I think Medium showed the world that you can't build a subscription business by commoditizing the content. I've read a lot of great content on Medium, but I don't remember who it was by, and that's why I never considered subscribing to Medium. Their content lacks the personality that platforms like Substack, and even traditional online newspapers like NYTimes, possess.
I don't think that you can't build a subscription business at Medium. What I told the team internally is that we had a Goldilocks problem where one thing we tried was wrong in one direction and what we're doing now is problematic in a different direction.
But I've been publishing on Medium since the beginning and have a pretty good sense of the intersection of quality and Medium's model. What I'm saying is keep an open mind. We grew a pretty large subscription already with a lot still that we can do to make it much higher quality.
There's so much junk in the way of the content. It feels like Medium doesn't respect the text or the act of reading. Night and day compared to Substack.
If I'm in any way typical, you've got a lot of work to do to overcome the negative associations of the brand.
I would say it isn't a stretch at all to say most people feel that way. I stopped including any Medium hosted articles in my HN newsletter b/c of complaints from lots of subscribers that they couldn't read them.
I'll have to dig up my analysis I did last year (using BigQuery HN data), but on HN there are more Medium links than ever, but they tend not to get voted on at the same rate as older stories which tells me at least for the HN crowd it isn't worth clicking on them.
I mean yes, I would not click on any article hosted on medium. And it is not just because of incessant login popup that many correctly noted. It is also because I feel if any individual / company can not host their articles and blogs on their own platform they are not worth reading. I dislike their reasoning on at least two counts:
1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.
2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.
I'm really torn about this because I don't think dealing with domains and web publishing is a good litmus test for who has something worthwhile to say. That said, I can't ignore the signal when it comes to tech-focused writing. For broader subjects though, I don't think tech-knowhow is better gatekeeper than traditional book or magazine publishing provided.
Ultimately I think lowering the barrier for publishing is a good thing, but that comes with an inherent cost on quality and the incentives just aren't there for businesses / brands to solve this. The backstop for me is personal reputation. Individuals can maintain integrity and principles, businesses cannot (except as a function of stable individual leadership). Therefore, I believe platforms which orient towards scalability and anonymous algorithms will be a race to the bottom (eg. Medium, TikTok), and platforms which orient around the individual (eg. Substack) will at least have a chance at representing quality (monetization, scalability, VC-pressure concerns notwithstanding).
I don’t get your reasoning. I have hosted my own static site for years, but I wrote primarily on Medium today because I can get paid that way. You cannot make a living writing blogs on a static site.
Medium significantly improves your reach and access to statistics to understand readers better. Until Medium came around I had clue I could ever make a living as writer.
A lot of us use Medium because it has solved a problem long plaguing the internet: How do you get paid for creating content?
I know myself that so don’t want to sign up to one dozen places for subscription. That would be the problem hosting your own site. Few people want to have 10 different subscriptions. With medium one subscription gives access to a lot of writers.
It’s interesting that you draw the line specifically at the software serving the post. Should the individual/company own the hardware also? The OS running on the server?
I don't think the parent is making a point about ownership, but rather publishing. He's saying that in 2022, if you're not competent to publish yourself, it creates doubts about what you have to say about high technology.
I think it’s just the branding awareness that is suspect.
You can host a WordPress site on blog.yourcompany.com for an amount that rounds to $0, and it will probably satisfy most people who dislike Medium and other aggregators.
Or you can roll your own of course, but the extra geek cred you will get for it is minimal. Not saying don’t do it, I’ve done it more than once, but do it for the doing.
When I see Medium, I think: nag banners, web fonts popping in and pushing the content around while I’m reading it, and little social things lazy loading and popping in on the side as yet another distraction.
This annoys me about all sites, but I think it feels worse on Medium because I remember a time when I thought Medium was decent. The design itself still looks good, and that, too might be why the bank feels worse.
I am hopeful that /u/tonystubblebine will reply to your comment, and I'm genuinely hopeful and interested in his answer because it essentially determines whether I'll open myself back up to reading and publishing on Medium.
