The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.

Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.

The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.

Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down.

Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant?

That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.

Why has substack "won" this market? Or has it really? Is it just due to the newsletter publishing tools and subsidising some big name bloggers?

Medium "won" this market a few years back as well. The reason it sucks now is because investors aren't paying them to make the internet reading experience nice. And in any case, readers aren't willing to pay a subscription fee for 'nice'.

Substack is now the leader because investors haven't pressured them to turn more newsletters into paid products. They will, they just haven't now. And just like Medium, the really good writers will have enough capital to run their own newsletters, and use Substack only for SEO. Sound familiar?

Soon, we'll begin to see "name.substack.com" with the same kind of suspicion that we now see "medium.com".

In a way this feels like the cycle of image hosts. Everyone moves to the new user friendly one, that one enshittifies the site to make more money, cycle repeats.

I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.

Here's how it goes: I open a link, I dismiss a sign-up suggestion screen (if any), I read the stuff, and then I go. If there's a paywall I leave, but I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.

There are low-quality posts but they are plenty on all platforms (dev.to comes to mind). On plus side Medium articles are comfortable to read without distractions.

I can count on my fingers the number of Economist articles I read per year while my history is full of recent Medium visits, mostly related to work so stuff that translates in productivity and earnings. They're not even in the same ballpark.

Of course but it has to be a balance. Medium does all the things I mention.

If they did just one of those to monetize, ok I'd not be happy but I'd give them a pass. A paywall ideally not because I'm really not going to subscribe after reading only 3 articles.

But doing all of those makes me feel like a cash cow. Like they're grasping at straws desperate to get some cash. They don't understand the user-hostility of this and that's important because the users are their resources.

And as far as the NYT and Economist, I avoid those too. If I really think something is worth reading I'll use a paywall bypass tool but generally I don't even bother.

Everything else is platforming, which we will also argue should be separated from the blog itself. This is why we have URLs and links. Just as in the restaurant example, I first go to a credit card company, then I go buy dinner.

The tech stack isn't even on the top 100 hindrances to profitability.

It's a deceptive business model, and people feel deceived and no longer want to do business with that company (surprise!).

There may be some similarities (like when they used to let people upload full movies and TV shows), but it is a big stretch to paint YouTube and Medium with the same brush.

hmm, not sure what you mean. I have a gmail account from early early days, and I've never created a youtube account. I would've accepted it if they forced it on me, but given the choice I've never seen a reason to create one. They nag me to create one if I forget and try to upvote, or comment, and they nag me for subscribing on the regular also.

perhaps if I created a gmail account later on it would come with youtube?

Medium should invest in UX study, get to know better their targeted users and implement a paywall that is _just_ painful enough so that it doesn’t cause the customers to associate your brand with a negative concept.

You can trick us into paying, but do it nice and sweet! We want to feel like you deserve it, not that we got forced.

This is the exact same thing: shitification.

Make a cool product at a loss then make it shitier to use to bring as much money as you can before enough users exit to break your network effect. You can even make it last longer by making it as hard as possible for your users to leave.

If the process is not entirely clear to you, look at Twitter. (Elon Musk is incredibly not-subtle at this). Everyone of those monopolies are "too big too fail" until it does. Yahoo was like this. Tumblr was like this. Facebook and Twitter were considered as indestructible gods yesterday: they look incredibly fragile now (I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"). Youtube is indestructible? Every single creator is complaining about having video removed/unmonetized while every single person I know is baffle and annoyed at the number of advertising they get. Wait for the moment when people will hear about Peertube.

What most people fail to realize is that "failing" is never a big nova disappearance. It’s more subtle, becoming slightly more irrelevant. Yahoo is still there after all. Youtube/Facebook will still be there in 10 years. (while some may even wonder if Twitter will still exist next year). I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.

What few realize that it is all part of the plan when running a VC business. You have the "invest phase" (everything is free, growth at all cost) then the "cashing phase" (aka "shitification"). VC never invest without an horizon. So, sooner or later, money will flew out and the whole thing will fall. People miss it because the brand usually keep a residual value which keep the light on.

That’s why the only long-term sustainable solution is free software. Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades (sometimes without major changes in their architecture, which is awesome when you think about it).

That’s why, all in all, Medium must fail. It’s all part of the plan. I was lured in myself years ago but I painfully exported all my medium content to my own blog. It took me years to realize that any centralized platform is one signature away of being elon-musked.

Free software isn't enough though, we need publicly run platforms that are not driven by profit interests. I think the only way this can work long term is if those platforms are sufficiently decentralized that the damage can be "repaired" when individual instances fall.

