What did Medium do wrong?

1. Low quality content / not enough "gatekeeping". My perception is that Medium presented itself as a classier / higher-quality blogging platform, but that inevitably got diluted over time as more people joined.

2. Bad timing. Medium probably could have been Substack, but Substack seems to be capturing a lucky moment when trust in mainstream media is completely imploding, censorship is rife, and lots of independent voices are looking for alternative platforms. Substack is also attracting lots of domain experts who aren't traditional writers / journalists but see in Substack an easy way to monetize their expertise.

3. As for an exodus from Medium -> Substack, probably a lot of that is just Substack seeming cooler / more exclusive than Medium at this point.

My expectation is that Substack will inevitably have a censorship crisis when it is forced to deplatform writers with "fringe" ideas (most likely on the right) and then it will lose its reputation as a more independent / free-speech platform, and the attention will move on to the next platform.

I don't know because I can't read Medium articles anymore.

Well, they did recently put in a requirement that any writers eligible to be paid has to have 100 followers. I think the point was to make it to where only authors with a decent following are rewarded; what it's done is make everyone follow everyone and muddied the water so much that "number of followers" is a terrible metric now.

It’s a tricky space to operate in. When companies like that want to “drive growth” they have a tendency to introduce questionable methods that can be downright user-hostile.

E.g. the irritating JavaScript they use that messes with the user’s ability to copy text from a Medium article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494328

Stuff like that will irritate readers and give the publisher a bad name.

It might be possible to run a publishing platform without resorting to nasty hacks like that, but the growth hacking shortcuts will be very tempting.

I really think it was paid subscription + there are many alternatives, so the articles aren’t worth paying for.

If Medium had some advantage, like better content (for users) or better discoverability (for writers), it would be worth paying for. But it just doesn’t. There’s nothing I get out of Medium that I can’t find on other sites. There’s almost nothing a writer gets out of medium vs. creating their own site.

Content made them great. It was refreshing to find articles worth reading. Now you usually hit a paywall as they're more desperate to monetize before getting to the second paragraph for things that aren't worth reading. Those who made good content wanted more control and started moving to other platforms. It feels that Medium is experiencing brain drain as content worth reading migrates elsewhere like Substack. But who knows if Substack will fall into disfavor in the future like Medium is right now.

The business model is misleading, not sure what is their User retention method, but asking a Lead to to become a paying user after 3 articles, looks not a great business model