[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
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Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
Medium.com is still up and running so it hasn't failed exactly, but
it's not the best platform to go to anymore when it comes to
blogging. The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm
reading the same posts over and over again. Not to mention the
stupid paywall which is infuriating. Why did Medium end up like
this? In the beginning it was pretty good but then it started to
wither. Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with
high quality posts while also paying their writers well? Substack
has done a good job at competing in the blogging market but it's
different from Medium. Medium is more of a social blogging platform
while Substack is more of a newsletter platform. Substack doesn't
have an algorithm that recommends you content, but instead shows
you exactly who you follow. This is nice, but I can't deny that I
also like finding new content through a recommendation engine,
which Medium _also_ sucks at.
Author : slymerson
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-02-10 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
| dhbradshaw wrote:
| If you punish me every time I follow a link to your site, I may
| learn to avoid following links to your site.
|
| Medium changed from reader-friendly to reader-hostile over time.
| amelius wrote:
| Because users who read stuff actually want to turn on their
| brain, rather than turn it off like on YT. This means users can't
| get caught in an endless downward spiral of bad content, and are
| happy to look elsewhere for interesting content.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| It was nice at first but as usual it had to satisfy the
| shareholders/VC profit margin and for something as mundane as a
| blog platform, this means annoying the users at unacceptable
| levels. So the readers fled, and so did now the content creators.
|
| Lets see how long Substack will take to wither away...
| ghaff wrote:
| One factor is that I think Medium, at one point, lent a certain
| gravitas (in the minds of some) to people publishing there. It
| was more like a magazine article or a book than a personal blog.
| I'd cross-post there if my company wanted to link to content I
| had written independently.
|
| Was never true of course.
|
| At some point, I stopped bothering.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It did not fail. Medium blogs still generate a lot of traffic. I
| think rather it got superseded by Substack. Substack has a few
| benefits over medium, such as being less inclined to censor and
| writers having more control over payouts and subscribers.
| slymerson wrote:
| Why is it less inclined to censor?
|
| Also, true. They do have more control over their payouts.
| topynate wrote:
| The proximate cause is that Substack was founded by people
| less likely to censor, who have so far kept control of the
| company. It _may_ be more meaningful to say that Substack was
| founded in 2017, and Medium was founded in 2012, and the sort
| of censorship we 're talking about was much more salient in
| 2017 than in 2012, so Substack was in some sense selected to
| be more against that sort of censorship.
| ricwri wrote:
| Medium doesn't allow you to keep people who like your work
| invested.
| nostromo wrote:
| It's a common story.
|
| A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots
| of money.
|
| Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want
| a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to
| increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.
|
| But these features often poison the user experience. Even as
| numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as
| users eventually defect.
|
| Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and
| YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users
| left.
| paxys wrote:
| Exactly this. Medium was great at what it did, but having
| raised $160M+ in funding and being valued at several billion
| dollars they simply could not continue to be a simply blogging
| platform while also making enough money to keep investors
| happy. And all their bets to become profitable just ended up
| alienating their users and writers.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| Never had a valuation that high.
| slymerson wrote:
| that's very true
| michaelteter wrote:
| It got stuffed full of low quality content, much of which felt
| like assignments from developer boot-camp students... and then
| the paywall arrived.
|
| So paying (or registering) for access to view content which was
| likely to be fluff wasn't attractive.
|
| There was definitely some valuable content on Medium, but it was
| lost in a sea of noise.
| slymerson wrote:
| i only see posts from freecodecamp and other organizations now,
| it sucks. medium back in the day had some great posts.
| joelrunyon wrote:
| Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT
| in terms of blogging platforms. It's
|
| 1) Easy to setup
|
| 2) Incredibly SEO friendly
|
| 3) Most importantly: you own your content.
|
| Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like -
| but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup.
|
| Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you
| need help, you can even get it set up for you for free -
| https://startablog.com/free-blog
| smt88 wrote:
| No one here hates WordPress because people use it for blogging.
| We hate it because other people use it as a complex, insecure,
| messy, un-versioned CMS that some of us had to inherit.
|
| It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else
| people do with it.
| robswc wrote:
| Seeing what "low-code" people can accomplish with WordPress
| is both horrifying and amazing.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Self-promotion spam aside, all of those points are stronger
| arguments for static site genetation like with Jekyll or Hugo.
| There, the site is faster _and_ you don 't have to pay much
| hosting fees if any.
| [deleted]
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yup. I think a better question that _everyone_ should be asking,
| is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all
| the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other
| "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow
| people to share information."
| lemax wrote:
| Wikipedia is not for profit, the incentives are incomparable.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| There's no competition for Wikipedia yet. As soon as search is
| killed by AI and AI starts providing answers of similar quality
| without driving traffic to sources, Wikipedia will either
| completely fade to irrelevance or will be quasi-acquired by AI
| providers, which will see it as a training ground for AI and
| fund it on such terms that allow this use case.