The alternative would be government- or non-profit-run infrastructure, but I am not confident that that will hold up against money interests. See e.g. ICANN and the increasingly monetized domain name system or the sellout of Freenode how money can corrupt or take over such centralized platforms.

> I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"

Mostly true, but that isn't that bad tbh. Grandparents have income, grandparents have time to spend, and grandparents aren't prone as much to jump to the next new shiny thing. True, they will eventually go away, but it's not going to happen very soon. So if that is true, Facebook has at least a decade, and maybe more because my generation (which would roughly be "parents" to your students) also uses FB, though much less now.

> I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.

Is there? I see two tweets links, and none of the "toots" (I will never get over the fact that this word means "fart"). I am no fan of twitter, but I am not sure how Mastodon would be better - all censorship fans are already there. I mean, you could use it as a blog, I guess, but why not just use a blog then?

> Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades

I was thinking that too, for a while. Until culture warriors started attacking the free software. Now I am not so sure. I mean, they probably won't be able to take down a huge project like Linux - too many people depend on it being there - but I am pretty sure they could destroy any smaller project. Think about it - how much abuse would a person be willing to take based on something they don't even get paid for?

A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.)

Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement.

I don't know what analytics compel these guys to put a gate in front the platform. Just accept what people are willing to give you. I guess they wake up one day and realize everyone just moved on.

Websites (forums, mostly) have figured out they'll actually drive more traffic if they didn't have a sign-up wall.

The signup requirement is myopic, some PM looking into the data and doing some math they can make more $$$ per unique visit if they make them sign up, not realizing the long-term harm it creates because it drives the unique visits way down.

Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.

Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.

The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.

Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.

But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.

Frankly I'd gladly pay $20 for privacy-preserving focused online service that does exactly what I want. And I believe many people would as well.

The problem as usual are others poisoning the well e.g. Netflix et. al. because they are kinda commoditized for many people at this point and they perceive them as impossible to live without.

By inserting ads every few posts in the feeds, letting users pay for bonus features and letting users pay for bonus features for others as a show of approval.

People don't generally go to Reddit to read one single thing that was linked from another site, so the kind of "engagement" platforms like Medium are struggling to achieve through incessant nagging happens a little more naturally. It doesn't have to dedicate a third of the screen area to links and thumbnails of totally unrelated articles, because I'm already in e.g. /r/StarWars where people voluntarily organize exactly what I was interested in reading about when I went there.

You also don't have to be as wary of the hustle because unlike Medium, as there's really no straight forward way to make money off of "engagement" with your Reddit posts and replies. You aren't there arguing about some detail in Star Trek TNG S03E14 with /u/dickmonger in order to boost your LinkedIn profile either. Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled—it has a sense of honesty and realness that you don't get when people are deliberately trying to culture profitable personas and turning every semblance of original thought into revenue streams.

> Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker,

Is Medium? I don't know that either of these companies make their profit public, but I have a hard time believing that Reddit performs worse than Medium. As someone who ends up reading an article here and there on Medium very occasionally, the changes I see between the visits tell of a company desperately struggling to keep investors happy.

A lot of communities are not like this though. There's a lot of good ones too.

Or you'll do what?

Somebody could enjoy building a site for awhile, but not ultimately enjoy running it, so they sell it, because included in the value of that ongoing concern is the option to shoot for the stars.

I know it's cliché, but the classic quote remains true:

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Do these platforms provide something useful compared to something like write.as which is based on an open source solution? Is their tools so much better than the open source alternatives?

Burn money to bring in users, then monetize and exit.

So I could imagine it's not on their radar for something aimed at bloggers - of course some will be developers too but not too many.

The first thing I'd think is "how high are the prices that they suggest I need more credit?"

Here's the one I use with mostly success:

    javascript:location.href="https://scribe.rip"+location.pathname;

I cannot agree more. The brand has destroyed itself by putting everything behind a login/pay-wall. I don't even click on medium.com links anymore, regardless of how interesting the content may be. And if I accidentally click on one, I click the back button in less than a second.

I understand the desire to monetize, but this is not the way.

I'd expect for them to monetize on ads. And ads show up regardless of registration status.

"X free articles." OK. Fine.

How much does a subscription cost? No idea. That info isn't available without a signup. [1]

This is so fucking stupid. With other content sites I can see a price and I can decide if I think it's worth it.

With Medium it feels like they have something to hide.

Obviously I didn't sign up and I didn't click through.

If the content was good enough and if it was worth the money I would. But they way Medium is now, neither of those important details is visible.

[1] Or by Googling. Which works, but...

