Why did medium.com "fail"?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody and their siblings is putting up 'Subscribe now' begging bowls. Who's going to do all that subscribing? Some of them show you a couple paragraphs, as if that was enough to get the purses open?

Give it up. Give. It. Up. Subscriptions were for the mailing of paper magazines a century ago. Back when, you know, the whole world wasn't opened-wide on the net. Who subscribes to non-org mags anymore?

The best podcasters have patreon accounts. Some even actually, and personally, thank contributors by name. People even send them stuff.

Or get a bunch of big-media companies to get some kind of micropayment options online. Not for the 2 paragraphs but the whole article. A quarter is not $5 but ten-thousand quarters a day might just keep you afloat.

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)

Because it sold "legitimacy" of your blog as a subdomain.

Being a legit tech blogger is not about the domain, it is about having a significant repository of articles over many years, and for the majority of those articles to be at least insightful or entertaining, if not educational or maybe even introduce something completely novel.

You can't achieve that by signing up at a website which instantly nags its users to sign up to your mailing list. Substack sucks for the same reason.

If you want to be a legit tech blogger, get writing, and write well. See how you're going in a few years.

“Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well?”

To me, this is the essential question. I’ve been writing on medium since May of 2019 and for a while there was a real sense of community and camaraderie. I met some of my closest writing friends and mentors there. But there was a growing sense of gaming the system in the writing communities that made me increasingly uncomfortable. Share threads where writers were supposed to read (and clap for and comment on ) everyone else’s pieces if they expected to be able to share theirs. But what it ended up amounting to was mostly a circle jerk of writers reading other writers’ stuff, quality be damned.

The curation engine was good for awhile and drove worthwhile engagement and earnings, but then it fell apart, too. I make less than $10/month from my two accounts now, enough to offset the cost of my 2 memberships.

Back to the original question, I don’t know how a media company could pay editors to spend the eyes-on time it takes to judge quality and also pay writers a reasonable amount without becoming a traditional media company that hires freelance writers to hodgepodge it up. All those standalone stories with no organization makes my head spin. And consumers (who are able) are increasingly unwilling to pay for a subscription to such a company, especially to a media business with a lack of focus that has not proven its value.

I always thought Medium was written for readers and exploited the hell out if its writers, but then their business model started being about neither readers nor writers.

I truly do believe Substack’s model is superior in that readers pay to support authors or creators they find worthwhile rather than paying the platform ant large and trying to wade through the morass of indefensibly low quality work (or, more likely, forgetting you subscribed in the first place until the renewal email comes). It’s a different kind of platform, but more versatile and feels more homey.

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.

I blogged on Medium for a while. My most read article hit like 170k reads and the front page here on HN.

The UX on Medium kept deteriorating for readers. Slow loads, annoying modals, etc.

And then Medium did some shitty things with Freecodecamp.

I ended up deleting my account and moving some of the articles to my own blog. In retrospect this wasn't a good move since I broke the URLs and I regret it. But what's done is done.

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.

I recommend https://write.as if you just want a clean, minimalist blog platform with photo hosting and minimal effort. Integrates with RSS, mail, even ActivityPub/Mastodon. Write in Markdown. No ads. Or self-host this software as F/OSS with WriteFreely if you want full control or think $6/mo is kinda steep. You can add interaction (blog post comments) via e.g. Commento if you dislike the invasive Disqus, as you should...

It reminds me of Medium before all the bullshit.

I realized that I never read anything on Medium. I use it solely as my private travel blog, which is then read by family members, close friends and my nostalgic future me. The reason I like to use medium for that is that it is very easy to add content. The two biggest issues I have with Medium is that pictures can not be set fullsize anymore and that there is a (for me) useless sidebar. Not only are you now limited on how to present your content, but it adds a lot of distraction.

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.

Poor execution and the lack of a moat have caused medium to get pushed in a mode where the measures they put in place to generate revenue ended up throwing away the baby with the bath water in terms of alienating both writers and readers from their platform. Which is of course disastrous for any content platform.

