Is Substack the new Medium?
Seeing a lot more Substack and fewer and fewer Medium articles. Anyone else notice this seemingly happened slowly but consistently over the last year?
These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform.
You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
Substack might be the new medium, and I think that's a good thing. Substack has a way for writers to get paid. I do pay for a few writers on substack, I don't even know if that is a thing at medium. Best thing about Substack over Medium, is that Medium was the most annoying blogging platform, it didn't like that I highlighted as I read. And it was really bad at finding more from an author.
Medium sucked - it’s the opposite of Substack.
Substack lets writers retain their own brand and their own access to their audience. They empower their writers with the platform.
Medium requires writers to give up that independence to support Medium’s (imo crappy) brand and ad driven model.
They aim at different markets. Substack is for writers that already have a following, it is more like a SaaS. Medium is for upstarts trying to gain a following through the platform, it is more like a social network.
I think of the average substacker as a serious writer, often they have a background doing journalism. I think the average Medium writer doesn’t have much to say other than maybe ‘me too’.
There are quite a few right-wing sub stacks that I don’t agree with but they tend to be well written by people who treat it as a job. And that’s the thing, Medium is mostly a way to express or promote yourself, but some people really make a living writing a substack.
Nothing is more infuriating than being blocked from reading an article on Medium when the original author clearly had the goal of freely educating as many people as possible.
At one point I thought that Substack did what Medium should have done. Then I realized they launched many years apart, and probably if Medium had tried the Substack approach, it wouldn't have succeeded.
I also find it interesting that Substack is now migrating toward an app approach ("read all your articles in this app!"), which is basically what Medium was from the beginning. I have wondered how much the Substack team intended this from the beginning, and if the newsletter angle was largely for differentiation ("what makes you guys different from Medium?").
Also, in case anyone was not aware, Medium's founder/CEO (Ev William) departed this summer. [1] I wonder what the circumstances were, who owned what share, etc.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-...
This is my first time ever using the phrase “signal-to-noise ratio”, but I think that Substack’s is starting to lean on the side of noise. There is something about consciously writing and publishing with a subscriber count and monetization model looming over you that may make writing poor or attract poorer writers in general. I reckon it’s 6 months away from officially becoming “Diet Medium”.
It's like Medium but with a much higher ratio of quality blogs to garbage.
Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.
Yes, from the demand side, it is the new Medium because that's where readers that didn't have a curated set of blog/column subscriptions or bookmarks are going for breath-of-fresh-air articles and technical analysis.
On the supply side, it's a different business and discovery model, as many others have noted. But you are asking about the demand side, i.e., what people are reading and sharing.
Was Medium paying people to write? Substack’s current growth hack seems to be paying certain writers as a way to subsidize subscription support. So I don’t think Substack’s goal is as clear as some might think. They aren’t a picks and shovels newsletter company. That was just a way to get people writing for them. It seems their real goal is to become a genuine publishing company.
There are a great number of people who write just for the love of writing. I wish more of these people would forego the “centralized blogging” platforms and publish using independent systems. When Covid hit I set out to write one article a day using my own self hosted site. Over time it organically started to become more popular. A few of posts are now first page search results.
As pointed out by a number of people already, money will end up corrupting what was once a great and easy outlet for people to share original ideas. A better alternative is to continue building systems that make it easier to publish independently AND create search engines that are not optimized to return SEO optimized click bait garbage for profits. I want blogs from real people who write because they want to teach me something.
Let’s get back to writing good content, share it freely, and change the world.
The main (only?) value of Medium from my perspective was that I occasionally cross-posted there when I had something of general interest that 1.) I wanted some broader discovery and/or 2.) It seemed to suggest (however incorrectly) a greater gravitas than a personal blog for linking from another site.
Maybe substack is similar. And maybe it's better at monetization though I don't really care and I suspect serious monetization is a real power law thing anyway. I'm not convinced personally about posting to substack rather than keeping on an independent blog.
I’m a fan of Substack, was never a fan of Medium, but I do worry that Substack will gradually get better and better for writers, and then gradually worse and worse until it becomes unusable.
I'm a big fan of how simple, unobtrusive, and quick the pages on Substack are. Truly a breath of fresh air compared to so much of the web these days.
I never paid for a single article or author on medium and I have no idea if I even can?
On Substack, I have been a paid subscriber to 6 pages and wish I could pay subscribe to even more if I could afford it.
I think the real question is why didn't Medium do what Substack does? Seems like the logical business move (although maybe it wasn't as obvious when Substack started)
I wrote several Medium articles. But then trying to read other people's articles I hit the free-limit and couldn't read them. I had hoped that even if my articles don't make we money at least they could let me read articles written by others on the same "medium". But it didn't. So I stopped publishing on Medium.
Maybe I'll give Substack a try.
OP here.
My takeaway from this entire thread is this: We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts.
It's really the only way to create a platform with staying power and maintainable core values.
I never got into Medium but I’m pretty optimistic about Substack, and have liked what I’ve seen so far
I liked Medium from the beginning, when it launched, it was one of my favorite platforms to read, lots of great articles, always found something new to read in the tech or crypto space, but as the time has passed articles became worse and worse, lots of paywalls, some interesting authors stopped posting and I left it. I can't even remember when I last logged in there.
I was thinking that the other day, but for a different reason. In the beginning, quora, medium, substack, etc, they succeed due to good content. Once they build a reputation, they open the floodgates and throw it away. For the past few years, I skip over medium links -- not because paywalls but because it's probably low quality garbage. HN substack links have generally been good quality. But the last couple I've seen here were trending downwards.
I wrote a post about writing on Substack on my (tech-focused) Substack a few weeks ago [1]. TLDR it's helped cure my procrastination.
Two further observations:
- The fact that it is a newsletter service and articles land in people's inboxes makes me much more cautious about trying to ensure that the work is of sufficient quality than I suspect would be the case for a blog / medium. I don't want to be embarrassed and I don't want readers to unsubscribe. This seems quite different to Medium.
- Substack's recommendation system does provide a very meaningful boost in subscriber numbers. There is quite a bit of concern though about whether this is reduces incentives for writers to attract new readers to Substack and so will ultimately harm the platform.
[1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-t...
Substack makes a lot of money from promoting misinformation on vaccines, climate change and other issues, harming a lot of people.
I rarely click on Substack links, they managed to attract all the propagandists and cultists other platforms weeded out for a reason.
This is InVsion vs Figma.