On top of that, they don't let you specifically log into an account. They let you type in an email address, which will either log into an existing account or create a new account. Better hope you use the same email for every site. Also better hope you're not trying to check if an account exists or not, because the process of checking will just create a new account if not.

This is also a bad idea IMO because it brings up the feeling of "if you have to ask..."

Nobody comes to use your service just because you want more money. People come to get value, and that has been sniffed out.

P.S. props to Corey doctorow for his fantastic “enshittification” posts.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But the investors will never let it just be that, there’s too much money involved.

You know it hits hard though. Hopefully they take it to heart. I like using medium as an author but HATE the “4 articles remaining” crap. I’ve been planning to move elsewhere but have been lazy. I’ve noticed from my readership numbers that I’m not alone.

As the platform goes to shit, keep milking it for all it's worth till the bitter end.

Or

Try and fix it and earn a bit less money for a year or two as it becomes healthy again and thrives.

It's not easy to tell investors that losing money for a year or two is ok and "just trust me".

I don’t know, maybe Medium should promote individual articles that are on Wordpress instances of personal and corporate blogs. Who would be happy to pay to apply to the vetting process.

Unless those 3 articles all happen to be amazing which is unlikely, and even then it's still a very large jump to a pricey subscription. Not everyone makes silicon valley money.

Ps not sure if it's still 3, because I haven't visited medium for about a year now.

I'm not a spiteful person in general, but I won't pay for anything that does things like this out of spite.

I just assume I'll be paywalled before clicking a Medium link, so I don't.

After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.

I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.

But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.

I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.

But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because of the possibility of making money off of Medium (even if I opted out), that gave them free license to make money off of me, so of course their pursuit of exploiting me of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of my own labor and content unless I systematically and enthusiastically played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.

I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.

I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.

If I write an article about ray tracing lime jello, then why can't I submit it for syndication to three specialty groups about ray tracing, jello, and limes, without restricting everyone on the internet from discovering and reading it for free in my own channel? Why are all the popular syndication channels there for the express purposes of exploiting me to make money for themselves?

That's like having not one pimp, but an entire pyramid of pimps trying to bully my customers and restrict and exploit my work, that I'm happy and willing to do for free.

I'm not going to get into the user interface, which would require writing a hundred page Medium article in itself (that would be promoted to and read by exactly zero readers). I'll just say that at first it was the thing that attracted me, but then once I actually started using it, it was infuriating and frustrating and purposefully lacking obvious and crucial features (not to mention those that I came to depend on that were later removed or hidden).

There are some great things about the ease of writing and editing and formatting articles, but also so many conspicuous trepanations of the skull and lobotomization of the brain that it's obvious it's all part of some dark pattern to brutally control my mind and behavior.

The final straw was when I found myself unable to control the formatting of my images. I was SURE I was able to do that before, but the interface simply was ignoring my mouse clicks that I'd learned to use. At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouse. Then maybe my browser was broken. Or possibly it was my internet connection. And then finally I felt like I was losing my mind and mis-remembering that I used to be able to do this simple obvious thing, and wondering how it was that my previous articles were formatted in ways I couldn't figure out how to apply to my new articles. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I am being gaslighted?

Finally I googled for "why can't I control the formatting of images in my medium articles", and this came up:

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Imag...

>Image formatting feature deprecation

>As of January 2022, Medium no longer supports formatting options for images in the Medium editor.

>All images in stories are now displayed in a single image size. Other features, such as the alt text, captions, grids, and image links, remain unaffected.

>Medium has recently redesigned parts of its website in order to deliver a more browsable, consistent, and faster experience to all users. To that end, we have removed certain design elements on the published story page, along with the ability to format and resize imagery in the story editor.

>We know image sizing matters to many writers. So, why did we remove this feature? Simply put: We removed image sizing to accommodate a new right-hand column that provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading, along with related reads across Medium. Our data shows this new right-hand column benefits writers by presenting their stories to more readers across the network.

Then why the hell don't you program your web site to respond to the mouse clicks on images with a big red popup and loud buzzer that goes "BZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!!" so I know it's MEDIUM and not ME that's at fault?

FUCK Medium's right-hand column. I don't give a shit about it. I don't want Medium to "provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading", I want readers to READ MY STORY. But obviously the only thing Medium cares about is castrating my formatting and gobbling up my precious square centimeters of screen space for the express purpose of diverting and distracting people away from reading my free content that I'm paying them to publish, and sucking them into the click-bait paid content that they actually make money off of.