Better execution might have prevented some of that but not all of it because without revenue, it was not a sustainable company. So, they had to do something given the level of investment and the mediocre revenue. Better execution would have not done anything to prevent competitors from stepping up. That was always going to happen.

But fundamentally, they are just a blogging platform. There are many blogging platforms out there and it's not rocket science to create some more. Blogging platforms are a commodity. It doesn't matter that much if theirs is nice to use, beautifully designed and comes with a great UX. And I would actually dispute it is that good to begin with. Either way, it's still a commodity. Easy to imitate, clone, copy, whatever. The value of that was always relatively low. And I don't think medium ever had a good plan for addressing that.

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.

Have you ever walked into a car dealership and the dealer seems to have already made up their mind that you're looking to buy a car NOW and you want to drive out with a car NOW and you're ready to make a decision NOW..? Yeah, that's how Medium feels. When I click a link to a Medium article, it seems like it's assumed that I really desperately need to read this article, I'm a huge fan of the author, and I'm ready to pay any price. I'm so ready, that I don't even care to know the price before I create an account. Just sign me up! I'm ready!

But I'm not ready. I clicked this post because it has a controversial headline. Maybe it'll be the best blog post I read all year, but more often than not it's someone who only made a Medium.com account because they think it'll make them rich. But I can't read it because I'm not a member, or I hit my limit of "free" articles (which is confusing because they didn't feel like they were valuable), or whatever the limiting factor is now.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

Still running - is not a greatest way to describe a business who's business plan relies on engaging a large audience.

I don't as practice use an ad blocker just to be polite to the sites I do visit and used to visit medium pages up until two or three years ago for light fluffy insights and I used to groan a little with the high ad load but not the point I wouldn't visit -- as there wasn't any really silly stuff like including a near 100 meg vidio payload with the hundred words I wanted to read. (I'll just say I don't visit Ars any more ... ever.)

At some point two or three years ago I believe I blocked a scraping API site ... I'm unsure what sites used the various apis, but around the same time medium thought it'd be cool to deal out some punishment, load the page and ads and barely two seconds after it finally loaded it was blanked. Yeah I guess I could have wrote a script that detected when it had loaded and taken a snapshot ... but for me it's easier to just ignore the entire site and surf elsewhere.

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/... )

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....

I think that the internet is overpopulated.

It creates ephemeral platforms that strives for a little while and become slave to the imperatives that drives revenu (ads, data) instead of staying true to themselves they corrupt their core in the name of viability, effectively rendering them shitty.

Oh wow, I thought it was just me. I used to like Medium several years ago, then due to my work stopped using it, and in the last few months tried to pick it up again. I often found interesting articles, but then every time I wasn’t able to read it because I had to pay. And the issue wasn’t so much paying for it, it was more the way it was presented. I basically got hooked by the title and summary, but then somehow I couldn’t even read the first paragraph of the article... I had to pay to continue reading. This gave me such a bad sentiment that I lost my appetite for the article. If the paying part had been presented or integrated somehow differently, things could have been different I feel.

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.

Slight offtopic, I didn’t even realize that medium has a frontpage and recommendations. Like in, you can sign up not only to pay money for views. Also, the average post quality itself is irrelevant when you read it occasionally only through shared links (e.g. on HN). But what’s annoying is that low-quality medium articles dominate SERPs. “I see it, I skip it” is common in my circle. Brand damage done. But it’s not the worst offender, tbh. A whole horde of blogs like “I apt-installed foo and tried to run it with some arguments, voila” is also there.

edit: I mean if it wasn’t there in SERPs, I wouldn’t even associate it with low-quality posts.

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.

This might not be relevant to medium's downward spiral, but as a reader I find that medium is a marker for content of very low quality.

I follow a lot of personal blogs and over the years less than 3 medium posts (not even whole blogs) made it into my bookmarks.

