Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?
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.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 8835 ms ] threadAlso, true. They do have more control over their payouts.
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.
Easier said than done I imagine.
If you read one long article you may see three ads.
But each short article could have the same three ads, multiplied by however many short articles you read.
Long term I think the future is going to be more along the line of direct patronage - if I want to write I can say that at $Xk a month from supporters I’ll quit my day job and just make content for everyone.
However the more intelligent, curious and thoughtful people that hopefully become our leaders, are more into long form content which simply has much more to offer than cheap one-liners.
Unfortunately selecting those leaders is where we are going wrong right now. Referring to a lot of leaders (politics and industry alike) that just love blasting cheap shots on short form services like Twitter.
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
Just ideas.
That's why nearly every content creator that normally relies on ads has additional revenue sources. (Patreon/Sponsorships)
edit: spelling
I mean they all look the same (visually)
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....
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.
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?
Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service
https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing
that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.
The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.
I remember a project I did some time ago where we required Github integration, every employee of the company was supposed to have a Github account, it was even part of the onboarding day, there was a very internal knowledge base page on how to setup Github, and EVEN then people would just hear the word "Github" and freak out saying a bunch of people in the company would never ever be able to setup an account there.
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.
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.
... which is, in my opinion, an overlooked and extremely powerful filter.
If people can upload images people will upload atrocity pictures (with the caption POST A STUPID IMAGE MEME... U DIE!), lewd pictures, CSAM pictures, and other things that will waste your time to manage if they don't get you in trouble outright. (It was super easy to get a basically G rated site demonetized with a 10⁻⁴ fraction of problem images ten years ago, it must be much worse now.)
I've been building my own smart RSS reader so I'd much rather add a feed to by reader which puts me, the reader, in control.
Because if it is VC-funded, enshittification is inevitable.
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.
- 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
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.
Tell me more about this niche?
(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
Then see their business model…
(I wrote about it 6 years ago: https://ploum.net/an-open-pay-wall-has-medium-lost-its-mind/... )
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.
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/
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.
https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).
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.
The thing is, all of these companies make money by arbitraging value consumed by the end users versus value produced by advertisers. It’s a two sided market, except that consumers pay in attention rather than currency.
It’s catchy - and probably true - to say that if you aren’t paying, “then you are the product”. But these companies still need a quality product or, eventually, the advertising and data collection is not valuable to those with money.
Which is what we seem to be seeing with Twitter.
Abusing end users is a very short sighted strategy, even if they’re not paying.
Many of these giant sites are really in the business of talking money out of investors, so their main business is not really selling a service at all (its "investor storytime").
I don't think that arbitrage model is useful because one side is paying cash and the other is not. Its like calling dating a marketplace, a bad metaphor.
Facebook makes money by creating a product that attracts a bunch of people to use it, and then they sell ads.
The whole thing falls apart if they don’t do #1 properly.
> 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.
They may have other businesses in banner ads but I’m specifically responding to the question,
> do all platforms go through this? if so, it's very sad.
by trying to make the point that if their business is selling attention, then pissing off end users - thereby reducing the supply of attention - is bad management.
I mean most of the value there is in text written by volunteers, which must not be so expensive to host (compared to, say, an image hosting site for example).
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 ...
Although I would also consider the other side of the "sharing economy" -- IMO sharing like Zipcar makes a lot of economic sense, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for incumbents there (although I guess Zipcar got bought).
Likewise with the taxi and hotel industries -- the incumbents deserve some competition / disruption.
But yeah consumers are certainly fickle
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)
How much truth is in this often-repeated statement?
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.
Quite a bit. I would say my blog has been successful, but it only happened after I had written a lot, which was about 100 posts and about 150 posts in a blog that now doesn't exist.
To be successful, your need to get an audience. To get an audience, you have to either build one over time or go viral at least once. I've done both.
To build an audience over time, you need to give them a lot to read so that they won't forget you and will keep coming back.
Going viral is a luck thing, but you sure do get better chances of going viral the more you post.
My first viral post was posted on Hacker News at a time when I thought it wouldn't go viral for sure: on Saturday night (my time). I didn't want that one to go viral, but I thought I would post it anyway to attract some readers.
Oh boy.
I woke up the next morning to a headache.
Since then, when I want to make an impact, I post during my nighttime. Turns out, posting that on a Saturday night was perfect because my most viral posts have been, with one or two exceptions.
But I wouldn't have been able to sample that enough to know if I didn't have 50-100 (tech-oriented) blog posts to try with.
So yeah, it's true.
The second definitely improves with consistent output. I assume the first does too, but they often are continually revising their “masterpiece” so it can be harder to see
I'd add to that that brand reputation is monetisable and monetised. It's almost a playbook at this point: sell something high quality to people who are really into that thing, get a good reputation, then dilute the quality down and you can coast on that reputation for a while while selling cheaper versions at the original high prices to a much wider audience.
I don't know what the counter to this is, other than customers paying much more attention to when a brand changes their products, which would not be free for them.
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!
Medium changed from reader-friendly to reader-hostile over time.
But then medium added all the same popups and nags.
I don't wanta sticky cookie popup (which is probably also illegal since it lacks a reject-all button). I don't want to sign in with Google for both of you to track me. I don't want any JavaScript doodads, sticky toolbars, floaty buttons, or messing with text selection.
I expect substack to end up exactly the same. It's not the fault of the site, just inevitability of the grow-capture-monetize playbook.
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.
Without a suite of adblockers and sponsorblock it's unusable now. I hate video content anyway so I wouldn't sign up for a subscription. But every time I get referred there I'm appalled how bad it's become.
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.
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
It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else people do with it.
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.