There's a lot of junk in the content too. In the software topic, I have read some articles that had interesting code by what sounded like entry-level to mid-level software engineers, and it was helpful for me when I was grasping with similar problems. But most of the senior-level author articles that are more about concepts, high-level project or organization problems and similar, most of the interesting stuff was outside of it. On medium I rarely see articles like that, what I see most are articles that try to be about that, but read like written by a non-senior author, and is sometimes buzzwordy or has no information I can extract beyond self promotion of the author.
Agree - they may seem like minor design decisions to the visionaries at Medium, but those things alone are why I perceive Medium to be user-hostile. And they’ve had this anti-functionality for many many years. It feels like they don’t want me to be there.
I quit your platform because you didn't have Partner Program in India.
I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did.
But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India.
Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India.
This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything.
I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys.
I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.
Please fix the horrible UX of Medium. The site is trash to use. For a while I just had an extension parse and proxy me to a better, cleaner alternative.
It’s full of banners, popups and annoyances that is completely opposite of what you’d want in a site where you focus and learn something
I was writing on Medium for many years building a small audience of 1300 followers.
While the posting experience is nice. Content discovery is terrible. Content monetization is even worse. I can't justify researching a post for hours for no reads and no money.
Personally the content model that's always made the most sense to me is a Kickstarter-like format where content pitches raise the funds necessary to execute on them and then distribution is free and unfettered, or don't happen at all if there's a lack of audience interest (saving the author the effort).
In particular for written content, the threshold for funding is low and the bar for execution is as well, which skirts a lot of the issues the actual Kickstarter has.
And if funding is anonymous, there isn't any direct issue with undue influence from benefactors.
There's a number of written pieces I'd happily pay to help bring into existence. And a number of other pitches that even if I wouldn't be interested in funding, I'd be interested in creating an account to vote up to increase visibility to those that would, and in both cases being notified when that content finally exists.
But I have very little interest in simply funding an author in general, or paying to access content when summaries of anything important will exist elsewhere, or even in wasting my time with free material that's over engineered towards clickbait and maximizing my scrolling to serve the most ads.
In particular, I'd love to fund a return of actual investigative journalism on topics I'd value.
We saw the short tail of this in action with Sanderson on the actual Kickstarter, but I definitely think there's a long tail model viability on a specialized platform for written content.
So you mean fund magazines or writer collectives? I feel like mirror was trying to be that but then moved away from it. Presumably because peopel don’t want to read the same crypto shill articles over and over again
Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience.
If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding.
Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals.
A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate.
I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year.
Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads.
I feel the main problem with medium is that i breaks the web. Putting a paywall at the other end of a link makes that a broken link.
Somewhere I feel that when an author link to an article, that link is an invitation to consume the linked text. It just feels uncivilised to put out links and then not deliver on it.
That said, I was at one time a subscriber of LWN. The model there was that articles were subscriber only the first week, and then public after that. _Unless_ a subscriber decided to provide a link, then the article was also available for anyone following that link.
Perhaps thats a model that could work for Medium? If I ever get an rss-reader up, and start following sources again I could perhaps see my self pay a subscription for “early access” feeds (to support some pore journalist doing actual reporting if nothing else)
I see a lot of complaints about the paywall but few offer any suggestions for alternatives. Somehow people who create content have to be able to get paid. One cannot write everything for free.
Unsolicited advice: The best media/social networks do two jobs:
1) Allow creators to make content (Medium does great at this, Ev’s eye for product was key here, but always room to improve)
2) Match that content with the correct/largest possible audience, like how twitter has hashtags/trending, FB has the friend graph, and ultimately Tik Tok has the algorithm (Medium is awful at this and if I were you, I’d focus immediately on solving this).
I've been using Medium as a reader, writer, and subscriber for some years. And nowadays I am unconsciously not using Medium as much in profit of Substack and Ghost. My main draw to Medium as a writer was to reach lot of people. A random paywall means less reach. Not sure if max reach and paywall are reconcilable and solvable.