The patronizing phrase "Our data shows..." is as bad as "I'm not racist, but..." because it tells me beyond doubt that Medium has become yet another data driven Zynga Cow Clicker skinner box.

http://www.cowclicker.com/

Medium's and Zynga's only goal is monetization by metrics, which suck out every drop of human creativity, design, and intent, and incarcerates my readers in the Clockwork Orange Movie Theatre Scene!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg

>I believe in second chances. I want us to work together. I want you to become a valued member of our organization. Surrender, and you will find meaning. Surrender, and you will find release. Take a deep breath. Calm your mind. You know what's best. What's best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply, Agent 33?

Also, Reddit still manages ok on this front IMO. The only reason I stopped paying was that they doubled the price when they moved away from gold to whatever it is they call now.

Another one is tweakers.net in Holland.

Boards.ie in Ireland though I left that country years ago and I don't know how that site is fairing now.

Those are the main ones I can think of right now.

I'm not going to install the app. Ever. I will never, ever, ever install reddit's app. No amount of nagging me will ever get me to install it ever.

However one of the things I do like is that they don't really interfere with the content. There's some really fringey communities on there like exhibitionists that would be banned by other platforms in 5 minutes because they really don't want to deal with the legal worries and stigmatization. Reddit leaves them alone, the only time they really close communities is when they become toxic.

I'm not a fan of Conde Nast but they could have done a lot worse with Reddit.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit kill their API in the future.

I use site:reddit.com all day in Google though. It really is still somehow a reliable place for information.

Also, their monetisation is pretty seamless because you come there with the intent to pay. So requests for payment don't feel out of place.

I guess for the people you patron it's less great now because I see many people moving to ko-fi.

The main landing page is such a shitshow. The feeling sticks to you no matter what after that.

The same goes with coding. SO and github are good. Everything else is pretty much garbage.

Sorry. Quora, to me, is beyond useless. Every once in a while I'll click on a Quora URL only to be let down again. One day I'll do the right thing and blacklist it on my local recursive DNS server so as not to be tempted and waste even more time in the future.

I used to be active blogger in 2000s and was a part of blogging community back then. One lesson that I learned back then was that you cannot predict popularity. Those heavy pieces you think will be hits with readers will not be and those that you throw together on a whim about your sock drawer will get more hits than anything else combined. Ymmv, but the effort you put in does not always equal the popularity it'll get.

The key problem is that you’ve lost the trust of the authors you want to attract. It’s no longer a place I can post and know that my content will be cleanly accessible to readers. I now think you’ll pepper it with pop ups and account demands.

It went from being a minimalist and trusted place to post, to now a feeling of feeding my own content into someone else’s machine and losing control of it.

You mentioned paying attention to the sentiment and linked to the HN survey where people explained why they don't like Medium. The top comment was someone explaining this exact reason.

It's highly admirable that you are on here trying to listen, communicating issues transparently, and working to fix problems. But I think you need to listen even more deeply.

Unfortunately this will push you into the depths of the business model that you won't want to change, but is the fundamental reason for medium's eventual failure.

Right now is the moment to save it, as you read this note!

What the hell did they expect would happen?

Medium did one thing and one thing well: a fast, easy, and free way to publish an article for the others to read. The value of that is immense.

It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?

They take care of their best content creators, they even send a plaque! And they don't force viewers to subscribe, they show ads and offer a subscription to remove them.

Imagine if youtube tomorrow started telling every visitor that they must login to view any video, and if they view more than 10 videos they need to buy a subscription. Rumble.com would be popping champagne.

On the other hand, the low quality content was what made me avoid medium.com links, so my experience perfectly mirrors the comment.

> It has nothing to do with 1 and 2. Youtube is FULL of click bait videos and their recommendation system is garbage, but it thrives, you know why?

It's extremely expensive to run a competitor to a global video platform, the platform is much stickier, the app makes it even more sticky, and they're a billion dollar ad company that can spend giant sums of money on creators? Starting a medium competitor is trivial in comparison, you can do so with Wordpress out of the box. It won't scale to the same size, won't be as nice etc, but it'll work. You can't do the same with Youtube.

The NYTimes provides a level of journalism that is not easily replaceable by letting a bunch of random people blog. That's why their subscription works. True there are other journalism sites. But there are also many actors, but only one Tom Cruise; the NYTimes is like Tom Cruise, which is why he is paid so much. Medium is more like an unknown actor that is good but there are 100 waiting to replace him.

I have read really interesting material on Medium and it’s just not enough to make me want to pay to read _any_ content on Medium. I might pay to remove ads like I do on YouTube but only after developing a habit that is triggered by content I care enough about and visit often enough for the ads experience to detract from it.

