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.
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.
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.
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 users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.
Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.
The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.
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 cannot agree more. The brand has destroyed itself by putting everything behind a login/pay-wall. I don't even click on medium.com links anymore, regardless of how interesting the content may be. And if I accidentally click on one, I click the back button in less than a second.
I understand the desire to monetize, but this is not the way.
Nobody comes to use your service just because you want more money. People come to get value, and that has been sniffed out.
P.S. props to Corey doctorow for his fantastic “enshittification” posts.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
But the investors will never let it just be that, there’s too much money involved.
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.
I don’t know, maybe Medium should promote individual articles that are on Wordpress instances of personal and corporate blogs. Who would be happy to pay to apply to the vetting process.
I'm not a spiteful person in general, but I won't pay for anything that does things like this out of spite.
I just assume I'll be paywalled before clicking a Medium link, so I don't.
After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.
I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.
But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.
I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.
But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because of the possibility of making money off of Medium (even if I opted out), that gave them free license to make money off of me, so of course their pursuit of exploiting me of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of my own labor and content unless I systematically and enthusiastically played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.
I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.
I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.
If I write an article about ray tracing lime jello, then why can't I submit it for syndication to three specialty groups about ray tracing, jello, and limes, without restricting everyone on the internet from discovering and reading it for free in my own channel? Why are all the popular syndication channels there for the express purposes of exploiting me to make money for themselves?
That's like having not one pimp, but an entire pyramid of pimps trying to bully my customers and restrict and exploit my work, that I'm happy and willing to do for free.
I'm not going to get into the user interface, which would require writing a hundred page Medium article in itself (that would be promoted to and read by exactly zero readers). I'll just say that at first it was the thing that attracted me, but then once I actually started using it, it was infuriating and frustrating and purposefully lacking obvious and crucial features (not to mention those that I came to depend on that were later removed or hidden).
There are some great things about the ease of writing and editing and formatting articles, but also so many conspicuous trepanations of the skull and lobotomization of the brain that it's obvious it's all part of some dark pattern to brutally control my mind and behavior.
The final straw was when I found myself unable to control the formatting of my images. I was SURE I was able to do that before, but the interface simply was ignoring my mouse clicks that I'd learned to use. At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouse. Then maybe my browser was broken. Or possibly it was my internet connection. And then finally I felt like I was losing my mind and mis-remembering that I used to be able to do this simple obvious thing, and wondering how it was that my previous articles were formatted in ways I couldn't figure out how to apply to my new articles. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I am being gaslighted?
Finally I googled for "why can't I control the formatting of images in my medium articles", and this came up:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Imag...
>Image formatting feature deprecation
>As of January 2022, Medium no longer supports formatting options for images in the Medium editor.
>All images in stories are now displayed in a single image size. Other features, such as the alt text, captions, grids, and image links, remain unaffected.
>Medium has recently redesigned parts of its website in order to deliver a more browsable, consistent, and faster experience to all users. To that end, we have removed certain design elements on the published story page, along with the ability to format and resize imagery in the story editor.
>We know image sizing matters to many writers. So, why did we remove this feature? Simply put: We removed image sizing to accommodate a new right-hand column that provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading, along with related reads across Medium. Our data shows this new right-hand column benefits writers by presenting their stories to more readers across the network.
Then why the hell don't you program your web site to respond to the mouse clicks on images with a big red popup and loud buzzer that goes "BZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!!" so I know it's MEDIUM and not ME that's at fault?
FUCK Medium's right-hand column. I don't give a shit about it. I don't want Medium to "provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading", I want readers to READ MY STORY. But obviously the only thing Medium cares about is castrating my formatting and gobbling up my precious square centimeters of screen space for the express purpose of diverting and distracting people away from reading my free content that I'm paying them to publish, and sucking them into the click-bait paid content that they actually make money off of.
The patronizing phrase "Our data shows..." is as bad as "I'm not racist, but..." because it tells me beyond doubt that Medium has become yet another data driven Zynga Cow Clicker skinner box.
http://www.cowclicker.com/
Medium's and Zynga's only goal is monetization by metrics, which suck out every drop of human creativity, design, and intent, and incarcerates my readers in the Clockwork Orange Movie Theatre Scene!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg
>I believe in second chances. I want us to work together. I want you to become a valued member of our organization. Surrender, and you will find meaning. Surrender, and you will find release. Take a deep breath. Calm your mind. You know what's best. What's best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply, Agent 33?
