[HN Gopher] Why Medium Failed
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Why Medium Failed
Author : jamesdco
Score : 20 points
Date : 2022-07-25 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| vanillax wrote:
| Medium is great for IT related articles. Why is everyone
| complaining? Is there another source of good software
| dev/architecture articles that everyone is going to for quality
| content?
| indianhippie wrote:
| dev.to
| [deleted]
| dt2m wrote:
| 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...
| transfire wrote:
| Have they actually failed? Or are they headed for failure if they
| can't get things straightened out?
|
| My biggest issue with them is the low quality of so many
| articles. They have little to no "meat on the bones".
|
| Relatedly, I really don't understand why they never added syntax
| highlighting for block quotes so developers would feel more
| comfortable using their platform. Seems like a big missed
| opportunity.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| All blog platforms have garbage content
| dexwiz wrote:
| I will say, most of the articles I read that would have been on
| Medium 2 or 3 years ago, are now all on substack.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Did Medium actually fail? It seems pretty well used.
|
| I'll admit I never thought highly of it, it always came off as
| mediocre, but this article reads as FUD garbage. Kind of like a
| Medium article.
| dexwiz wrote:
| 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.
| q-big wrote:
| > No one wanted to invest in reading a 45 minute article
|
| Honestly, I was/am quite the opposite kind of person: I mostly
| went to Medium for this kind of long reads. When the articles
| typically became shorter, I became much less interested in
| reading them - as you described:
|
| > 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.
| dexwiz wrote:
| While I agree, long form content is almost exclusively
| better, it can be daunting. Medium was great as a quick
| scroll/dopamine hit, and long form goes against that. Also
| many long form articles are only made long via meandering
| threads, injected personal anecdotes, and literal filler.
| Strip that away, and it ends up closer to a Medium article.
| It takes great effort to write a long article that actually
| benefits from being long.
| ajtr wrote:
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