| jake_morrison wrote:
| Some writers were attracted to Medium because it was easy get
| started. It was frustrating to me as a reader, because I was
| getting enough links there each month to hit the limit. I wished
| that writers would just set up their own site, which is also
| better for building their personal brand.
|
| One interesting aspect of the Medium business model is that it
| can really deliver money for writers who get a lot of traffic.
| Medium effectively shares some part of the paid user
| subscriptions with all the sites they visit. So if you only visit
| one site in a month, they get all the money for that month. If
| that's a popular post, the writer might make a lot of money. But
| it depends on the subscriber not visiting many sites.
|
| There is a theory that people will discover the writer's content
| just because it's on Medium, but that's certainly not how I find
| things. I follow links from social media or web searches.
|
| If a writer consistently has a lot of good content, they will
| make more money at Substack, as they keep a larger percentage.
|
| So the business model of users having a subscription to Medium as
| a destination site for discovery doesn't work particularly well.
| It doesn't benefit writers with consistently good content, and it
| doesn't benefit readers. So you end up with medium-value content
| that might get a windfall. It's kind of an SEO game.
|
| Reminds me that I have hardly seen any interesting links to
| Medium lately, and I should cancel my subscription.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for
| free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving
| something and being willing to pay for it are very different.
|
| The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe
| earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and
| everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a
| little money here and there, or otherwise find some way to
| monetize.
|
| Then the site realizes that all those users that love them so
| much, don't really love them enough to pay or to tolerate other
| irritating forms of monetization.
|
| So then the site has a choice: A. Continue losing money forever
| B. Keep up the monetization efforts, despite knowingly irritating
| and losing your customers, partners, content producers, etc.
|
| And most reasonably choose option B, even though they know it's
| the death knell.
| teach wrote:
| "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their
| users; then they abuse their users to make things better for
| their business customers; finally, they abuse those business
| customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they
| die."
|
| from TikTok's Enshittification[0] by Cory Doctorow
|
| [0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about
| what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about
| right. Every startup needs to choose a business model
| eventually and we botched the rollout of ours.
|
| The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough
| to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's
| congruent with anything else we were doing.
|
| Most notably, the subscription implies that we have some
| premium content to share. But instead of incentivizing premium
| content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to
| flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles.
| Of course, that's not what we set out to do. But it's
| effectively what happened. I'm partly through reversing it.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Two main reasons, IMO:
|
| 1. At a point, Medium stopped adding value to blog posts and
| their network, to the point that they had to strongarm some of
| the larger networks to try and stay on their platform (e.g.
| FreeCodeCamp) and failed. Currently, Medium's best value
| proposition is long-tail SEO which just encourages more low-
| quality content.
|
| 2. In general, the long-form content landscape has shifted more
| toward short-form content in terms of things like Twitter and
| TikTok. Even Substack, which is a reasonable Medium alternative
| and superior if trying to build a readerbase, hasn't received as
| much buzz as it did years ago.
| slymerson wrote:
| Long form content will become more niche, at least when it
| comes to text. I prefer long form reading content over short
| form content so it's nice having platforms like Substack and
| Medium, but IMO there needs to be something better. I would
| love a new social blogging platform that actually does well at
| showing you content you'd enjoy AND that ensures the posts are
| quality.
|
| Easier said than done I imagine.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This made me sad. Long form content is the content I get the
| most value from. Short-form is largely pointless.
| slymerson wrote:
| I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to
| be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form
| content. Everything points towards short form content being
| the biggest thing while long form content and text content
| becomes niche.
| robswc wrote:
| This sounds like terribly "old-fashioned" thinking... at
| the same time, not everything new is good. I'm afraid
| you're right though. Seems short form is destroying
| attention spans across the board. I even notice it in
| myself.
| idlewords wrote:
| The short answer is that the founder is an introverted guy who
| sort of weathervanes around when it comes to his vision for the
| product, he had enough prior success to get lots of funding for
| his project, and there was no one with enough authority to say
| "no" to his shifting ideas or replace him with a more effective
| boss.
|
| You see this pattern a lot with successful people. Nassim
| Nicholas Taleb is a brilliant guy, but his later books are
| unreadable because he won't consent to have an editor. Your
| favorite band takes five years to release a follow-up to their
| breakthrough album. Pundits get a sinecure at a major news outlet
| on the strength of their insightful thinking and then start
| producing drivel.
|
| Ev Williams had the misfortune of being given a limitless budget
| and the freedom to realize his vision. Medium with three
| developers and a half million dollar budget might have been
| unstoppable.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| How's the new management doing?