The main landing page is such a shitshow. The feeling sticks to you no matter what after that.
The same goes with coding. SO and github are good. Everything else is pretty much garbage.
Sorry. Quora, to me, is beyond useless. Every once in a while I'll click on a Quora URL only to be let down again. One day I'll do the right thing and blacklist it on my local recursive DNS server so as not to be tempted and waste even more time in the future.
I used to be active blogger in 2000s and was a part of blogging community back then. One lesson that I learned back then was that you cannot predict popularity. Those heavy pieces you think will be hits with readers will not be and those that you throw together on a whim about your sock drawer will get more hits than anything else combined. Ymmv, but the effort you put in does not always equal the popularity it'll get.
The key problem is that you’ve lost the trust of the authors you want to attract. It’s no longer a place I can post and know that my content will be cleanly accessible to readers. I now think you’ll pepper it with pop ups and account demands.
It went from being a minimalist and trusted place to post, to now a feeling of feeding my own content into someone else’s machine and losing control of it.
You mentioned paying attention to the sentiment and linked to the HN survey where people explained why they don't like Medium. The top comment was someone explaining this exact reason.
It's highly admirable that you are on here trying to listen, communicating issues transparently, and working to fix problems. But I think you need to listen even more deeply.
Unfortunately this will push you into the depths of the business model that you won't want to change, but is the fundamental reason for medium's eventual failure.
Right now is the moment to save it, as you read this note!
What the hell did they expect would happen?
Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense.
It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?
They take care of their best content creators, they even send a plaque! And they don't force viewers to subscribe, they show ads and offer a subscription to remove them.
Imagine if youtube tomorrow started telling every visitor that they must login to view any video, and if they view more than 10 videos they need to buy a subscription. Rumble.com would be popping champagne.
On the other hand, the low quality content was what made me avoid medium.com links, so my experience perfectly mirrors the comment.
> It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?
It's extremely expensive to run a competitor to a global video platform, the platform is much stickier, the app makes it even more sticky, and they're a billion dollar ad company that can spend giant sums of money on creators? Starting a medium competitor is trivial in comparison, you can do so with Wordpress out of the box. It won't scale to the same size, won't be as nice etc, but it'll work. You can't do the same with Youtube.
First I click a couple of, let’s say, “why X is dead” links, then I start getting the message “You have Y free articles left this month”. Then I’m thinking, okay, the “X ded” articles were meh anyway, why would I even subscribe then? Somewhere in this scenario the incentive to subscribe is missing for me. Maybe there’s a world of cool articles out there, but from visiting a random article with the “you have Y articles left” popup they cannot be seen. Just my two cents!
That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you. But I hope you will! Best of luck and thank you for the interesting remarks :)
As far as fixing it, the obvious first step is to at least be more generous with the article count... and don't show it at all until someone has seen at least 5 articles on separate days that month. Count a session clicking through a few articles on the same day as at most 2 article views (maybe have a separate limit of something like 5 articles in the same day). Don't be a nag trying to upsell when people haven't even had a chance to get interested yet.
That at least would cut down on the sleazy feeling of the whole site. An easy next step would be hiring someone as an editorial curator. Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm
Another way to feed a meaningful recommender: Allow users to tag posts (and other more clever things like deriving tags by looking at, e.g., which sub-reddits link to them). Build user profiles that are similar to how StumbleUpon had a "Stumble DNA" for users.
That's what I would be doing, anyway.
It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this domain would be hated by a lot of people.
Those of us who personally wouldn’t pay for articles aren’t the target audience anyway, and that’s ok. I think throwing rocks at paywalls is a stupid thing to do, especially when the only alternative is ad-tech. I’d rather have competing business models than not.
What doesn’t make sense to me, is that opaque clickbait recommendation engines AND paywall made itself to the same platform. This seems odd, because usually the former is a plague of ad-tech. Perhaps this is the result of cargo-culting from employees who came from ad-tech mindlessly replicating these patterns even where they don’t make sense.
- Medium was a good platform for people to publish well formatted content online. - said content ranked quite high on Google. - There’s now a non-trivial amount of content published by myriad authors on there. - I have zero interest in following a particular author. I don’t want recommendations. I end up there as a result of a very specific need at the time. - you’re incessant pop ups to log in or sign up to read the content drastically reduced that value. - I’ve now been conditioned to just avoid any search results that look like they go to a Medium page.
