Why Medium Failed

I’m convinced Medium failed the second they considered themselves more than a blogging platform. Initially it was a very well designed blog as-a-service but they kept shovelling on features and wanted to be a destination in its own right.

If they removed the free tier and doubled down on providing a best-in-class white label blogging platform, they might not be in as bad a position as they are today.

Greed’s a motherfucker…

My list of reasons Medium failed.

- Their in-site discovery sucked. Like many users I would discovered Medium articles via external networks, but once on the site, I never found their "similar articles" feature to give my anything worthwhile. Also their editorialized recommendations seemed to have a hidden social-political agenda. But what media platform doesn't?

- Most of the content had quality barely above a tweetstorm. I think this was caused by the "time to read" metric. No one wanted to invest in reading a 45 minute article, so everything was 10 minutes or less. Turns out you can't say much in 10 minutes that wouldn't be a better Tweet. This lead to a race to the bottom in terms of article quality and length.

- No established writer had much incentive to leave their current platform and migrate to Medium. All other social media lets you cross promote your centralized publishing channel. But with Medium you had to commit to publishing on Medium. Discovery would be an incentive, but it wasn't great.

- The forced typography made all the articles blend together in readers' memory. You may remember the contents of a book, but you often remember the book itself. Typography and style help us differentiate sources in our minds. "Did I read that in a text book, or a news paper?" For Medium, everything looked the same. I have no proof, but I think that made all the articles seem very similar. Giving repeat readers a sense of "Not another Medium article," even when the content and author was completely different. Obviously MySpace style pages would be bad, but even a preset list of themes would have helped differentiate authors.

- They implemented subscriptions, but missed the corresponding publications. If I am going to subscribe, I either want it to be directly to a creator (Patreon/Twitch), or I want a regular publications that include multiple authors (classic magazine/newspaper). Medium tried to mix them together, but as it was advertised it just seemed like a bulk subscription that lacked a managed publication. It wasn't immediately obvious I could direct that to specific creators. Medium should have just allowed content specific subscriptions and skimmed off the top like everyone else. Forcing a subscription at the front door was equivalent to the Wall Street Journal paywell, without the guaranteed content behind it.

----------------

> On the high end, well funded digital publishers from BuzzFeed to Vice to the Atlantic excelled at publishing high-quality journalism.

That's a hot take. I would never classify BuzzFeed as high quality, and Vice is dubious. The Atlantic had great brand name. In school, I was told explicitly by a teacher that carrying an Atlantic is a great way to virtue signal intelligence. Maybe that comment carried more sarcasm than I remember. Their long form articles were great, but recent issues only carry 1 or 2 of these. Their online publications are barely above the rest of mainstream news.

[dead]

dev.to

All blog platforms have garbage content