| slymerson wrote:
| interesting point
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I remember seeing a few medium posts on Hacker News a few years
| ago. They all had good tone management; but when read with a
| critical eye, they were factually incorrect or had poor
| comprehension of the subject matter.
|
| It got the point where, if I saw "medium.com" next to a link I'd
| think, "oh, that's a medium post" and not open it. If I
| accidentally opened a Medium post, I'd close it immediately
| without reading it.
|
| "Medium.com" is a stamp of mediocracy, IMO. I just won't read
| them.
| patrick451 wrote:
| I agree that "medium.com" is a stamp of mediocrity, and I tend
| to have the same kneejerk reaction to never read something
| posted there.
|
| However, I'm not sure I agree about the good tone management.
| There's always been something about medium and most of the
| articles there that is sort of cringe. It feels kind of like
| linkedin, where everything is superficial self-promotion,
| everybody is "thrilled" (a word only used in linkedin posts
| when you change jobs), and there's too many exclamation points
| everywhere. None if it feels raw or authentic.
|
| Part of this ties into the low technical quality you mention:
| after reading the n-th generic, un-insightful description of a
| Kalman filter on medium, you get the sense that grad students
| are only posting this stuff to build a following, i.e., for the
| clout.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| You aren't alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222
| stuaxo wrote:
| The push for growth killed everything good about it.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Free Digital Media "Platforms" are unprofitable
|
| Look what happened to:
|
| 1. Gawker
|
| 2. The Awl and The Hairpin
|
| 2. PolicyMic
|
| 3. Vice subsidiaries like Refinery29
|
| It's funny, all these places tried to reinvent the tech stack
| too. I remember Medium being a clojure shop
| slymerson wrote:
| Can't Medium generate revenue through ads? They have the
| network effects so they should be able to place ads on the
| website to keep it running like the other social platforms do.
| They could even split the ad revenue with writers.
|
| Just ideas.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The current economics of ads on the internet are such at
| "just add ads" is no longer viable alone like it was a decade
| ago.
|
| That's why nearly every content creator that normally relies
| on ads has additional revenue sources. (Patreon/Sponsorships)
| y42 wrote:
| If they would add ads, writers would ask for a revenue, too.
| If they'd do that, they would ask for a fair share,
| considering their amount of contribution. Means: how many
| articles they write. And with that you are back to the status
| quo. Dropping "get rich fast posts" and soul-less "top x
| lists".
| jyriand wrote:
| Because writers have to write for the lowest denominator.
|
| edit: spelling
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no -- in previous eras, the brand name of the publication built
| expectation from the readers. If you want long form, high brow
| content then you look for it; if you are browsing for
| entertainment and not an intellectual, then ad-filled
| publications are pushed at you.. lots in between with topic-
| focused publications. The magazine rack of 1984 has not been
| replaced and readers are suffering for it... IMO
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Speaking about the technical content: it seemed to max out at
| intermediate-level content, at best. And then trended downward
| down towards beginner-level content after writers started racing
| to get paid.
| hardware2win wrote:
| For me medium posts are boring
|
| I mean they all look the same (visually)
| slymerson wrote:
| Yeah there isn't much variety. There would have to be some way
| to make the app "pop" more so that it gives it life. What would
| you recommened?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| First off, I do get recommendations from substack whenever I
| subscribe to a substack It gives me a recommendation list.
|
| I'll take your question even further back: Why did Blogger drop
| the ball? Was it just that Google lost interest? (most likely,
| google loses interest pretty quickly - it's kind of an ADHD
| company)
| drummer wrote:
| Censorship
| slymerson wrote:
| Why does that happen? Why can't Medium allow writers to publish
| whatever they want without being worried of censorship?
| Phanyxx wrote:
| My view on it: 1. Paywall 2. Algorithm rewarded hyperbolic / echo
| chamber posts 3. Changing content consumption tastes
| y42 wrote:
| Any "service" that offers money for content will fail eventually.
|
| Take most news portals: they fill their sites with "news" to
| favor search engines, to deploy ads or affiliate links.
|
| Take search engines itself: They lead to SEO which leads to
| "silly" and packed "WordPress" like websites whose only goal is
| to drop affiliate links.
|
| And so on....
| ptudan wrote:
| Youtube? Tiktok? Twitch?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| To be fair, YouTube does have a serious problem with millions
| of dud, autogenerated content videos trying to game the
| algorithm to generate ad cash.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| 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 recommendations. When I showed up the company
| was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and
| it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your
| recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that
| made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical
| example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with
| zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so
| did authors. 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.
|
| 2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should
| have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning
| value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to
| find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone
| with something great to say had a chance to get their story
| boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in
| publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming
| books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics,
| personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but
| by definition full time content creation gets in the way of
| having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are
| partly through fixing this and #1. About 30% of our
| recommendations are coming through a new, more substance-oriented
| recommendation system and individual articles are now getting
| meaningful boosts again.