When searching the web, medium content is often times just 1 or 2 steps above the worst SEO spam sites.

In short: I avoid medium.com links most of the time. It's basically the site for people that just want to write tons of clickbait low quality content to "build their brand".

I'd like something like a long-form Mastodon server, with a way to organize content with keywords kind of like Drupal's taxonomy tree (keywords can be arranged in trees, and tags produce feeds of articles, so an article tagged with a specific tag also shows up in the more abstract tag feeds).

https://www.drupal.org/project/taxonomy_tree

It would also need to be useful for posting high resolution cat pictures and videos (or whatever), to replace Flickr. Mastodon shrinks and clips images, and I don't know how to make it a large full sized stream of image posts. Is that possible somehow, or is there a special version of Mastodon oriented towards photography or simply cloning the best parts of Flickr?

And it should not only make it easy to embed youtube and other videos, but also easily publish and incrementally enhance time-synchronized multimedia and link enriched transcripts and commentary on videos, with synchronized time scrolling and searching.

Maybe even a time based discussion tree that starts by importing the chat transcripts of live broadcasts, and lets you reply to the real time comments with later comments, and insert now top level comments later at particular points in time (or segments of time).

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

- Sunk cost fallacy everywhere you look. - An engineering culture of reinventing the wheel and maze of internal tools that only a select few understand. - No grass roots innovation - all ideas come from founders of recently acquired companies. - Highly politicized culture with rampant wokeness paralyzing decisions at every level. - Refusal to acknowledge Substack exists. - Too many non-builders and non-engineers running the company. - Lots and lots of misallocated talent.

Centralization is always destined to failure because growth requires catering to an ever lower common denominator. When services are new they are exclusive and content quality is high, if narrow. As they scale their standards drop, it is a mathematical certainty.

This is the fundamental mistake of Web 2.0. It's impossible to be everything to everyone.

In other words content moderation is a feature and if you can't do it while keeping your audience happy you are too big.

I'm a paid subscriber, I even gifted the membership to my friends.

The recommendation system needs to improve to find the true great articles, maybe some famous and well respected domain bloggers shall get a higher score than a newbie from nowhere with a clickbait title. You need a quality rating system. Maybe some icon to show the blogger's level(expert, random blogger, newbie,etc)

Personally I also like a text-oriented theme more, I mean I don't need those fancy pictures to distract me when what I want is to broaden my tech skills. In general Medium articles seem too verbose to me. In this twitter/Axios era, nobody has the time and patience to read those slow articles. Can you provide a text-mode option?

Talking about this, maybe Medium can learn one thing or two from Axios, how about put summary and conclusion to the top of each blog? so I know ahead what I am getting into before I have to scroll all the way down, to decide if I should dive into the thing at all?

> Substack doesn't have an algorithm that recommends you content

Which is a good thing. I don't really need a robot doing to me "you read an article about 'Instagram influencer mauled by a bear', so you are clearly into Instagram influencers and bears, here are 9000 blogs from Instagram influencers and another 9000 from people collecting teddy bears". In fact, I have an RSS feed which is composed of I lost count how many blogs, which I constantly fail to read half of them - and those I selected manually for being the most interesting to me, do you really thing I need another hyper-noisy channel to suggest me more content? If there's something relevant to the article, the article author would likely suggest it anyway. Or other thousand of authors would. Or it wasn't that important anyway, and my 2k+ messages unread in Feedly are calling to me.

"Why don't I use Medium?" is the question I asked from this, as I actually use HN as my chosen outlet for material that comes from a short lifetime in what I'd call "semi-pro" level writing. That is, I'd be writing professionally, but really, why?

