Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 567 posts

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

#451

Post by berniedurfee »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #284
thepasswordis wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is doing everything they can to kill it though. It's gone from habitually including site:reddit.com in every google search to actively avoiding it on mobile. I'm not going to install the app. Ever. I will never, ever, ever install reddit's app. No amount of nagging me will ever get me to install it ever.

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

Is that Apollo for Reddit on the iOS app store?

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

#452

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

> 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 like a cash cow. Like they're grasping at straws desperate to get some cash. They don't understand the user-hostility of this and that's important because the users are their resources.

And as far as the NYT and Economist, I avoid those too. If I really think something is worth reading I'll use a paywall bypass tool but generally I don't even bother.

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

#453

Post by wkat4242 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #440
wkat4242 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's the problem. I don't want a newsletter, I want a blog. And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.

Genuine question. Isn’t HN what you are looking for then? What else would you need from a blog?

Good question!

I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture. The reading format is also not suitable for long form, and it makes the post text kinda grey which makes it even harder to read.

So, no. The community is great but it's not a blogging platform. I could self host my blog and post links here for discovery but self-promotion is generally frowned upon. I don't want to abuse the community.

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

#454

Post by JeremyNT »

inerte wrote: post #295
thepasswordis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally it. Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down. Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant? That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.

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?

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

#455

Post by berniedurfee »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #201
vouaobrasil wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge difference between the NYTimes and Medium. For readers, the content on Medium is fungible: if it goes away today, it's easily replaceable by the 100 other user driven sites like it. I'm not saying that the content on Medium is bad, but it's easily replaceable. The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscripti…

The best of Medium is better than the best of the NYTimes and isn’t fungible at all. That’s not refuting what you see. To get those gems you see too many me too articles. You are right.

Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter. The NYT is THE NYT and Medium is just another Quora/Pinterest/rando website.

Medium has not earned the right to paywall content, the NYT has, apparently.

You need to find another way.

Maybe a pay by the drink subscription model.

Put a button on each article so I can decide how much I want to pay, with zero as an option.

Put a little counter at the top so I can see how much I’ve spent this month and how much has gone to authors vs the company.

If the content is that good, people will pay, I know I would. But I ain’t paying monthly for something I don’t use regularly and I ain’t paying to read something based on a title.

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

#457

Post by benjaminsky2 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #177
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 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 been planning to move elsewhere but have been lazy. I’ve noticed from my readership numbers that I’m not alone.

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

#458

Post by Cheezewheel »

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…

>Yes, but only because they are aggressively making their reading experience terrible. I'd argue that a WordPress site with the default template is less offensive at this point. The typography and layout on Medium is fine, it's the popups, nags, paywall, and the like. For a while there was a lovely extension called "Make Medium Readable Again" but they aggressively broke that too. I'm happy to let Medium fall off the tech community radar.

Honest question, how can you, on one hand, link to the previous discussion surrounding the stigma of being a "medium.com" article, but fail to address the literal top response to both that thread and even the top response to your own comment? Is it one of those "CEO's are not allowed to speak plainly in public" things or do you not parse/agree with the information?

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

#459

Post by tonystubblebine »

plaguepilled wrote: post #286
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…

One thing you missed was the content ownership relationship between an author and their article. Articles posted originally on Medium are partially owned by Medium, which is a big reason why I do not use the service myself.

100% not true. Authors retain their copyright and can revoke their content from our site at any point.

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

#460

Post by tonystubblebine »

robfitz wrote: post #427
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…

Any chance you've written more about the system design and incentives side of it somewhere (whether about medium in particular, a previous biz, or just the mechanisms in general)? If so, I'd absolutely love to dig in... It's got big overlap w/ some stuff I'm trying to figure out for building useful communities, and it's not so common to find folks with a deep view on it ;)

No. But you could email me.
Post reply on HN