|
| Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer
| list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our
| own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started
| but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't
| get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are
| putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.
|
| What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit
| to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I
| still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that
| it'll be worthwhile.
| rkimb wrote:
| 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.
| reso wrote:
| Lots of answers point to the user experience of Medium becoming
| worse. This misses the bigger picture: the economics of free blog
| hosting don't work.
|
| V1 of Medium was great because they weren't concerned with
| monetization. The product was built fully in the interests of the
| user. Once the company grew, they saw that the bottom line was
| not sustainable, and so started adding features that would
| possibly increase revenue. These features were built in the
| company's interest, not the user's interest, so the user
| experience got worse.
|
| This isn't their fault, it's just a fact of business. People
| wouldn't pay enough to make the project worthwhile (either
| directly or indirectly in the form of ads/other monetization
| avenues).
|
| Maybe Substack has found a different model that genuinely does
| work, or maybe they will follow a similar trajectory to Medium.
| joegahona wrote:
| I agree that UX complaints miss the bigger picture. Lots of the
| highest-traffic sites have terrible UX. Lots of people will put
| up with poor UX if it delivers the content/product they want.
| Poor UX does not help -- but it's not the main failing of
| Medium, in my opinion.
|
| Medium has been plagued with endless "pivots" -- not sure if it
| was wimpy yes-men who had to give in to every U-turn from the
| founder or if it was just fundamentally bad ideas. They also
| let the Substack idea pass them by, which can only be described
| as embarrassing.
|
| On the other hand, your point about Medium flailing away trying
| different features to add to the bottom line is poignant. Very
| few written-content publications have figured out monetization.
| There's always a tension between ads, which yuck up the
| experience, and paywalls, which hobble virility and penalize
| your most passionate users.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think a big part of it is that users/readers understandably
| feel that a bait-and-switch has happened. Because it has.
|
| I really think the whole idea of "make it free at first,
| monetize later" is what's broken. If the intention is
| ultimately to have it generate revenue, the best thing to do is
| set up the revenue mechanism right from the start.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Agreed. Many people who have the means don't mind paying for
| things that bring them value, and they would much rather just
| pay for consistency than have that value eroded over time.
| joegahona wrote:
| Good example: The Information.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Well, they can start free, get 1M users, and then try to
| monetize.
|
| Or they can charge up front, get zero users, and then find
| something else to do with their time.
| izacus wrote:
| Or you know... bootstrap a non-predatory sustainable
| business. If anyone even knows how to do that in 2020s.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Long time ago, seeing medium.com links made me think "oh nice, a
| clean reading experience ahead".
|
| Soon afterwards, it switched to "oh no, not this annoying site
| again".
|
| I would be surprised to see it thrive.
| lmedinas wrote:
| I have a love and hate relationship with Medium.com. On one hand
| has a very nice design and it was is really nice and comfortable
| to read. On the other hand limiting the amount of reads per month
| while putting that stupid popup to read is absolutely dumb.
| legitster wrote:
| There are extremely low barriers to entry. Both against becoming
| a Medium blogger, and against companies putting together
| competing platforms to draw talent. So you are left with a pretty
| diluted pool of content.
|
| Substack isn't a technology platform - it's a business model.
| They paid a bunch of well known writers a bunch of money to come
| to their platform and it paid off. I think they have wisely bet
| that there is no shortage of content on the internet, and
| focusing on curation is more important than access.
| Lazare wrote:
| > Substack isn't a technology platform - it's a business model.
| They paid a bunch of well known writers a bunch of money to
| come to their platform and it paid off. I think they have
| wisely bet that there is no shortage of content on the
| internet, and focusing on curation is more important than
| access.
|
| I would say Substack is both a technology platform _and_ a
| business model, but I think the point you 're making is the
| technology platform is very simple and easy to replicate, so
| not the focus of their success or lack of it? Which I'd agree
| with.
|
| What I would not agree with is that Substacks business model
| has anything to do with _curation_. I do subscribe to a couple
| of writers on Substack, but my decision to subscribe to each
| was independent of the fact that the other one was on Substack,
| or who else was on Substack. The Substack brand isn 't _reader_
| facing at all.
|
| And in fact, Substack doesn't actually do curation. Anyone can
| sign up, and when they were signing their advance deals, they
| were fairly clearly offering them to anyone who their models
| predicted would bring in enough subscribers to bring a profit.
| Which in turn later harmed them, as people imputed some sort of
| editorial opinion to the deals.
|
| In short, I'd say their suceeding so far because of their
| business model. but the business model is that there's a lot of
| content out there that people are willing to pay for, so
| they'll offer a technology platform with zero curation that
| lets people pay for content.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| This whole thing reminds me of this comment when Tumblr "died":
|
| "I think the real problem here is that big media corporations
| seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and
| persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it's
| demonstrated to be wrong.
|
| There's a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over
| (and over) again, and it looks something like this:
|
| 1. Social media platform becomes popular
|
| 2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in
| order to gain access to it large user base
|
| 3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform's
| demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things
| to.
|
| 4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away
| "undesirable" users, apparently in the honest belief that the
| outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number
| of new, more demographically desirable users
|
| 5. This does not, in fact, occur
|
| 6. Social media platform crashes and burns
|
| You'd think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one
| person who's capable of learning from experience would become
| involved in this whole process at some point."
