[HN Gopher] Ev Williams to step down from Medium
___________________________________________________________________
Ev Williams to step down from Medium
Author : marban
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-07-12 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ev.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ev.medium.com)
| EricE wrote:
| "That's why Medium exists. We aim to make it simple to share deep
| thinking and easy to find the thinking that's valuable to you."
| Ha!
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Rats fleeing the sinking ship the impression I have of this.
|
| Am I wrong and in fact Medium is doing well and Ev decided to get
| off whilst the going is good?
| robmerki wrote:
| 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.
| lesstyzing wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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).
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm still sad at LJ's downfall. I've been reminiscing since I
| got an email two days ago about my LJ's 19th birthday.
|
| There are several aspects of that site in its heyday that
| I've yet to find really replicated elsewhere, particularly
| for longer text discussions.
| notRobot wrote:
| Unfortunately I was not able to use LJ during its heyday,
| would you mind elaborating a bit on the features you miss?
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The Medium experience is worse than any ugly & slow Wordpress
| website I'm aware of.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| 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
| Alex3917 wrote:
| 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.
| bspear wrote:
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Screwing Noah Glass over as the Twitter founders did should
| never make any of them legends
| aliqot wrote:
| Legends, like legacies, don't have to be positive.
| swyx wrote:
| too little, too late. Medium sat on its hands while Substack ate
| its lunch. its not a question of technology, but organizational
| willpower.
| indogooner wrote:
| Blogger, Twitter and Medium. Thanks Ev. Still long for clutter
| free Medium interface.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| That's basically what substack is (trying to be)
| rchaud wrote:
| until it can't anymore because the now-generous VCs will
| start to want to see some stats they can sell up to other
| investors.
|
| History repeats itself. Medium.com was clean and cruft-free
| too, until it wasn't.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| picardo wrote:
| 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.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| I'm the new guy replacing Ev at Medium.
|
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| 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.
| __rito__ wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kromem wrote:
| 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.
|
| In any case, good luck with the new role.
| hyeomans wrote:
| I just created my account @ Medium and got this weird sign-up
| follow up page:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/ItWEJoI
| etc-hosts wrote:
| are you complaining that Medium wants your email address to
| identify you?
|
| Fight the good fight I guess,
| mgh2 wrote:
| Medium needs to branch out into other markets:
| http://www.marcoshung.com.s3-website-us-
| east-1.amazonaws.com...
| ok123456 wrote:
| can you cool it with the javascript?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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).
| hartator wrote:
| Good luck Tony.
|
| 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.
| dilap wrote:
| As a reader there's always a little groan inside when I see
| something is hosted on Medium.
|
| 'Cuz, here, look at it:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/EIAp2UM
|
| 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.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Concurred. Thanks for including a screenshot.
|
| 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.
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| duck wrote:
| 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.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| fossuser wrote:
| +1 - Medium is a damaged brand, my immediate response is a
| negative association. Basically the opposite of Substack.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| 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)
| blowski wrote:
| To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes
| it different?
| bspear wrote:
| Individual writers control their own email lists
| ProAm wrote:
| The UI is better.
| blowski wrote:
| Better how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone
| fawned over the quality of the UI.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| 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.
| dubswithus wrote:
| You can open medium links in incognito mode.
| flyingfences wrote:
| I can. I shouldn't have to.
| dubswithus wrote:
| Because you have a right to view an article on medium?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| 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.
| user00012-ab wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is what I've found - (medium.com) indicates medium
| quality at best, rehashed junk at worst.
| javajosh wrote:
| That's true for every medium, including paper.
|
| FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably
| paywalled.
| rchaud wrote:
| At some point, Substack will require Javascript, just as
| Medium eventually did.
| jacooper wrote:
| Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub
| Gists.
|
| https://scribe.rip/
| czottmann wrote:
| 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.)
| andrewfong wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| karpierz wrote:
| A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions.
| And a personal subscription model.
| kodah wrote:
| > 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.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| 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?
| aikah wrote:
| morelisp wrote:
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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).
|
| Greenwald's Medium is still up. He just never really used
| it. https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-
| these-pos...
| kradeelav wrote:
| 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).
| rchaud wrote:
| "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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Medium is a bad value proposition for those who make good
| content, therefore they tend to leave and as a result the
| only thing left is trash.
|
| "Medium.com" nowadays is a sign of low quality and I
| personally started skipping articles because of that alone.
| huac wrote:
| I wrote this piece about the different subscription models a
| few years back and think that it held up very well:
| https://hua.substack.com/p/subscriptions-as-price-
| discrimina...
|
| In particular re Medium:
|
| > 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| 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.
| blowski wrote:
| So they don't promote content in the way that Medium tries
| to do?