In my experience Medium should have been (could still be?) a Wordpress killer and not a publishing play.

I've seen tons of medium articles and to me it always seemed like random ranting and a pulpit for leftists, rather than a serious platform. I hope you can do something about it.

I’ll admit I don’t bother with the NYT or Medium or Subspace, but if I ever were to subscribe it’d be along those lines.

Medium has not earned the right to paywall content, the NYT has, apparently.

You need to find another way.

Maybe a pay by the drink subscription model.

Put a button on each article so I can decide how much I want to pay, with zero as an option.

Put a little counter at the top so I can see how much I’ve spent this month and how much has gone to authors vs the company.

If the content is that good, people will pay, I know I would. But I ain’t paying monthly for something I don’t use regularly and I ain’t paying to read something based on a title.

Medium has a very different and inherently lower value proposition. It needs to get people to read and value old content.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding where the money for Medium's paywall goes and you've actually been giving the vast majority of subscription revenue to the writers this whole time—but that wasn't obvious to me.

I often get linked to a NYT article but as I don't even live in the US I'd never be tempted to pay for it. If I couldn't just use a paywall blocker or archive.is I'd just ignore them altogether. I kinda doubt they get many subscribers from outside their native area (US as they have a bigger reach than just new York)

I think the guardian does this a lot better, they don't paywall but ask for a contribution even if you don't subscribe. I've actually contributed a few times there.

It's not.

It's on the same path as medium and slowly over time other venues of information are (stealthily) eating its lunch.

There will be a 'Why did nytimes.com "fail"?' HN post in a few years from now.

Medium.com used to have a good reputation. But it never had anything like the NYT's and right now the only reputation you have is "hot garbage cash grab". Most people want your service to die. I know I did, before reading your responses here at least.

Sorry to be blunt, and I wish you luck in digging back out of that. But I would gently suggest that looking to the NYT as your shining success story is... Well I think there's a parable to match this but it escapes me now. Like an ant looking at an elephant maybe.

Of course, that was before I found out that canceling requires talking to an AOL-like retention droid rather than just clicking a button, and that's when they stopped getting my money permanently.

The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.

Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.

Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.

Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.

I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.

It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.

In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.

Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.

I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.

It won't happen over night, of course there will be a temporary boost in revenue when one decides to force everyone that visits the site to pay.

How much of that is from existing NYTimes subscribers, marketing tactics (eg. wordle), shady subscription offer deals, forgotten subscriptions, and lack of suitable competition.

Over time though that withers and once that withering starts, nothing brings it back.

See you in a few years.

In addition, there is one important thing that is not being paywalled (yet), the 'news' value of nytimes is still accessible via the headline + summary on the front page.

The moment the guys chasing a buck remove that is the day nytimes dies.

Priced appropriately is a key word, you're happy to pay $20/mo for 3 services but will you feel the same when it's $200/mo for 10 services?

Netflix was priced appropriately until it started getting some competition, we all see what happened there.

The irony of the entire situation is that real competition could have been medium, if they didn't fuck it up.

Subscribers recently increased because account sharing was stopped but recently Disney has already passed Netflix in subscribers across all its platforms: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/09/27/disney-surpasses...

Netflix revenue has started to decline and as they start increasing their pricing and removing shows to save a buck, more and more users will leave, it's already happening, just not reflected on the charts yet due to the aforementioned stopping shared accounts.

The Disney+ vs Netflix subscriber growth trajectory says it all: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/netflix-statistics/

First I click a couple of, let’s say, “why X is dead” links, then I start getting the message “You have Y free articles left this month”. Then I’m thinking, okay, the “X ded” articles were meh anyway, why would I even subscribe then? Somewhere in this scenario the incentive to subscribe is missing for me. Maybe there’s a world of cool articles out there, but from visiting a random article with the “you have Y articles left” popup they cannot be seen. Just my two cents!

That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you. But I hope you will! Best of luck and thank you for the interesting remarks :)

As far as fixing it, the obvious first step is to at least be more generous with the article count... and don't show it at all until someone has seen at least 5 articles on separate days that month. Count a session clicking through a few articles on the same day as at most 2 article views (maybe have a separate limit of something like 5 articles in the same day). Don't be a nag trying to upsell when people haven't even had a chance to get interested yet.

That at least would cut down on the sleazy feeling of the whole site. An easy next step would be hiring someone as an editorial curator. Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Another way to feed a meaningful recommender: Allow users to tag posts (and other more clever things like deriving tags by looking at, e.g., which sub-reddits link to them). Build user profiles that are similar to how StumbleUpon had a "Stumble DNA" for users.