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I used to host my blog on Medium because it was the easiest way
| to get a simple, attractive blog available with a minimum amount
| of work.
|
| Then they started adding various annoyances, which I'm sure they
| thought would help with financial goals, but it eliminated the
| "simple, attractive" part. As a reader, seeing that a link went
| to medium.com used to mean it was easy-to-read and text-focused,
| and afterwards, it meant that it would be full of intrusive crap
| one would have to deal with before reading. To the point that
| people started making [special browser
| extensions](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-
| medium-readab...) just to remove them.
|
| As a writer, whose main interest is in people reading my stuff
| (rather than, say, monetization), I wanted to move it somewhere
| where the readers would not be annoyed and maybe refuse to click
| on the link in the first place because of the domain.
|
| I'm sure the above describes many others' experiences as well.
| binaryanomaly wrote:
| https://hashnode.com/ is close to what medium used to be, I
| suppose. Hope it will stay like that.
| judahmeek wrote:
| Is there a way to confirm whether hashnode is VC-funded or
| not?
|
| Because if it is VC-funded, enshittification is inevitable.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's VC funded, but maybe Salesforce and Sequoia don't care
| about investor return (ha): https://www.crunchbase.com/orga
| nization/hashnode/company_fin...
| jklm wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Substack is heading down the same
| direction - when you get linked to an article, it now forces a
| full screen popup on you asking if you want to subscribe or
| just read.
| drc500free wrote:
| Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because
| their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not
| a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up
| are annoying though.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone
| egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be
| tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for
| quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for
| that short sighted nonsense
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This would be a good service for the Wikimedia Foundation
| to provide, IMO.
| Permit wrote:
| > never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the
| golden eggs
|
| Isn't the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People
| don't want to pay and people don't want ads. Where would
| you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?
| dark__paladin wrote:
| Where did you move to? Self hosting?
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| Static Pelican site hosted on bitbucket.io. I'd use GitHub
| Pages if I were doing it today.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| https://bearblog.dev seems like a good alternative for simple,
| clean, good looking blogs. Prioritizes quick loading and
| efficient web design.
| CM30 wrote:
| Ah Medium. Ignoring the technical and business issues caused by
| ever heavier pages, unavoidable paywalls, etc, the main reason it
| failed was simple:
|
| Because it attracted an audience that didn't care for quality,
| and saw blogging as a 'get rich quick' scheme.
|
| And that's something that tends to happen whenever a service
| provides a way to 'monetise' user created content without any
| sort of quality filter. The people who write/make content about
| things they care about get flooded out by folks jumping on the
| bandwagon and trying to get to make easy money.
|
| Hence all the vapid lifestyle garbage and beginner tutorials for
| basic tech topics and political rants and whatever else. The
| folks writing them didn't have anything meaningful to say, but
| wanted to become full time bloggers making money on the internet.
|
| You can see this in a lot of fields in general too. Amazon
| lowered the requirements for selling there, so it became flooded
| with dropshippers and questionable companies selling dubious or
| counterfeit products. YouTube allows you to make money from your
| work, so in addition to all the great creators, you see a lot of
| scammers, thieves and people trying to make a quick buck from
| controversy content.
|
| See also Steam (with lots of asset flips and questionably done
| games), the iOS and Android app stores and (in real life) Airbnb.
|
| As for why Medium failed when the others didn't on a finacial
| level/popularity level?
|
| Because unfortunately, it's really hard to get people to pay for
| text based content, and (fortunately) equally hard to get authors
| to stick with your platform when it goes to crap.
|
| YouTube sticks around because it's free and videos take up a lot
| of disc space, bandwidth, etc. The app stores and most gaming
| ones stick around because it's often the only way for users of
| those products to play your games/use your apps, at least without
| a decent amount of technical knowledge and jailbreaking. Amazon
| has a kick ass logistics network and brand recognition on par
| with Google or Facebook (and running your own online shop is more
| finicky/expensive than hosting blog posts).
|
| What exactly does Medium have?
|
| Not much, hence all the folks who genuinely care about what
| writing can (and did) go elsewhere, whereas the folks who want
| easy money still cling to it like a lottery ticket that might
| potentially work out in some universe or another.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Medium content turned more click bait because of the readership
| model and made it less popular
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Substack stole their thunder.
