how medium fell into the same cycle of amplifying junk. Netflix is another case study here of something where the incentives weren't as obvious as with advertising funded content but still fell into line.

But mainly I came here to note the irony of this frank, honest and useful discussion taking place under an "X is dead" headline of its own.

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

#189

Post by pjot »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #164
bburnett44 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thanks for your transparency but how do you go about fixing these problems? Like it's great to acknowledge them but the "Why NodeJS is dead" article was in the suggested sidebar for me yesterday

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).

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

#190

Post by Retric »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #169
zepolen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one reason medium went down the hole and it's because it annoyed the fuck out of users by demanding sign up (and subscription) just to read content OTHERS had created on the platform. What the hell did they expect would happen? Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense. It has nothing to do with 1 and 2.…

The NYTimes does it. And that's the thing think we got wrong: the pay off for what is behind the paywall has to be higher.

NYTimes is both vetted and timely which completely changes the value proposition.

Medium has a very different and inherently lower value proposition. It needs to get people to read and value old content.

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