The appeal of Substack is the appeal of good writing, and in particular, its necessary ingredient, conflict. What Substack offered, and Medium didn't have, was a bet on edginess that guaranteed them high quality writing, and to attract high quality writers. What I used Medium for was basically as long form LinkedIn, where that necessary essence of good writing is the one thing the platform is designed to dull. On LinkedIn, you have to look like everyone else, but with some slight variation and nothing remarkable or unconventional. To be a writer, you need to blow peoples fucking minds. This means taking risks, challenging conventions, knowing all the rules and then breaking them in the right order to produce something beautiful. To me, Medium is blandness as a service. Its entire brand is an expression of its quality, medium. Their market niche is to be the Olive Garden of content but without all the spiciness.

Taking risk in writing means I'm risking all the future money I am making on the platform, and the potetntial scandal-cost against finding other work because of the reputational hit of being booted. Together they mean I can't add the necessary degree of conflict to my writing that will edify an audience. The other thing about writing nobody tells you is that the world forgives you when you win and you can say anything you want when you are riding high, but if you lose publicly because of some insane political situation, you don't eat lunch in this global town again.

The genius of the substack launch was offering security to writers via their open political policy, which enabled great writers to take risks. Their work turned the platform into a desirable and elite brand, and the policy of openness guaranteed the platform would never stop writers from doing the one thing they have to do to live, which is writing. They gave writers a home and the artists turned it into a neighbourhood.

Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Camille Paglia, H. L. Mencken, Michel Houellebec, Glen Greenwald or really anyone's name I remember for being a great writer - does not survive on Medium. Hell, Matt Taibbi doesn't survive on Medium. It's content for people who buy celebrity scented candles.

Maybe they could launch a new site for experiemental ideas and provocative work, and some forums with rules that challenge twitter and reddit dominance. They can call it: medium.rare

> 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.

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."

I decided to stop supporting Medium with my articles due to the disregard for accessibility, and would urge any accessibility writers to do the same. Why support a company that can't even create a good writing experience for the blind? Or even a nice reading experience? And no, having a text to speech thing doesn't help, it's just more bullcrap browsers have to load, and infantalizes us further since aww de poor widdle blindie can't even read the Internet! Of course, it's nice for those who don't know about built-in tools like speak screen and such, but using built-in TTS engines would surely be better than calling out to Google or whatever the crap Medium uses.

I'm just gonna toss in my two cents and say I fucking hate the endless legions of shitty, low quality "towards data science" articles that clog up any DS related google search. That alone has engendered disdain for medium.

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.)

Has it ever been the go-to platform? I don't read on Medium at all, nor on Substack (which I view as basically Medium v1.1).

Monetization is why we got here.

Edit:

What Medium has is what I call the "Pornhub Paradox". Nobody (very rarely) pays for porn nowadays. Bloggers and the blogosphere has established that no one pays for blogs. YouTube suffers from their own success. Nobody wants to pay for YT videos, they tried to monetize it behind a paywall and it failed (multiple times).

You'd think that having all this content is just a surefire way to pull in money. But nobody wants to pay for porn - so pornhub puts them up for free.

My main gripe is that the quality really has gone down. I see many people posting on stuff that just isn't worth blogging about.

For example: https://tirthyakamaldasgupta12.medium.com/visualize-the-flow...

How is this important?

It's going the same way as the StackOverflow answers, which, like Quora, are being posts about self-promotion and filled with 'if this answer is correct please don't forget to mark it as such'.

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.

Lots of things, but mostly misaligned incentives.

On medium you’re a commodity as a writer and you have to drive traffic for ads. Your brand is devalued in favor of the “medium” brand and medium’s interests only loosely align with yours (mostly they conflict).

With Substack you retain your audience’s emails and Substack is fully aligned with helping you grow that audience and convert to paid. Everything they build is about that. It’s a much better model.

This is the core of it imo. The general crappiness of the medium site is extra.

Well once I saw that majority of my feed was becoming either affilate spam disguised as blog posts, reposts with slight paraphrasing from popular "Top 10" lists, or AI generated posts - I started doing the same.

Currently running an automated Medium blog which generates nonsense articles from topics scraped from YouTube trending, make roughly $300 per week.

Here's my take, from January 2017.