|
| Superficially Substack looks a lot like Medium, to the point
| where I'd say Substack was forced to prove it was something much
| better than Medium from the very beginning.
|
| Substack gets much better engagement with subscribers because
| each Substacker has to earn each subscription. A Substacker can
| get a passionate audience that rewards good writing.
|
| Substack though has the serious problem that somebody can make
| their own email newsletter + credit card gateway script for
| $20,000 or less so the kind of person who makes $1,000,000 a year
| on Substack can go their own way and keep more money. Substack
| makes almost all their money off two handfuls of writers so
| having the best ones walk out is a constant threat -- they are
| saying "we aren't a mailing list company" and would like to have
| a richer engagement platform, like OnlyFans, that substackers
| would find harder to replicate, but it's never easy to get people
| who play game A interested in playing game B, and if they do play
| game B they are as likely to do it on a "best of breed" platform
| for that game.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Substack has no paywalls, and Medium does. Makes sense why they
| took over.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Substack is literally a paywall as a service platform for
| indie writers.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm
| reading the same posts over and over again.
|
| Not just that, but more and more writers are writing long-form
| analyses of events and topics which have been thoroughly analyzed
| elsewhere, long ago. Not really adding anything new.
|
| Some of their most popular authors are legitimately regurgitating
| the same talking points over and over again. If you read a dozen
| articles from Umair Haque, you'll have read the basic talking
| points of every article he's likely to write.
|
| But - it seems to work I guess. Lots of youtubers get popular the
| same way - by generating the same basic content over and over
| again, with slight changes. As long as they do so frequently,
| they maintain their viewers. Granted if you're a cute girl
| dancing, it's a lot easier to get away with than if you're
| writing 800 words about how America is a failed state.
| groffee wrote:
| For me I followed programming posts etc but they went from high
| quality to things like 'how to turn your computer on' and just
| the most basic shit imaginable, the flood of garbage drowned out
| any good posts.
| jyriand wrote:
| When medium decided that, as a writer, you need to have at least
| 100 followers to be able to get paid, the rules of the game
| changed. All I saw was articles about how to get your first 100
| followers and how somebody made lots of money writing on medium.
| Clickbait titles, follow-back culture.
| slymerson wrote:
| Good points
| aintgonnatakeit wrote:
| When Medium instituted their paywall they enshittified the user
| experience.
| slymerson wrote:
| 100%. That was the worst mistake Medium made.
| Lazare wrote:
| I agree that it feels like Medium failed, but I think it's hard
| to say exactly why because it's hard to say exactly what Medium
| failed _at_.
|
| Several iterations of their (often changing) business model
| seemed to focus around creating a high-prestige magazine (or
| close equivalent). And for a period of time, it seemed to be
| working; the Medium domain was often a sign that I was going to
| read something interesting and insightful, to the extent that I
| would be _more_ likely to follow a link to Medium than to a
| domain I didn 't recognise.
|
| But launching a magazine is expensive; it requires money for high
| quality content, _and_ money to pay for the editorial staff to
| run it. (And although I don 't think Medium suffered from this
| especially, when that editorial staff makes editorial decisions,
| you run the risk of being sucket into the culture war, and the
| moment you deeply offend a large fraction of your audience
| because you censored/refused to censor Topic X, your economics
| suddenly get much much worse.)
|
| And as a host of existing magazines have found out recently,
| there's no _money_ in running a magazine anyhow, which I imagine
| explains why the quality of Medium content fell off a cliff, even
| as they started more and more aggressively trying to monetize
| things.
|
| Adding to that, the UI was passable to start with, but actively
| deteriorated under their monetization efforts. At certain times,
| arriving at an article hosted on Medium with a small screensize
| could result in your browser being overwhelmingly filled with
| Medium UI, with little or no actual content visible.
|
| If the content isn't reliably good, and the UX is reliably bad,
| what's left?
|
| > Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with
| high quality posts while also paying their writers well?
|
| I think there is, it's just fantastically hard. If you look
| around, there are a small handful of newspapers, magazines, etc.
| that are still suceeding, putting out content while paying the
| bills. So it's like asking "can my home town paper be
| economically viable?" On the one hand, _yes_ , the NYT has done
| it, so your local paper can too! On the other hand, 99% of
| newspapers are disasterous failures, and your local paper
| probably isn't going to be the NYT.
|
| It's worth underlining the _incredible_ ambition of what Medium
| wanted to do (in most of their business models anyhow). Failure
| wasn 't inevitable, but it wasn't surprising.
|
| (Also, the constant pivoting probably didn't help.)