Transaction costs to find good content within Medium is too expensive (in time invested).
Sporadic posts, with hit or miss in getting quality content
Opinion masquerading as facts most of the time
Hidden agendas not revealed upfront
Editorial standards unknown
In a world where everyone is an expert, there no real experts
Twitter long form (in limited rollout now) will kill Medium
The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. They're a middleman where both the author and reader is a customer of Medium, which puts them in the position of having to balance the needs of authors and readers.
The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.
> The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience.
This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted.
This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience.
I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.
Getting your content onto a Medium publication with a large and/or relevant following is such useful method of distribution. All of my most widely read Medium posts have been via a publication that I reached out to.
> There's no way to pay Medium to promote your content on their platform ?
That's not something I saw when I used Medium in 2018ish for some of my posts.
I know there was a partner program but that wasn't paying to get traffic to your posts. That was a mechanism to get paid based on how much engagement you had on your Medium articles. It's just another incentive to get you to drive your own traffic and audience to Medium to drive up Medium engagement. Basically helping Medium grow their business.
If you wanted to pay money to promote your content you can do that without Medium. You can buy ads on Google and other outlets then run ads to your blog posts. I don't do that personally but it's an option.
The substack model seems to be more focused on building and supporting individual brands. So I don't think of visiting Substack, I think of checking out what X, Y or Z said. The Substack brand is subordinate to the individual blogs/writers.
> both the author and reader is a customer of Medium
> only the author is [Substack’s] customer
That suggests that Medium should be more reader-friendly than Substack, but it seems the opposite is true. I suspect that even when readers are nominally customers on Medium, they are really still just the product (in the sense of “if it’s free, you’re the product” — except it’s not free here).
Most (all good?) authors will prioritize good reader experience as one of their own requirements, so a good reader experience comes naturally downstream from being author-first.
There is some discovery if you go look for it actually. It's just toned down and left for the user's initiative, instead of bugging you every chance it gets :)
> On the backend, the way [Medium's] partner program works is that users’ membership fees are allocated proportionally to the writer based on how many articles the user read. Fine. Also there is something about clapping. I guess if I really like a writer I could make sure to read a lot of their articles so they can get some of that membership fee. But, as a consumer, I: a. can’t subscribe directly to the writer, and b. can’t signal that I value their content at more than $5 per month. No amount of claps can make up for that!
Writers and readers both don't get the right amount of value from their framework.
When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript.
When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.
I also skip any article that is from medium, not just because of the noise on the screen, but medium seems to just be people "building their brand" by repeating what other people have already said.
That proxy is great, thanks for sharing! Most annoying thing about Medium pages is the multi-second waiting period while the page is loading. (On Chrome on a M1 Pro, mind.)
No, for UX reasons. If your content is primarily text and images ... then you should NEED javascript to view page. Maybe it is needed for comments, or some other feature, but the basic content should be viewable just fine. This is good both the readers, for accessibility for things like screen readers, for bandwidth and more. That doesn't mean medium OWES us this, but one can still make the critique.
The big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.
For now at least, Substack has much, much better UI.
Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress).
Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline.
You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)
Substack fills an explicitly free-speech need (for now) in an age where the backbone/service providers of the internet's conveniently forgotten why that's important.
You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).
"Free speech" isn't a business model, unless the business plan is to sell a story to VCs and get paid a percentage of the term sheet.
Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.
That's not how it worked. Some authors got paid a big advance in return for giving up all subscription revenue for one year. In at least some cases, authors said they would have made more money taking the regular subscription deal, where Substack gets a cut.
So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.
It is a classic platform bootstrapping model. It worked with new book publishers in the 1800s too. It worked for new video game consoles, etc ...
The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.
I've seen a fair bit of discussion about this, and so far, every author who I've seen talk about this has said they took the deal and came out behind, or they refused the deal but would have come out behind if they'd taken it, ie, subscription revenue ended up exceeding the offered advance.
