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

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

#351

Post by 8bitsrule »

Everybody and their siblings is putting up 'Subscribe now' begging bowls. Who's going to do all that subscribing? Some of them show you a couple paragraphs, as if that was enough to get the purses open?

Give it up. Give. It. Up. Subscriptions were for the mailing of paper magazines a century ago. Back when, you know, the whole world wasn't opened-wide on the net. Who subscribes to non-org mags anymore?

The best podcasters have patreon accounts. Some even actually, and personally, thank contributors by name. People even send them stuff.

Or get a bunch of big-media companies to get some kind of micropayment options online. Not for the 2 paragraphs but the whole article. A quarter is not $5 but ten-thousand quarters a day might just keep you afloat.

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

#352

Post by suprjami »

Because it sold "legitimacy" of your blog as a subdomain.

Being a legit tech blogger is not about the domain, it is about having a significant repository of articles over many years, and for the majority of those articles to be at least insightful or entertaining, if not educational or maybe even introduce something completely novel.

You can't achieve that by signing up at a website which instantly nags its users to sign up to your mailing list. Substack sucks for the same reason.

If you want to be a legit tech blogger, get writing, and write well. See how you're going in a few years.

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

#353

Post by SPBS »

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…

> And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

Deboosting those content-mill authors is a good step! However changing the recommendation system is not enough. With Google, everyone interacts with it through the search box so them changing the search results is enough to influence what SEO junk is on the front page. But with Medium, anyone can promote their junk articles on Reddit and on other platforms and it will still result in a click and a paywall, which contributes to people avoiding medium.com links. You need to stop incentivizing these content-mill authors altogether (or prominently blackmark these posts/blogs so everyone knows to avoid them).

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

#354

Post by throwaway292939 »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #167
hbarka wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say that the hook and lede of Medium articles are very effective. They are sticky and grabs your interest. The frustration comes with the paywall. There must be another way, like a free summary (maybe use ChatGPT) that will compel me to pay.

Most other metered paywalls move the paywall much lower in the page. That would be a simple way--let you get 1/3 of the way so you are more confident in what you are getting. Or move the location of the paywall. In general though, we love being subscription driven rather than ad driven and I don't expect that to change.

Paywalls are difficult to get right.

For the consumer, it's very much not like "see 5 articles and now you got me as a subscriber".

I'm not sure what your ratio of free-to-premium content is, but I have a feeling it needs to skew more towards the free side to build engagement again. I hardly ever go on Medium now, but I used to a lot.

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

#355

Post by onlypositive »

thepasswordis wrote: post #340
TulliusCicero wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use site:reddit.com for recommendations, I just use a third party app for viewing (rif is fun, aka "reddit is fun").

How do you get weblinks to open in that app?

Three dots, open in app. You need something that is associated to those links for the menu option to show though. (Firefox)

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

#356

Post by nurettin »

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 stopped visiting the site after greedy publishers started to destroy links with useful information.

There should be a penalty for a free page going behind a paywall. Paywall pages also appear at the top of google searches because they were left there as a bait for indexing bots for months and then got paywalled. Not cool, medium.

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

#357

Post by encryptluks2 »

rkimb wrote: post #134
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…

Just wanted to say thanks for your transparency - very cool to see you here acknowledging the pain points head on and sharing your plan to address them.

These aren't even the real pain points. Most people using Medium aren't using it to discover new content. The CEO clearly has no clue what they are doing.

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

#358

Post by Jarwain »

j_crick wrote: post #282
j_crick wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue here might be of a more general nature. Would it be fair to say that we usually expect blogs to be free to read? I think yes, because that’s how it has been for some time -- somebody wants to share their thoughts, you want to read them, no money involved. Now, some people run paid newsletters, and can charge you for their content, and you pay them if you feel like you’re getting value out of it. Inv…

An afterthought: there are platforms with “bunch of bloggers” that we can pay money to, and they are called old school newspapers. But the implication remains: with the newspaper, you know what they do and what you pay money for. What does Medium want to get paid for without being a traditional newspaper, with all the things like editorial policy, journalistic standards (whatever they might be) and so on? To me it’s…

Based on what the CEO said, it sounds like they want to get paid for a recommendation engine that surfaces quality, substantial content. Upping the signal-to-noise ratio. Where traditional newspapers have editorial policy and journalistic standards, you could see that as an authoritative "these are the rules and follow them". I could see medium attempting a more 'free market system' where writers are incentivized to write quality content by getting views and money and the snuff sinks to the bottom. Essentially taking a more 'automated system of incentives' approach to try and fill that newspapery niche.

Especially with the consideration that traditional newspapers typically don't have niche content like programming articles.

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

#359

Post by binkHN »

sammnaser wrote: post #208
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 have been conditioned to expect low-effort, surface level, self promotion fluff when I click on a Medium article. The site feels like if Quora and LinkedIn had a baby. I don't know, maybe it's just because I mainly stick to programming posts, and nobody decent is using medium for those anymore (you just can't customize the articles well enough, format code like you want to, have any degree of interactivity). This h…

> The site feels like if Quora...

Sorry. Quora, to me, is beyond useless. Every once in a while I'll click on a Quora URL only to be let down again. One day I'll do the right thing and blacklist it on my local recursive DNS server so as not to be tempted and waste even more time in the future.

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

#360

Post by p1esk »

throwaway290 wrote: post #325
programmarchy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I have no patience for this type of shameless spamming anymore. One thing I hate about Medium is that it puts a paywall across everything, as if they’re The NY Times. If anything, I care about the author I’m reading, not Medium. With Substack I can subscribe to an individual author and they are the ones deciding what to paywall. Sure Substack gets a cut if I subscribe but that’s in the background.

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…

Medium is not Economist.
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