| trieste92 wrote:
| - UI has progressively gotten more bloated
|
| - too many articles that read like they were written by an LLM
|
| - the service provided is easily replaceable
|
| At least substack has a niche with conservatives. Medium, not so
| much
| chx wrote:
| That's a strange characterization because none of my substacks
| are anywhere near being conservative.
| trieste92 wrote:
| Substack having a notable conservative presense doesn't imply
| that all or even most are conservative
| comte7092 wrote:
| It seems to have become a meme because a handful of notable
| conservatives made a big stink about moving from traditional
| media to sub stack, and liberal Twitter followed on by
| attempting to paint substack as the gab of publishing or
| something.
|
| I agree with you, it's far from a conservative platform. It's
| more so a challenge to traditional media, which I think is
| threatening to the prominent news types on Twitter.
| slymerson wrote:
| good points
| Lazare wrote:
| Funny, I subscribe to three Substacks, and they're all left
| wing, in one case being written by an avowed Marxist.
|
| Tell me more about this niche?
| awinter-py wrote:
| their payment model is really strange
|
| (I looked into this a while ago, may have changed)
|
| I think you get paid in some inscrutable formula of '% of
| subscription revenue when someone reads your post and then
| subscribes'
|
| like based on some cursed attribution model
|
| it also has a CMS technology that loads a visible page, then does
| a bunch of FOUC nonsense, probably messes with my scroll in some
| way -- heavy + awful presentation tech
| mkl95 wrote:
| Medium.com has great SEO but terrible UX. Loved by people who
| post their stuff there, loathed by readers. It succeeded because
| it was one of the few free traditional blogging platforms of its
| era. Many Medium users were kids when blogger was popular, so
| they don't know any better.
| ploum wrote:
| They went completely crap on every single aspect. See the source
| code of a page that call itself "minimalist".
|
| Then see their business model...
|
| (I wrote about it 6 years ago: https://ploum.net/an-open-pay-
| wall-has-medium-lost-its-mind/... )
| slymerson wrote:
| Great blog. You made good points and I'm sure many of us feel
| the same way.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know in the big picture. Here's my personal experience,
| though.
|
| I never really thought that Medium was an attractive place. It
| had so many annoyances about it that I didn't develop a regular
| habit of going there. Then, at some point, it became even worse
| with paywalling and other additional irritations. I rarely even
| follow links to Medium anymore.
|
| The actual writing quality was OK at first, but it also
| plummeted.
| slymerson wrote:
| interesting. i wish there was a social blogging platform that
| had interesting posts to learn about things, and a way to
| compensate writers without ruining the whole experience.
| zem wrote:
| cory doctorow has codified this precisely in his theory of
| "enshittification":
|
| 8<------------------------------
|
| Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users;
| then they abuse their users to make things better for their
| business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers
| to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
|
| I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable
| consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing
| how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a
| "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and
| sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-
| larger share of the value that passes between them.
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
| xnx wrote:
| Terrific and succinct observation. How does competition not
| prevent this? Does lock-in prevent competition? e.g. Medium's
| suck-factor will always hover at the level where it's just not
| quite worth it to use something else if you already have many
| posts on Medium. New users will still pick Medium because it
| sucks, but is still popular/accepted.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The remarkable thing about Medium was that it went downhill
| so quickly, or, compared to other platforms like Twitter, it
| started trying to make money early in the process of
| gathering an audience, which limited it's growth.
|
| In my mind it never had a good reputation. Successful
| blogging has three elements: (1) writing a lot, (2)
| technically running your blog, and (3) promoting your blog.
| In principle Medium took (2) and (3) out of your hands so you
| could focus on (1) but I think Medium attracted a person who
| was too lazy to blog before and who is interested in working
| on (1) as little as they are on (2) and (3).
|
| In principle you might make some money blogging on Medium but
| a lot of people blog to promote themselves or their business
| and the registration wall reduced their reach and actually
| damaged their personal brand because I think a lot of people
| felt it was annoying to have to register to read articles on
| a blogging platform that is just a bit worse than the rest of
| the web as opposed to just a bit better. (Certainly anyone
| whose Medium blog posts connected with someone has received
| an email telling them it's a shame that a good blogger is
| blogging on Medium)
| Eduard wrote:
| > Successful blogging has three elements: (1) writing a
| lot...
|
| How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?
| sircastor wrote:
| In the case of blogging, writing is (typically) one's
| product. Writing is relatively cheap and depending on the
| subject is highly commoditized, so you need to write a
| lot to incentivize audiences to return and to continue to
| consume, and presumably pay you somehow.
|
| This isn't always the case. You might be an otherwise
| famous individual who will have an audience regardless of
| your publishing frequency. But I think for most bloggers,
| you have to have enough material that people will visit,
| and continue to make more so people will come back.
|
| I published between 1 and 3 times a year on my
| blog/website. But then I'm not doing it for income.