I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.
That's the opposite of what happened. You may want to double check this. :)
> people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage
Some prominent Substacks have tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Glenn Greenwald is apparently clearing (after Substack's fees), something like $100k USD/month. Matt Taibbi has even more paying subscribers, so will make even more; Andrew Sullivan is close behind. Last year Substack announced they had over 1 million paying subscribers (generally around $5-10/month), and the top 10 newsletters were at that point generating over $20m in revenue/year (ie, averaging over 2m each).
As it turns out, a non-trivial amount of people are willing to pay for writing, whatever the reason is.
Whereas Medium works better for network effects/SEO (and why it became super popular before Facebook/Twitter became the most reliable methods of distribution for personal articles), Substack has a better writer/reader relationship, which matters when trying to make a living off of it. Although as a result, it incentivises "thought leadership" more than Medium, which is funny in retrospect since Medium was the blogging platform that started the trend.
Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.
The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors.
With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.
None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.
This seems like a pretty uncharitable take, and one thats unlikely to be true.
Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?
> A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions
These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.
Substack exists because someone launched a very different business model than Medium. They also have a program where they pay prominent people advances to switch (https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers).
YouTube has a great personalization algorithm and a lot of content. Content and personalization make up a virtuous cycle, and drive higher engagement rates, which drives ad rates higher. Medium has neither the scale, content nor the engagement to be as valuable a platform for advertisers.
> So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.
I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler.
On the other hand, managing a monetization platform (subscription billing, customer support, linking posts to email to social media notifications) is more complex than self-hosting. Not impossible, but more than most writers would want to take on themselves.
Tangential, but I found Ev's recent Tweet about the Twitter/Elon mess totally perplexing:
"I'm sure there are legal/fiduciary reasons you have to say that [you are going to sue Elon to force the acquisition], Bret. But if I was still on the board, I'd be asking if we can just let this whole ugly episode blow over. Hopefully that's the plan and this is ceremony."
I don't fully agree with arguments that Silicon Valley is full of America's current meritocratic elite scratching each other's backs. But I do think that tweet speaks to that argument.
The board's responsibility to shareholders and other stakeholders in Twitter doesn't seem to enter his awareness — just everyone getting along, where everyone means a select crowd of entrepreneurs and investors.
The stock made a huge jump when he announced he purchased a large stake on April 4, and now it's back to $34 which is ~5% above its mid-March low point. Most other tech stocks are down in that time frame, e.g. FB is down 13%.
That's because the possibility of an acquisition is still being priced in. If Twitter announced tomorrow that they were letting Musk off the hook it would take a much greater dive.
That would mean a shrinking possibility of an already bungled acquisition going through is better than the status quo. Seems like Musk has kind of done Twitter a favor by shaking things up. Regardless of the acquisition, it has become clear that the market thinks there is a lot of potential here that's being wasted.
The market isn't pricing whether Elon will improve Twitter. The market is pricing in the fact that if the acquisition goes through, each stock you hold gets converted into 52.40$, regardless of what happens to Twitter after it's acquired.
The market just thinks there's a chance he'll be forced into paying more than the company is worth. It needn't have anything to do with the company's potential.
If I made a credible $100B offer for the Campbell Soup company and waived due diligence, the stock price would shoot up, but it's not because they're wasting their potential.
> That would mean a shrinking possibility of an already bungled acquisition going through is better than the status quo
It is objectively better for investors because they get $54.20 a share instead of the current ~$34. It isn't a signal for anything else. Shareholders don't care what happens to Twitter as a company after that, because they have already sold their shares.
There's been some employee attrition and negative effects on company morale. I also think the brand-reputation damage of this episode will take time to show itself.
most recent Matt Levine column outlined a scenario where Elon Musk sells back his 9 percent stake in Twitter back to Twitter at a discount, and everyone agrees to back off.