| erichocean wrote:
| Correct, no promotion at all.
| stefan_ wrote:
| No wonder it's failed if that is the model, I've never
| arrived on Medium .. from Medium. It's like the Vimeo of
| text.
| ignoramous wrote:
| So: Medium is to Amazon/Best Western, what Substack is to
| Shopify/Airbnb?
|
| https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
| nickjj wrote:
| > 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.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| There's no way to pay Medium to promote your content on
| their platform ?
| nickjj wrote:
| > 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.
| andreilys wrote:
| I started with no audience and got >100k reads on one of
| my articles because I used a medium publication.
|
| This resulted in being able to build an audience that
| would read my work irrespective of whether I published
| with a publication.
| jmathai wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| > 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).
| blairbeckwith wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Medium is simply YouTube for written content. So what holds for
| Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.
| paxys wrote:
| Except YouTube is wildly more popular and sustainable. Any
| company would _kill_ to be the YouTube of [xyz].
| erichocean wrote:
| > _Medium is simply YouTube for written content._
|
| They wish! Medium is Vimeo.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| A platform isn't necessarily neutral. It can cultivate and
| influence the culture that that exists on it. Medium never
| really seemed to do that imo.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This fact changes the game quite a bit.
| picardo wrote:
| 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.
| skilled wrote:
| Medium is an absolute plague since it started to enforce its
| draconian subscription model.
|
| It is literally a waste of space for the 10 results you see on
| the first page of Google searches.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I liked Medium at first, but it worked hard to make me stop
| liking it. I feel I'm not the only one.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jacooper wrote:
| > 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.
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| You can write exactly the same about Blogger. Medium added
| nothing
| revskill wrote:
| Medium or any blogging sites MUST prevent usage of Javascript
| (think HackerNews for blogging). JS is evil for websites like
| blogging or news.
| dewey wrote:
| 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.
| revskill wrote:
| If you can't control something, just forbid it.
|
| I built my internal apps with full of JS but when it comes to
| website, No JS is the highest priority to me.
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
| revskill wrote:
| Yes for sure. If a service is free to use, you're the
| product. You're the product because of JS of course.
|
| So let's be concise on "Free", i want "Free of JS", not free
| of charge.
| dewey wrote:
| You are just repeating phrases.
|
| 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I can make a product free of JS where the user is still the
| product. Server side tracking still exists.
| revskill wrote:
| 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| 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.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the amazing <img> tag!
| [deleted]
| __rito__ wrote:
| 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.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I wish Medium would step down from the Internet.
| erichocean wrote:
| I'm surprised he didn't leave five years ago.
| EddieDante wrote:
| It's called "Medium" because the posts are neither rare nor well-
| done.
| rg111 wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| 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.
| rg111 wrote:
| I do not _depend_ on my writings in any way.
|
| 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.
| caseyross wrote:
| 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.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://twitter.com/ev/status/1545588839363727361?s=20&t=4g7...
|
| 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.
| drewda wrote:
| 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.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| 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%.
|
| Doesn't seem like Musk did any obvious damage.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| If true isn't that alone a pretty strong signal?
|
| 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.
| initplus wrote:
| The only thing it's a signal of is that $54.20 is much
| higher than the "true" stock price.
| karpierz wrote:
| The market isn't pricing whether Elon will improve
| Twitter. The market is pricing in the fact that if the
| acquisition goes through, each stock you hold gets
| converted into 52.40$, regardless of what happens to
| Twitter after it's acquired.
| game-of-throws wrote:
| 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.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Twitter will be worth about $5bn by 2026. It's a nonsense
| platform with no intrinsic value.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > A bunch of bagholders trying to legally compel a multi-
| billionaire to buy them out doesn't make a very strong court
| case.
|
| What case law would suggest this being a bad idea? Musk
| voluntarily made himself the 2nd-biggest TWTR bagholder next
| to Vanguard.
| jorams wrote:
| > Elon could full-well just settle the $1B offer cancellation
| fee out of spite and Twitter wouldn't see a dime.
|
| This is not true. He can't just decide to pay $1B to get rid
| of it all.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| 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.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| 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.
| radiojasper wrote:
| 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.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| 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?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| It doesn't matter from Twitters point of view who is right
| or wrong. They need to close this fiasco it's tanking their
| stock price.
| leroman wrote:
| A while back I was sold on a subscription because I wanted to
| subscribe on some topics and get a nice digest in my mail every
| day or so..
|
| But in actuality I started getting - some shitcoin promoters -
| some wfh scams - click baity topics without much substance..
|
| So I cancelled (which unfortunately only happens some months
| later..)
| [deleted]
| dodgerdan wrote:
| 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.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
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