I obviously have no idea how widespread that experience is. The unfortunate reality is that the damage has been done. You could undo all of the things that led to it and I’d never know given the muscle memory that’s been created.
You can understand the kind of service which lives on ad revenue giving in to conflicts of interest leading to them recommending against the reader's interests, but there's no obvious conflict when you're a subscription service. It ends up being endless formulaic articles of the "5 packages your next project must use" ilk, with questionable grammar and a number of clichéd folksy writing habits common in certain circles.
The "huge pile of shit" is a primary example of why authors should invest in tools they control and have a direct relationship with their audience. A portable relationship with their audience. As I see it, Medium is in conflict with that.
I'm really hoping that the Twitter fiasco and Medium's "huge pile of shit" will serve as object lessons why creators, publishers, etc. are better off building their own platforms even if it's slower initially.
Want to repair some of that damage right now? Stop prompting me to sign in when I try to read an article on Medium.
Medium is still very aggressive data harvesting machine. Look at what sub stack is doing and just do the same, what they’re doing is correct and valuable and what medium had done so far is absolutely full-on reader/writer hostile.
Best of luck!
Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when I think author behavior will change.
That "X is dead" trope will disappear from your recs both because we'll have better things to show and because the new incentives make it not worth writing. An article like that is very sensitive to incentives because there is no authentic reason to have written it. Probably without Medium's payment, it never would have been occurred to the person.
As a Medium member since 2020, I've been writing articles that reflect real-world use cases and require 2-4 days of research and writing. Despite my efforts, I've only had one article boosted on the platform thus far.
It would be incredibly beneficial for creators like myself if Medium offered a verification process to prove our authenticity and help increase the visibility of our work.
Basically Medium is indistinguishable to me from any of its competitors, except it's quite slow to load so given two similarly promising links I prefer the other one. It's too much JavaScript because Medium can be fast if I turn JavaScript off using either NoScript, uBlock Origin, uMatrix etc.
The issue is how annoying it is to experience the content, not the content itself.
And wow, quite a claim to say that creators are too busy to have lives worth writing about.
Reconsider what went wrong with Medium so you can get on the right track.
That is by far and away your biggest issue in a community like this.
Medium.com now paywalls even bullshit content. Simple as that.
You limit me to x number of free articles in a month, yet the first 10x articles from medium i see are absolute trash with no quality control and vetting and all so by the time i hit my limit, I am already annoyed by it.
If you are going to paywall me, let the content behind the paywall be from vetted sources that i have some sort of reasonable expectation. You can put a 'Buy Me a Coffee' for the rest of the other unverified sources.
If i am searching for articles on an advanced technique and all i see are articles from newbies who are neither addressing the question nor providing new insights, you can rest assured I will not be paying for your service nor clicking top search links from your site.
Dead Comment
The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.
In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!
medium.com has the feel of a dystopian internet that bugs you on every click. There is this classic Sci-Fi short story where the protagonist had to insert a coin in to the door to his apartment every time he wanted to use it. This is how medium has felt.
That”s incredibly insightful and explains so much of what’s wrong with, well, everything today. The actual doing has become an afterthought to the pitch, the documentation, the branding, the promotion, the cobranding, the cross-promotion, the synergies, and so on.
It’s never been so easy for people with so little to say to say so much. Curation has not kept up with creation. I hope Medium recovers.
You are drinking koolaid, though. Look at the comments. A lot of them are spot on.
You say this but this went on for literal years.
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?
Yet, I was below some sort of threshold to be in the club that would get me a few pennies if enough people read them, so I was kicked out of that program.
Not that the program mattered, but getting kicked out for not being popular enough was annoying, so I just stopped using the platform.
I still get a weekly summary that says my articles are being regularly read, which doesn’t seem likely. They appear to be made up numbers.
It feels like the platform quickly became another Quora and is 90% junk.
Not sure how you’ll regain the initial trust and stature Medium seemed to have, but best of luck. FWIW, I do like the site design and reading/writing experience. Keep it simple.
Everyone here is debating what went wrong. But how would knowing that help?
I would like a CEO to articulate what exactly will be "worthwhile" to each stakeholder in the future, and not just to clean up the mess. Instead I fear we have a generation of leaders who tell investors that the good times will come back and tell employees to tighten their belts - crisis managers instead of visionaries.