> Why would Twitter want to just let this all blow over? Elon did a ton of damage to the company and they have a good cause of action.
I don't think Twitter has much of a choice here. Suing Musk seems like a pretty big risk given his defense, and it doesn't even guarantee a payoff for the company. On top of that, the fallout from such a high-profile court case wouldn't be very good PR (arguably so even if Twitter wins), so the shareholders are probably in for a net loss if they fight it out in court. Plus, Elon could full-well just settle the $1B offer cancellation fee out of spite and Twitter wouldn't see a dime.
Elon definitely made a stupid and rash decision, but frankly, Twitter is an even dumber company. A bunch of bagholders trying to legally compel a multi-billionaire to buy them out doesn't make a very strong court case. I don't see this ending well for Twitter unless Elon really fumbles his defense.
> fallout from such a high-profile court case wouldn't be very good PR
In what sense? Will advertisers or users flee because of a court case? If anything, it keeps Twitter in the news. Their CEO could make any announcement today and have it reverberate across America as he could never have done before.
There is precedent for Delaware courts to force the merger to go through, Tyson vs IBP. Twitter vs Musk is going to be a test of that precedent and whether judicial system still works as intended.
My impression is that Musk's defense is pretty weak. This is mostly based on Matt Levine's columns so I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like much to me. He's a known BS artist with a strong incentive to get out of this deal so I don't give a lot of weight to claims he makes without evidence.
Twitter hurt themselves by not being able to hand over crucial details like how big the percentage of bot accounts is on the platform. No matter what is being said, as long as Twitter can't hand over these stats, all they say is worthless. About as worthless as the Twitter platform itself.
Elon hurt himself by waiving his right to any due diligence. Any time he tweets he sees a ton of spam accounts replying to him. Why didn't he ask for this information before agreeing to the initial terms?
Ev Williams is a legend and his contribution to posterity is already assured, however it is hard not to conclude that he dropped the ball with Medium - which had a dominant position for the written word, and yet now looks to be superceded by SubStack and - ironically - Twitter, where threading seems to be the new blogging. It's not only about the writing / reading experience, its also about audience growth. Look forward to his next project
Interesting. You may have a vested interest in saying this, but not being an anonymous account does give me pause. Obv much more than an anonymous account with your position in your bio.
Tik Tok is a lot closer to what Medium is doing than SubStack or Twitter. The fact that Twitter now has blogging doesn't really make it a Medium competitor. And similarly, SubStack is in a completely different business.
I read a lot of “serious” things online, probably more than I should, and I never even remotely felt like Medium had any kind of dominant position.
For a certain kind of formulaic, clickbaity, “who needs an editor” kind of content sure, it was popular, but for serious writing?
Sorry, nope, not even close, not even temporarily.
Substack at least can make a claim for serious journalism and opinion that’s hard to monetize elsewhere — much but not all of it heavily libertarian — but what, please, was Medium’s claim to gravity?
To be honest, Medium still provides the easiest of discovery processes.
Twitter is still bad for the small guy. The algorithm is too bad. I know at least n people will find a tweet content really interesting, but I se k (<< n) likes. That frustrates me.
Blogger, Wordpress, Bear Blog: none of them makes your content visible to others like Medium does.
Those are the solutions that I like, because I don't want to do even little maintenance. And I want features like likes, comments, bookmarks, share buttons.
I posted to Bear Blog and Medium same content some weeks back. It is on an obscure topic. The Bear Blog one has two toasts, nobody reached out to me regarding it. On the Medium one, there are 13 unique claps, two thoughful comments, people saving my article to several lists.
I didn't have this with anything else, tbh.
I tried maintaining a site using Jekyll and hosted on GH pages. I don't even like that amount of maintenance.
I have research for org, self-research, books, family, physical activity, minor hacking projects. Really cannot find the time to fiddle with another thing.
> On the Medium one, there are 13 unique claps, two thoughful comments, people saving my article to several lists.
Is a handful of additional comments worth the tradeoff?