| pixodaros wrote:
| Its an empirical rule of thumb that to build an audience
| online, post at least once a week (more often for low-
| effort posts for smartphones). If you can think of any
| well-known online writers who do not post a lot, I think
| you will find they generally had an existing audience
| (eg. Paul Graham is a venture capitalist with a crowd of
| admirers). Rules of thumb are not laws of nature, but
| this one matches my experience and my observations.
| drc500free wrote:
| Competition doesn't generally apply because these are usually
| venture-backed companies in the first few stages. The point
| is to prevent competition in the third stage by using the
| first two stages to lock in both sides of the market.
| chubot wrote:
| Yes, definitely agree, and "enshittification" is a good word
| for something I've observed for ~25 years.
|
| Very similar to this phenomenon, in relation to imgur and so
| forth:
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
|
| _I think that all image hosts suffer from the same sad pattern
| of eventual failure. That pattern is:_
|
| I wouldn't place the blame squarely on the company however.
| It's also true that consumers have predictable behavior
| patterns -- they want free stuff, and they will stick around to
| get that, and then move to the next thing.
|
| On the other hand, we want free stuff because we don't want to
| sign up for subscriptions, and companies are always making that
| annoying -- betting on us forgetting to cancel, making it hard
| to cancel, tacking on hidden fees (banks do a lot of this),
| etc.
|
| I wish that money could just be exchanged for goods and
| services, as Homer Simpson once noted ...
| zem wrote:
| there's also this old ribbonfarm post on "the locust
| economy", describing that sort of consumer behaviour:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Are there examples of sites/platforms that are doing it
| "right"? (however you interpret 'right' to be, I guess). Ones
| that have been around for a while and haven't enshittified?
| robotnikman wrote:
| Not sure if it counts, but Steam maybe?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Hacker News
| walterbell wrote:
| https://NeoCities.org, free static hosting, $5/mo for higher
| storage/traffic limits.
|
| https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).
| zem wrote:
| hm, maybe the crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter and
| indiegogo? as far as I know those haven't started down the
| curve yet. but I would guess it's inevitable once you take vc
| money and are beholden to your investors to squeeze out every
| drop of revenue you can :(
|
| it would require a really strong mission statement baked into
| the company to say "we are here to provide value to our users
| and everything else has to come second to that". if nothing
| else you eventually get acquired, e.g. tumblr, and everything
| goes to hell then.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Kickstarter and Indiegogo have quite a few charlatans
| selling a tech version of snake oil, and they don't care
| because they get 10% (or whatever their fees are).
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I am not sure how much vetting you want the platform to
| do? If someone says they can synthesize gasoline from air
| for $.02/liter, should Kickstarter shut it down? Send a
| guy to investigate? Where does the arbitrary this-is-
| probably-wrong line land?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I don't think Kickstarter "doesn't care", they just don't
| care enough to proactively find out. Indiegogo will keep
| outright scams up. Kickstarter says "eh, someone will
| flag it if it is a scam"
| bartvk wrote:
| Slashdot?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Craigslist
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Bandcamp, although many are holding their breath since the
| Epic takeover.
| slymerson wrote:
| do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.
| sircastor wrote:
| It's a sort-of inevitable thing when your focus becomes
| earnings and growth rather than whatever your actual business
| is. Facebook's business was providing a common platform for
| people that know each other to share publicly. Twitter's
| business was a billboard to share what they're doing.
| Google's business was to provide a way to find things on the
| web.
|
| Unfortunately, none of those things is particularly easy to
| charge money for. So you take Venture Capital to fund your
| development, and then you try to find a way to pay that VC
| through other means - Advertising mostly, it turns out. Then
| you have to keep pushing that because your investors want
| returns, and it funds the party.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This definitely seems like at least half of it.
|
| With blogging platforms, an additional aspect: I don't really
| care to read the opinions of people who are mostly interested
| in blogging about a topic. I want to read from actual
| practitioners. As soon as a platform becomes well known, the
| non-practicing bloggers show up and it turns into a crapshoot
| whether what I'm reading is first or third hand information.
|
| And that's during the early still-OK-ish phase. After a while
| the natural tendency is that the non-practicing folks will
| produce more content because they've got more spare time!
| dannyr wrote:
| Love that post. Sadly, every major tech platform is going thru
| "enshittification".
| bee_rider wrote:
| The enshittification cycle has always been here, but progress
| continues. It just feels like things are getting worse as the
| programs we grew up on enter the shit-zone part of their
| lifecycle.
| bgun wrote:
| Because adblockers have made selling "free" content to astute,
| tech-literate people extremely difficut, and in 2023
| micropayment/subscription models are still hopelessly _bad_.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Adblockers only caught on because the internet ad industry is
| incredibly abusive.
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