That's what I would be doing, anyway.

Would it be fair to say that we usually expect blogs to be free to read? I think yes, because that’s how it has been for some time -- somebody wants to share their thoughts, you want to read them, no money involved.

Now, some people run paid newsletters, and can charge you for their content, and you pay them if you feel like you’re getting value out of it. Investment advice, curated content, you name it.

But that’s precisely the thing: if a blog is paywalled, you can decide if you want to pay this exact author. But Medium is a platform. And it’s weird: why should you pay money to some platform on which some author is publishing a seemingly free to read blog? Without the value clearly communicated, it feels like a weird form of extortion.

There might be something to do about it, like along the lines of “hey our crazy AI recommendation engine can find some articles on the same topic for ya, just for three bucks a month”. Okay, but why would you do that if you still have search engines and stackoverflow? Where’s the value? I don’t know vOv

Especially with the consideration that traditional newspapers typically don't have niche content like programming articles.

> That’s probably a chicken/egg problem, and I don’t know how I would even begin to untangle it if I were you.

Paywall half of the article so the reader gets an idea on whether or not they want to pay to read more. This would also encourage impulse purchases.

> Most of their job to start would be to build a regex list of article title structures which are overly cliched, so that those articles get de-merited by the recommender algorithm

Categorize articles. There's no need to make cliched articles impossible to find for the cliche-interested reader.

It’s also important to understand that a lot of people will never pay for or be happy with the paywall content model, especially for articles. So even a success in this domain would be hated by a lot of people.

Those of us who personally wouldn’t pay for articles aren’t the target audience anyway, and that’s ok. I think throwing rocks at paywalls is a stupid thing to do, especially when the only alternative is ad-tech. I’d rather have competing business models than not.

What doesn’t make sense to me, is that opaque clickbait recommendation engines AND paywall made itself to the same platform. This seems odd, because usually the former is a plague of ad-tech. Perhaps this is the result of cargo-culting from employees who came from ad-tech mindlessly replicating these patterns even where they don’t make sense.

if visitors numbers are shrinking you get no new customers.

add to that the risk of other platforms trying to get away your existing users:

- substack: both writers and readers - hashnode: targeting writters and readers from tech - dev.to: the same as hashnode - mastodon: longer posts and with elk and others better syntax - ghost : writers and readers

and many more.

so not paying attention to the base of the funnel is very costly in the long run: and this is what happened to Medium = ignored the base of the funnel (the free users) for a long period and focused on short term goals/income

Medium is trying to be a two-sided marketplace. In any such marketplace, the producers want the audience to be as big as possible, and the consumers want the inventory to be as big as possible. Neither cares about Medium making a profit, except to the extent it incidentally furthers their own goals.

To succeed, either they monetize the transaction as a middleman (e.g. ads when transactions don't involve the exchange of money), or they figure out how to establish a direct financial relationship with the producers and/or consumers (like Costco's annual fee).

Medium has chosen a pathological route of using the two-sided marketplace principally to advertise a fee for their own product. (Yes, "principally" is fair. I believe their conversion rate is low, so the vast majority of impressions represent potential members of the two-sided marketplace that they're OK turning away, even though that frustrates both the producers who wanted the audience to grow, and the consumers who wanted to read the article.)

The fact that they can't figure out a better way to make money than to turn away customers is not my problem. There are plenty of other places for me to read or publish content that have figured out how to be sustainable operations.

My personal viewpoint is that Medium is in a death spiral. If their paywall is abrasive, which I think it is, then I won't join, because I would question which content publishers would be OK being behind an abrasive paywall. Medium's real offer to me -- that they're where to find content from publishers I like -- has failed. That was their one and only job from my perspective. They failed.

I can't be the only one who feels this way.

But the paywall, i.e. the metered paywall where some articles are behind a paywall by author choice and an unsusbcribed reader can read three of those a month, is up there. And I'm just coming at it from the opposite side. Many people here don't want to see a paywall. That's fine. But I'd like to see their reaction if the quality of what was behind it changed. A no might still be a no, but I think the tenor would change. So that's how my original take on fix quality first fits into the anti-paywall headline of other people. This model works well enough for us in the worst possible implementation that I believe it will work all the way if we have a better implementation, especially if there is more of a sense of that there's at least something valuable behind it.

Isn’t this the same as how Patreon works? I’m not too familiar with these services, but genuinely curious.

If charging for content is their business model then it's fundamentally flawed in my opinion. Why would people give away high quality content and let medium charge for it? It looks like they do have some revenue share programme, but Substack offer a simple and transparent 90% payment in your favour.