Because Medium.com can decide at any time to tweak the knobs of their recommendation engine, and your admittedly low traffic could go straight down to Bear Blog levels. That is what happened to many people's Instagram accounts, as IG is now favouring organic posts from users that also pay for promoted posts...aka, servicing their real customers.
But that tradeoff is hypothetical and would not retroactively remove value that is created in the meantime.
I'm not a medium fan either but my feelings are similar to the parent post. If it's something I want to persist then I will take the effort and add it to my jekyll site but that's few and far between. Medium works great for the 99% of long form content I want to publish.
I also have a pseudonymous Less Wrong account where I say unconventional, unpopular things. See, I don't earn money OR make a name.
I also write notes when I need- to Simplenote and Google Docs, and share the links with the people I see fit.
I don't measure anything serious or important to me regarding views or reach. They are just a nice bonus.
I wouldn’t even have that if not for Medium.
FB is where I can get the best reach. But I don't like the distribution of people there, and post seldomly with extremely curated visibility list of "friends". I am happy with 10 likes.
I also have an YT channel that helps people (edit: it's code and math). Very low effort channel with near-zero editing. I earn a penny or two.
As I said, don't care. Need low-maintenance stuff.
Medium is pretty much on death row now. It’s gone through so many failed business model changes, its not a pleasant reading experience, and it’s brand isn’t great.
I'm soooo disappointed in Medium. They were supposed to be a clean, readable alternative to all the shitty sites that attack you with popups and won't show text without JS. But bit by bit they've joined the sites they were meant to replace.
The way I see it from the outside, Medium had a lot of lofty goals that unfortunately turned out to be in conflict with each other in the real world.
One one hand, they wanted to create the best writing and reading experience on the web, by investing heavily in product design, and manually curating and promoting quality writing that would be interesting to read.
On the other hand, they wanted to democratize publishing by making it easy to write and encouraging just anyone to get their ideas out onto the platform, regardless of how readable those writings were.
Subscribers that were willing to pay monthly for access to curated, thoughtful writing increasingly found a site filled with low-quality boilerplate. Established writers who had at first enthusiastically adopted Medium increasingly fled the site in order to protect their personal brands and reputations.
In the end, no one was happy, except mediocre clickbait writers. There wasn't enough subscription money to justify focusing entirely on quality, and ad-based models were too much in conflict with the platform goals for them to be able to make up the difference via scale.
I definitely don't think Medium has been a failure in its first 10 years. Quite the contrary --- they really did raise the bar for reading experiences across the web, and for a time, they did have the best and brightest writers churning out thoughtful, interesting content.
But it was an idea ahead of its time. Without established cultural and technical micropayments infrastructure (a situation which has seen practically no progress in these past 10 years), it was always going to be an uphill battle to fund the kind of experiences they wanted to create.
I doubt there will be many changes in this state of affairs during the next CEO's tenure. That said, I hope to be surprised, not just because it would be good for Medium, but because it would provide much-needed hope for the web as a whole. Our need for social platforms that care about empowering and educating people, rather than exploiting them, is even greater than it was 10 years ago. Perhaps Medium's next act can help rekindle that flame.
It's easy to forget that blogging before Medium was mostly ugly & slow WordPress websites. I am grateful that Ev & team were able to push online writing in a better direction.
Unfortunately Medium slowly turned into a incredibly frustrating & hostile user experience. I haven't purposely clicked a Medium link in many years because of it. I empathize with how difficult it can be to generate revenue from online writing, but I wish they figured out a better way.
Did you forget about cool and snappy Blogger (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or cool and snappy tumblr (before it turned ugly and slow)? Or even cool and snappy LiveJournal (before it turned ugly and slow)?
It's like the difficult part is not to initially build a cool and snappy web service, but manage to remain cool and snappy over a long period of time, when money seems to want you to build something not-cool and not-snappy.
Something Medium failed at. Yes, they managed to solve the easy part (start out cool and snappy) but they failed at the hard and valuable part (remain cool and snappy).
