Too focus on monetizing. Just not worth the all the hassle to be there.
Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
411–420 of 567 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#412I'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…
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
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#413I'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…
my 50 cents, medium.com is a page I consciously avoid, a link to medium.com is a link I won't click.
medium.com has the feel of a dystopian internet that bugs you on every click. There is this classic Sci-Fi short story where the protagonist had to insert a coin in to the door to his apartment every time he wanted to use it. This is how medium has felt.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#414My main gripe is that the quality really has gone down. I see many people posting on stuff that just isn't worth blogging about. For example: https://tirthyakamaldasgupta12.medium.com/visualize-the-flow... How is this important? It's going the same way as the StackOverflow answers, which, like Quora, are being posts about self-promotion and filled with 'if this answer is correct please don't forget to mark it as such…
that actually had the seeds of a really good blog post in there - "you may not know about this, but there's a really cool tool called mermaid that can help you embed diagrams in your markdown files. if you don't see why that's so cool, here are some examples of readme.md files where a mermaid diagram really adds a lot of value". instead it decided to take a turn into a mermaid tutorial, which (a) already exists and (b) if the author wanted to write a better one this was not the venue or format for it. but really it was a failure of execution; the "here is something you might not have even realised was possible or desirable" bit is genuinely valuable.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#415I decided to run my startup's blog on Medium for two primary reasons:
1) Having someone else already put in the work to get a clean, readable design is a big win
2) The chief reason for blogging is to make people aware of the company. A self-hosted blog isn't realistically going to have the reach or discoverability of a dedicated service
But over time it's just got worse and worse.
1) The redesign is just weird. When it first hit I thought the logo image had failed to download properly. But turns out that's deliberate.
2) Dark patterns for subscriber-only content. It's really unclear when publishing whether the article is going to be hit by the paywall
3) Having login tied to Twitter is a business risk. I don't want to wake up one day to find space karen has broken signin and I can no longer access my company's blog
There's definitely room in the market for someone to come along and do blogging+discoverability better. Unfortunately I don't see Medium as having the chops to be that answer.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Substack's already starting to feel the same way; the incessant prompts to create an account and subscribe to something are the telltale first red flags heralding an intention to put monetization first and utility second.
I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this. A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.) Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement. I don't know what anal…
Quora is a shithole too. I remember 5-6 years ago I hung out in Quora because it high quality content from real experts. It was really interesting. Now it's nothing.
Websites (forums, mostly) have figured out they'll actually drive more traffic if they didn't have a sign-up wall.
The signup requirement is myopic, some PM looking into the data and doing some math they can make more $$$ per unique visit if they make them sign up, not realizing the long-term harm it creates because it drives the unique visits way down.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Substack's already starting to feel the same way; the incessant prompts to create an account and subscribe to something are the telltale first red flags heralding an intention to put monetization first and utility second.
I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this. A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.) Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement. I don't know what anal…
For me the bar is that a site has to work in incognito. That's how I open all links, so login is out of the question. Medium actually works very well that way, I didn't even know they still have the paywall -- or I might have disabled some scripts?
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#418It's the result of investment capital. They demand growth and this is more important than long term sustainability.
Some of us were around when people abandoned their blogs and moved to Medium and we predicted this back then. We predict this with substack too.
It's inevitable for all of these startup social sites.
The way these sites should now be used are as temporary and try to move your audience every few years.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NYTimes digital subscription is doing north of $800M/year. That’s successful in my book.
This is my impression as well, about NYT's business. The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now. Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's w…
I've been thinking about something related to internet paywalls.
In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.
Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.
I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.
Re: Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
#420Substack did recommend stuff to me, based on who I'm already subscribed to, but the recommendations were not great.