I think rough times are precisely when visionaries should have their greatest impact, because people are open to change. The question is not what went wrong, but where to go now?
A few personal observations:
1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to LinkedIN [1] (exceptions exist but are invisible). Have you considered paywall to post, even as low as $1/mo as a content quality filter?
2. There is no reason for a 16k character article to require 6.5MB of data to render. (looking at a random article from the home page [2]). I hear that Medium has an optimized writing experience, why not have an optimized reading experience too?
3. Do you wish Medium became what Substack did, and if no, what is your vision for it? Why should one use Medium as an author or as a reader?
[1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn
[2] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/be-present-aff45d6421b4
My comment might get lost amongst many, you may not see it, but Medium still has the reach. I think as a blogging platform you can support a lot more customisation and become an actual platform that is the staple for where people put their content. I have a personal blog hosted on GitHub with Jekyll. I'd much prefer to use mediums tools but I'm reluctant to because of the experience for end users. Just my thoughts.
We've gone through many cycles of publishing platforms/trends. What catches your eyes in this space today (in general)?
But even ignoring all that, medium is the worst place for any article about programming because the code blocks do everything to make it harder to read them. There's no syntax highlighting, the lines wrap and the container the code is in pads the text to make a narrower column than the body of the article.
That's the opposite of what I want. Especially on mobile! It's one of the sites that make me wonder if its developers have ever tried using it.
https://postimg.cc/zbY3jQqc
Also, not sure if you know but we have the entire back catalog of Pragmatic Programmer books. I need to do a re-import to take advantage of the syntax highlighting, but it's still a pretty good feature. (Unfortunately, I was the programmer who did this import and so it's still on me to redo it)
2. Substack killed you. I know that HN is mostly populated by extremely left leaning people who wholeheartedly believe in all the Current Things that MSM feeds them, so this argument will fall on deaf ears, but I will write it here anyways because it is the truth and if you aren't just a Woke CEO, you might actually care: During the pandemic, Substack was the only news source where I could get proper information about what is going on. Virtually everything that got people cancelled on Twitter and labelled as conspiracy theorists eventually turned out to be the truth. These people all moved to Substack. Thanks to Elon we all know now that Twitter was infested by deep state actors abusing the platform to spread disinformation and manipulate elections - I'm not sure if this is still true but I somehow remember that Medium emerged as a sub-company from Twitter, so I must assume that the exact same ways of censorship and propaganda that brought Twitter to its knees are also in place at Medium. If that is true, and as long as that is true, I can guarantee that you will have zero chance whatsoever against Substack.
I see a lot of people using GitHub gists to embed code blocks for this reason, this means that writing any article code related is a pain
Edit: i think it's available now but definitely too late
my main issue as a reader (im the guy who frequently campaigns to just ban all medium.com links on HN) is the authwall that is thrown in our faces before we've had a chance to even read the article. its against the open web and not something i would encourage on HN. i understand youve changed your defaults but i still encounter these walls enough that there is just overall brand damage to Medium as a whole. mr stubblebine, please tear down that wall.
Medium tried to make two of these groups happy and that is difficult. Both need many of the same tools - like nice looking templates, easy editing, comments and also recommendations - so there is a lot of investments that could be used by both groups and there is also a lot of synergy between these two - but they need to be monetized differently.
I think it is too early to say that Substack has found the good model - they managed to attract the cool guys - but Medium was also fashionable for a little while. But right now Medium needs a total rebranding.
I think I've changed my email since my first Google SSO and you guys haven't dealt with that scenario - but it's probably pretty common
I'm convinced the single biggest factor is the wrong incentive leads to poor quality, well beyond other factors like the paywalls, publications, etc. Not only it disinterests reader but more importantly, it push away good writers. Content is the beating heart of your platform.
It started out like a beautiful small town. The residents are nice and talented, the streets are clean and elegant - it attracts tourists.
It went wrong when the incentive encouraged bad actors to resides in town - litters and tea scammers are everywhere. Not only they're hurting tourists, they discourage good actors from residing in - nobody wants to live in dirty neighborhood and live with bad neighbors.
Thus the negative feed back loop, which causing the infinite downward spiral on quality.