- Medium was a good platform for people to publish well formatted content online. - said content ranked quite high on Google. - There’s now a non-trivial amount of content published by myriad authors on there. - I have zero interest in following a particular author. I don’t want recommendations. I end up there as a result of a very specific need at the time. - you’re incessant pop ups to log in or sign up to read the content drastically reduced that value. - I’ve now been conditioned to just avoid any search results that look like they go to a Medium page.

I obviously have no idea how widespread that experience is. The unfortunate reality is that the damage has been done. You could undo all of the things that led to it and I’d never know given the muscle memory that’s been created.

You can understand the kind of service which lives on ad revenue giving in to conflicts of interest leading to them recommending against the reader's interests, but there's no obvious conflict when you're a subscription service. It ends up being endless formulaic articles of the "5 packages your next project must use" ilk, with questionable grammar and a number of clichéd folksy writing habits common in certain circles.

The "huge pile of shit" is a primary example of why authors should invest in tools they control and have a direct relationship with their audience. A portable relationship with their audience. As I see it, Medium is in conflict with that.

I'm really hoping that the Twitter fiasco and Medium's "huge pile of shit" will serve as object lessons why creators, publishers, etc. are better off building their own platforms even if it's slower initially.

Want to repair some of that damage right now? Stop prompting me to sign in when I try to read an article on Medium.

Medium is still very aggressive data harvesting machine. Look at what sub stack is doing and just do the same, what they’re doing is correct and valuable and what medium had done so far is absolutely full-on reader/writer hostile.

Best of luck!

Where we are today is 30% rolled out but not even announced to our authors. That'll happen in a week and is when I think author behavior will change.

That "X is dead" trope will disappear from your recs both because we'll have better things to show and because the new incentives make it not worth writing. An article like that is very sensitive to incentives because there is no authentic reason to have written it. Probably without Medium's payment, it never would have been occurred to the person.

But mainly I came here to note the irony of this frank, honest and useful discussion taking place under an "X is dead" headline of its own.

Which for many platforms is a quite difficult thing because that’s they’re revenue and they don’t have the manpower or time to review everything.

I think more dollars is good, as it increases the number of opportunities. This comes with a lot of failed attempts at creating something of value, and that's ok. What we truly need, in a societal sense, is to make next generations recognize the current times as a crazed race after the least demanding content that they are, and to guide them in the direction of articles with enduring value, again. The generation that entered adulthood during these crazy times is probably already lost, the previous generation is busy raising kids, and the previous-previous generation lives in bunkers where only the guys who "go way back" can ever enter. If not the next generation, then we're probably done for, as the IT revolution will eat its children and their children too, like many revolutions before.

Go on…

As a Medium member since 2020, I've been writing articles that reflect real-world use cases and require 2-4 days of research and writing. Despite my efforts, I've only had one article boosted on the platform thus far.

It would be incredibly beneficial for creators like myself if Medium offered a verification process to prove our authenticity and help increase the visibility of our work.

Basically Medium is indistinguishable to me from any of its competitors, except it's quite slow to load so given two similarly promising links I prefer the other one. It's too much JavaScript because Medium can be fast if I turn JavaScript off using either NoScript, uBlock Origin, uMatrix etc.

The issue is how annoying it is to experience the content, not the content itself.

And wow, quite a claim to say that creators are too busy to have lives worth writing about.

Reconsider what went wrong with Medium so you can get on the right track.

If much of the content is garbage but some is good then presumably people will still come for the good stuff and just spend more time filtering out garbage. Most people don’t navigate inside the medium ecosystem anyway. So inner system garbage is less of a problem then landing experience

That is by far and away your biggest issue in a community like this.

Medium.com now paywalls even bullshit content. Simple as that.

You limit me to x number of free articles in a month, yet the first 10x articles from medium i see are absolute trash with no quality control and vetting and all so by the time i hit my limit, I am already annoyed by it.

If you are going to paywall me, let the content behind the paywall be from vetted sources that i have some sort of reasonable expectation. You can put a 'Buy Me a Coffee' for the rest of the other unverified sources.

If i am searching for articles on an advanced technique and all i see are articles from newbies who are neither addressing the question nor providing new insights, you can rest assured I will not be paying for your service nor clicking top search links from your site.

The Substack model is more sustainable, but something about their incentive model or community design seems to result in impenetrable 9000 word essays.

In either case, "what if blog posts cost money" is a tough business—I wish you luck!