Most of the things I miss revolve around the community features and how good LJ was for MEDIUM-SIZED conversations: You weren't stuck in your immediate circle but neither were you just shouting into the terrifying public void like you are on, for example, Instagram or Twitter.
There was very, very fine level of access control over who could see what which meant you could require CONTEXT to be a part of a group. In addition, tagging support was robust and NOT just a mixture of hashtags. So you could do things like, in a politics group, click 'Elections: 2004' and see, in chronological order, every post related to that topic in the group. This made actual search possible and cut down on reposts/recycled content, because things weren't just lost the minute they fell off the front page, etc.
I agree with Mezzie about the good things about LJ, but one thing I think he/she is wrong about is that Twitter is "shouting into a void." In fact, even though your tweets may be set to public and any user can read them, your followers are your "circle" and most interactions come from there, not from random people.
The difference is that the access controls were built in to LJ and they're an afterthought on Twitter. The ability to finely control VIEWERSHIP (multiple different friends groups, for example) dampened a lot of things being shared without context.
Then again, screenshot culture wasn't really a big thing, yet. I don't think we could replicate some of what made LJ work anymore. It's sad.
No it wasn't. Blogspot was fine. TypePad was fine, as was WP. These are what powered the blogging boom of 2003-2010. They are all still around. If you were a regular writer, you would also have eventually developed a strong command of whatever platform you were on. A writer doesn't stop because the pen isn't as nice as they would like.
Meanwhile, Medium failed to create any kind of boom at all, despite its clean UX. They just kept the marketing/analytics cruft out of the product JUST long enough to attract a large enough audience, and then jacked everything up to 11. Standard bait-and-switch for 'free' technology products these days.
How to your two paragraphs go to together? Wordpress websites can be good if they’re set up right (and that’s why Wordpress powers such a huge portion of web content). Medium developed a nice platform and turned it into something completely user hostile and horrible. We shouldn’t be grateful they started with good intentions when it’s currently so awful. I’d says we should be thanking Wordpress and condemning Medium.
I have yet to run into a slow Wordpress blog. The slow WP sites are usually corporate websites running a ton of plugins (appointment scheduler is a popular one) that wouldn't exist on a pure writer's blog site.
I completely disagree. It used to be so easy to subscribe to everything I wanted to read via RSS and consume it quickly how I want to consume it. That user experience was 100x better than what we have now.
Most blogs today are still accessible via RSS, even though few of them actually advertise their RSS feed. However some don't put full articles on their feed.
Medium also tried to be a clutter free version of Medi, eh I mean LiveJournal. At one point, Substack, unless radically different than Medium, will go the same way.
My quip with them is they never started the Partner Program in India. And were very dishonest regarding it.
There once was a time when I wanted to earn from my writings, but not any more.
But their dishonesty makes it unlikely for me to reconsider them.
They said that they would start Partner Program (MPP) in India once Stripe started serving India.
Then Stripe became operational in Beta. They said, once Stripe comes out of Beta, they would start MPP in India.
Then Stripe came out of Beta. They just stopped mentioning India. They can serve Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Slovenia- and not India. That made me frustrated enough to stop using Medium.
I do not plan to go back, and I don't need money from writing anymore.
I made some money from Quora (you just have to sign W8-BEN, which is a 10 minute process) running Spaces, but somehow Medium never started MPP.
Their dishonesty made me angry.
Edit: they put a paywall on my writings by default even when they didn't pay me a dime.
I'll give credit to Medium for trying to diversify its content/revenue streams with things like memberships and in-house high-quality publications, but media is not an easy business.
At this point, if you are still posting on Medium, you many want to consider moving to your own platform since some of the network effects that made posting on Medium a good proposition are dying off as a result.
Rather than this community's emphasis on petty issues ("no javascript"), I'd start by saying something positive about Medium.