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/we-need-mediums-editor-not-m...

Basically, the incentives are misaligned, which will inevitably make it worse for writers as time goes on.

I drifted away from Medium five years ago when I built by own site with interactive features Medium lacked. But I still continued publishing non-interactive pieces there. However, last March, when Facebook and Twitter started hunting down russian bots, Medium became the last safe haven for them. I blocked quite a few but eventually gave up and deleted the account along with a few dozen posts.

Walled gardens suck. Once we had “the blogosphere” and it was great, and then Medium came along and did their best to ruin it. I tend to avoid any post on Medium and will never give them a dime. And as the OP points out, there’s tons of mediocre content there anyway. It’s almost always possible to find better content elsewhere, just needs a bit more search tweaking.

It's the result of investment capital. They demand growth and this is more important than long term sustainability.

Some of us were around when people abandoned their blogs and moved to Medium and we predicted this back then. We predict this with substack too.

It's inevitable for all of these startup social sites.

The way these sites should now be used are as temporary and try to move your audience every few years.

Everything On Medium.com Looks Like An Ad

I'm surprised it's taken this long for more people to realise this. I don't care about reading techbros' opinions on everything when most of the time it boils down to them doing shameless self-promotion.

While I'm on this topic, Quora is pretty bad too. I hope no explanation is necessary.

I'm surprised that Medium hasn't tried to capitalize on exiles from Twitter.

I can understand not wanting to go through the effort of hosting your own blog, but why don't more people use Blogger? Is Blogger's problem that it allows too much customization (e.g. MySpace v. Facebook situation)?

The real reason is that on Medium you don't own your audience. You do on Substack because you have their email addresses. You also have more ways of monetizing and can more easily communicate with readers by spending promotional emails. And of course all the content goes out by email which is great.

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.

Management by metrics is what leads companies astray. [1]

Right now it’s happening on Twitter and the process has just started on Substack.

[1] https://jakobgreenfeld.com/metrics

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.

I used to go to Medium because of the high quality articles on tech and programming on how to do things. Now it's just low quality SEO/self-promotion garbage. I've since long stopped using it and can very easily see using something like ChatGPT to answer my questions.

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…

What's the point of setting up a blog on medium rather then setting up a WordPress website in minutes?

Or course in short term you win with Medium and similar platforms, but long term you lose, moreover bearing risks of platform-locking

One thing medium did well was SEO. Medium articles were/are often top 1-5 links in Google search. This was a win but it turned into a loss because of the many issues mentioned in other comments on this thread.

Question related to this: Is there a tool out there that let's you spin a Medium-like text editor for your personal site? Curious to hear about HN's recommendation about whether a tool like this exists or if someone has considered building one.

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.

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.

They log shit ton of user data as well (visitors and creators). My advise is to use a private frontend like scribe[0].

0. https://scribe.rip

Medium doesn't allow you to keep people who like your work invested.

Because adblockers have made selling "free" content to astute, tech-literate people extremely difficut, and in 2023 micropayment/subscription models are still hopelessly bad.

What you write becomes a very big word document with all the staff editing the same document. That is why authors leave the platform and keep their precious texts in office apps.

It prompts me to login before I can read an article, which I solve by pressing back and not reading that content. In my mind it’s garbage indistinguishable from Quora at this point.

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

For me medium posts are boring

I mean they all look the same (visually)

The push for growth killed everything good about it.

Substack did recommend stuff to me, based on who I'm already subscribed to, but the recommendations were not great.

Too many fake "experts" just regurgitating each others posts re: software how-to articles.

Medium failed because "words on the internet" isn't a business model. People are writing to be seen, not to advertise for Medium.com. Over time, that means Medium becomes a halfway house for the "published on Inc.com / Entrepreneur.com" army of freelance content writers in between jobs.

For Medium to make money, it will always come down to pumping "user growth" and advertising to help the site owners sell it off to some bloated media conglomerate like Conde Nast.