Even reading enough of the long form magazine and newspaper articles you start to notice certain patterns.

medium.com has the feel of a dystopian internet that bugs you on every click. There is this classic Sci-Fi short story where the protagonist had to insert a coin in to the door to his apartment every time he wanted to use it. This is how medium has felt.

That”s incredibly insightful and explains so much of what’s wrong with, well, everything today. The actual doing has become an afterthought to the pitch, the documentation, the branding, the promotion, the cobranding, the cross-promotion, the synergies, and so on.

It’s never been so easy for people with so little to say to say so much. Curation has not kept up with creation. I hope Medium recovers.

You are drinking koolaid, though. Look at the comments. A lot of them are spot on.

You say this but this went on for literal years.

Honest question, how can you, on one hand, link to the previous discussion surrounding the stigma of being a "medium.com" article, but fail to address the literal top response to both that thread and even the top response to your own comment? Is it one of those "CEO's are not allowed to speak plainly in public" things or do you not parse/agree with the information?

Yet, I was below some sort of threshold to be in the club that would get me a few pennies if enough people read them, so I was kicked out of that program.

Not that the program mattered, but getting kicked out for not being popular enough was annoying, so I just stopped using the platform.

I still get a weekly summary that says my articles are being regularly read, which doesn’t seem likely. They appear to be made up numbers.

It feels like the platform quickly became another Quora and is 90% junk.

Not sure how you’ll regain the initial trust and stature Medium seemed to have, but best of luck. FWIW, I do like the site design and reading/writing experience. Keep it simple.

Everyone here is debating what went wrong. But how would knowing that help?

I would like a CEO to articulate what exactly will be "worthwhile" to each stakeholder in the future, and not just to clean up the mess. Instead I fear we have a generation of leaders who tell investors that the good times will come back and tell employees to tighten their belts - crisis managers instead of visionaries.

I think rough times are precisely when visionaries should have their greatest impact, because people are open to change. The question is not what went wrong, but where to go now?

A few personal observations:

1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to LinkedIN [1] (exceptions exist but are invisible). Have you considered paywall to post, even as low as $1/mo as a content quality filter?

2. There is no reason for a 16k character article to require 6.5MB of data to render. (looking at a random article from the home page [2]). I hear that Medium has an optimized writing experience, why not have an optimized reading experience too?

3. Do you wish Medium became what Substack did, and if no, what is your vision for it? Why should one use Medium as an author or as a reader?

[1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

[2] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/be-present-aff45d6421b4

That does not matter. What decides if people pay for a publication is the median article quality.

On Medium it is a 2 (on a scale 1-10) while NYT is at least 7.

Would you buy a car that is occasionaly (once in in a month) great, but rest of the time is crap, or a car that is very good all the time? Good luck!

You'll be welcome in the ecosystem whatever path you choose

My comment might get lost amongst many, you may not see it, but Medium still has the reach. I think as a blogging platform you can support a lot more customisation and become an actual platform that is the staple for where people put their content. I have a personal blog hosted on GitHub with Jekyll. I'd much prefer to use mediums tools but I'm reluctant to because of the experience for end users. Just my thoughts.

We've gone through many cycles of publishing platforms/trends. What catches your eyes in this space today (in general)?

But even ignoring all that, medium is the worst place for any article about programming because the code blocks do everything to make it harder to read them. There's no syntax highlighting, the lines wrap and the container the code is in pads the text to make a narrower column than the body of the article.

That's the opposite of what I want. Especially on mobile! It's one of the sites that make me wonder if its developers have ever tried using it.

https://postimg.cc/zbY3jQqc

Also, not sure if you know but we have the entire back catalog of Pragmatic Programmer books. I need to do a re-import to take advantage of the syntax highlighting, but it's still a pretty good feature. (Unfortunately, I was the programmer who did this import and so it's still on me to redo it)

2. Substack killed you. I know that HN is mostly populated by extremely left leaning people who wholeheartedly believe in all the Current Things that MSM feeds them, so this argument will fall on deaf ears, but I will write it here anyways because it is the truth and if you aren't just a Woke CEO, you might actually care: During the pandemic, Substack was the only news source where I could get proper information about what is going on. Virtually everything that got people cancelled on Twitter and labelled as conspiracy theorists eventually turned out to be the truth. These people all moved to Substack. Thanks to Elon we all know now that Twitter was infested by deep state actors abusing the platform to spread disinformation and manipulate elections - I'm not sure if this is still true but I somehow remember that Medium emerged as a sub-company from Twitter, so I must assume that the exact same ways of censorship and propaganda that brought Twitter to its knees are also in place at Medium. If that is true, and as long as that is true, I can guarantee that you will have zero chance whatsoever against Substack.