If you can't be bothered to self-host a blog, you can link your domain to your Medium publication (before May of this year this was free, and continues to be free for earlier users). You'd then have a free blog on a proper domain, with zero ads and you can even tweak the design with a few clicks to make it your own. Further, it comes with a comment system, followers, etc. It's easy to blog as the writing experience is quite excellent.
I think all of that combined is a lot of value, in particular for a casual blogger. And it doesn't cost a cent. To me, this counters the list of small UI annoyances. We've grown extremely entitled and cynical, I'm just trying to recognize value when I see it. Because certainly the value isn't zero.
The negative I have about Medium is that just like many other content services, they failed to solve the discovery problem. There used to be a lot of quality writing on Medium and there might still be a lot, but those writers are not recognized by the ranking/discovery algorithms. Instead, they are completely outclassed by people gaming the system.
Check any topic/category and see that most are flooded with low effort no-substance articles with click bait titles. Those people know how to work the algorithms, and they win.
So...noise goes to the top instead of quality. And for those quality writers to gain traction, they need to join the engagement hacking or find crickets.
It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up.
It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
> It seems to be a generic problems across many networks: the loud, dumb and unreasonable get 90% of all attention after which other voices are discouraged or just give up.
I think its probably not a problem for the platforms, shorter content mean its easier to put advertisements and easier to recommend and manage.
Its a race to the bottom because now probably for the first time in history, social interaction is not made to be valuable or important, its made to be profitable.
Cafes and bars didn't control what you can say, and changed which topics are preferable and which aren't, obviously Social media does this and more.
So as long users exist, advertisers are paying to advertise, nothing really will change, and we are starting to see the affect of this in the world.
> It gets worse when you consider the secondary problem: there's limited appetite for long form content and the trend is that it's decreasing even further. We quite simply live in a Tiktok society. You have 30 seconds to make your point.
I think this really depends on the audience, and who you are targeting.
HN is totally the opposite from TikTok, yet it still grows, and blogs that get on the front page get a very large amount of traffic that almost any author would be happy with.
But in general, I agree everything became stupider because its a race to the bottom at this point.
Ads don't apply to Medium. It's a subscription model. In theory it's a refreshing take as they rightfully recognize the many (ethical) issues with running ads, surveillance tech, and so on.
If for a moment we would assume a very large group of qualitative "citizen journalists" regularly writing, together they'd produce a vast sea of high quality content. Medium at one point also onboarded actual pro publications, so you'd get a really great set of content that in volume would be the equivalent of several thousands of newspaper and in terms of quality be close, whilst being more diverse.
5$ per month for that pile of quality is a steal.
But for that to work, the quality has to be discoverable. You need to able to look at the homepage, and see top notch writing in the categories you're interested in. It would be a single place to do most of one's deeper reading, with seemingly no end. For very low costs.
None of that has worked out, for the reasons I mentioned.
This is only the opinion of a very small (but loud on HN) group of people. Most people want basic interactivity like bookmarking things they want to keep for later, commenting, interactive charts, image gallery.
That's not really true. For instance, interactive charts can be very useful on a blog. Diagramming is also quite useful, especially if the diagram and data it acts on are kept in the article itself - for instance, I use MermaidJS for this.
What becomes bad is when platforms (or people) think they're entitled to track you with said Javascript.
Nobody is the product just because a website uses JS. You should be complaining about data collection, unnecessary tracking, data brokers all of which can be done without JS.
That idea doesn't work in reality. For example, i go to a website, and just read and browse it. No data should be collected as i never update or call the backend.
But...you went to the website. Now my server can track you. It knows what IP address you're coming from, where you are in the world, and it could theoretically cross reference that data with other databases and determine more about you.
I said logging because that's what I usually do with this information, but if your goal is track then you can do it with the same information. Fingerprinting can happen actively (with JS) or passively (without JS). The former is obviously more precise, the latter isn't bad at all. In passive fingerprinting you can combine the IP, which is a connection IP - nothing to do with HTTP, and the User-Agent header. You are now tracked.