BTW, all the issues with Medium.com that you've described are things I am already seeing on Substack.

- Lots of interesting writers gathering at the latest "for writers" venue

- Everybody remarking how different the clean interface is compared to the ugly popup-bar filled mess that they came from

- Some achieve overnight success, pulling other writers into the platform

- Platform starts running out of VC funding runway and starts tweaking the site to deliver more 'conversions'. Instead of a clean design, you'll now see a "sign up" popup that has to be dismissed. Writers are also encouraged to paywall early, so that great article link that you sent to your friend is no longer accessible because it's for paid subscribers only.

For me it seemed like medium posts were always a bit too self aggrandizing vs quality content.

Medium content turned more click bait because of the readership model and made it less popular

> pads locks the front door > trashes the place

Why doesn't anyone want to come here anymore?

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.

I decided to run my startup's blog on Medium for two primary reasons:

1) Having someone else already put in the work to get a clean, readable design is a big win

2) The chief reason for blogging is to make people aware of the company. A self-hosted blog isn't realistically going to have the reach or discoverability of a dedicated service

But over time it's just got worse and worse.

1) The redesign is just weird. When it first hit I thought the logo image had failed to download properly. But turns out that's deliberate.

2) Dark patterns for subscriber-only content. It's really unclear when publishing whether the article is going to be hit by the paywall

3) Having login tied to Twitter is a business risk. I don't want to wake up one day to find space karen has broken signin and I can no longer access my company's blog

There's definitely room in the market for someone to come along and do blogging+discoverability better. Unfortunately I don't see Medium as having the chops to be that answer.

Too focus on monetizing. Just not worth the all the hassle to be there.

Same thing that happened to reddit and digg etc, the keep trying to improve a finished product and with each revision the site becomes more bloated, difficult to use, and riddle with nasty things like paywalls and fullscreen ads in a pathetic attempt to generate revenue.

It's a bad market. It's really that simple.

Because writers have to write for the lowest denominator.

edit: spelling

It committed suicide at the altar of ad revenue.

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

I mostly see a paywall when I visit it. It's funny they've done all that effort to get me there, then once every day or so I see their paywall and leave.

I'm only talking from my perspective, but I'm bounced away from it most of the time.

I don't feel like I get that with Substack? I usually just click "no thanks" on the newsletter box, and go back and sign up if I like it. I very occasionally subscribe and pay for a substack feed I particularly like.

I stopped clicking on Medium links a looong time ago, I simply can't stand the X-views paywall. It's not worth it.

More recently I started using https://scribe.rip/ (via the Redirector browser plugin) when I absolutely want to read a Medium article, though not on Medium. Once ScribeRIP fails to work I'll just stop reading Medium articles again.

"Not to mention the stupid paywall which is infuriating."

"Is there any way for a platform like Medium to keep up with high quality posts while also paying their writers well"

Where exactly do you expect the money to come from to pay the writers well?

Slow (the code sections take a while to load), annoying (the copy and paste thing again) and paywalled. I feel dirty when I accidentally click a medium.com link. I, unfairly, devalue the devs who use the platform.

For me it's just the paywall. I pay for my local newspaper, pay for the NY Times, pay for The New Yorker, but I'm not made of money and I know of nothing at medium.com worth paying for.

> The post quality has deteriorated, and it feels like I'm reading the same posts over and over again.

Paywall, authors are indistinguishable to casual readers, not different enough from Blogspot.

Easy - they tried (more-or-less "successfully") to take the IP of every contributor and hide it behind their own paywall

Too many fR right blogs posted only to havkernews

- 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

My view on it: 1. Paywall 2. Algorithm rewarded hyperbolic / echo chamber posts 3. Changing content consumption tastes

(1) Paywalls.

(2) Fucked up the "Editors" or content aggregators.

The CEO won't admit the first one tho.

When Medium instituted their paywall they enshittified the user experience.

PAYWALL_NOT_GOOD

Censorship