1. Paywalls. Some people don't mind. Make it obvious in the link itself that this blog is monetized. I want to know if it's worth navigating away from what I am doing right now.
2. Site it slow. Ask yourself why did Medium scraper websites (that strip tracking) had to come into existence. If the market actively tries to circumvent you then it means you are not in connection with the users who you would want to spend time on Medium. This Silicon Valley mentality of "extract money, we'll think of performance maybe one day next century" is driving away the professional users who would pay for your service.
3. Too much trackers (likely related to #2). If that's your monetization model then the business is already on its way out.
You can do a lot with Medium. You can be the specialized Facebook for small club of readers and authors. You can help people organize events. You can provide a platform for book writers to draft and store chapters. You can put a paywall like "early access to my book's new chapter", too.
These things are not what drives insanely huge engagements that investors love but they absolutely will be bringing some money.
This hyper-growth mindset has to go. There are good ways to make money and not make your product suck.
I loved the idea of Medium when it first came out and consumed it a lot. For no less than two years now though, I use various scrapers and read stuff ad-free and tracker-free. Think of why it has came to it.
Medium is a good website in opinion for articles about programming, hardware, gadgets etc. Most of the articles are not that great, but they are not bad either. The algorithm works well.
The paywall is necessary for now, but soon a better solution will become popular for paying on the internet. The pay as you go model will become easier and cheaper. Maybe a solution of reading the article and afterwards clicking like/clap transferring a small amount of money, like 0.1 cent will become a viable solution for writers and the service.
That said, i write my articles on lichess. It has the best website design i have ever seen, and it is fast as hell.
Deboosting those content-mill authors is a good step! However changing the recommendation system is not enough. With Google, everyone interacts with it through the search box so them changing the search results is enough to influence what SEO junk is on the front page. But with Medium, anyone can promote their junk articles on Reddit and on other platforms and it will still result in a click and a paywall, which contributes to people avoiding medium.com links. You need to stop incentivizing these content-mill authors altogether (or prominently blackmark these posts/blogs so everyone knows to avoid them).
Let me recommend Ted Gioia as someone to listen to. I actually pay for his newsletter, while there are hardly any others I'd pay for. From what I can see, if you are good on Substack, you'll make a lot of money. That does mean writing about something other than your current life and/or romantic involvements, which are, I'm sorry to say, boring. An awful lot of the Substack writers are doing that, too.
Maybe they do have some far left-wing writers, too, but Medium is just loaded with them.
I'm sure there are better ways of monetizing it.
There should be a penalty for a free page going behind a paywall. Paywall pages also appear at the top of google searches because they were left there as a bait for indexing bots for months and then got paywalled. Not cool, medium.
In general though, we love being subscription driven rather than ad driven and I don't expect that to change.
medium was doomed from the start. but being myself a detractor from the start i’m probably too much biased
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.
Because if it is VC-funded, enshittification is inevitable.
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.
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.
I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort into the article content as they put into getting me to click.
I hope you get it turned around; this is largely a market that isn't served. Subscribing to newsletters is pretty dang expensive with anything less than a FAANG salary.
>>The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us.
You're touching on an Option C or perhaps option B2 here, where the supply and demand curves intersect, but much farther to the left than the current user base. Meaning there ARE enough users who are willing to pay you enough to keep going - but it's many fewer than you currently have. So you settle into a much smaller, but sustainable business. Not necessarily a bad outcome!
Question for you: Suppose that users can pay you $X (say, 5 cents) per article they read, but you are not allowed to know who they are or anything about them, they don't login at all, and you can't show them any ads. That is, it's a "pure" transaction similar to anonymously purchasing a hamburger. Is there some value of X high enough for this to be worthwhile for you? Do you think enough of your users would go for this to make it work?
As a writer, seeing random people (bots?) highlight my article to death, making it essentially illegible, was a show-stopper for me.
Original:
"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/
This irks me because scammers are always trying to trick me. Legit companies are trying to trick me with dark patterns to spend micro amounts of money (Square is my current nemesis). For me there is always a level of opposition to these efforts.
Mentioned here was the New York Times. It’s always a subscription. You may be able to find a discount, or a special deal, but it’s always a subscription.
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/
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 ...
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!
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)
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.
https://Groups.io (rebooted Yahoo Groups).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or they can charge up front, get zero users, and then find something else to do with their time.
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 virality and penalize your most passionate users.
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.
"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."
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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.