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.

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.

I would say it isn't a stretch at all to say most people feel that way. I stopped including any Medium hosted articles in my HN newsletter b/c of complaints from lots of subscribers that they couldn't read them.

I'll have to dig up my analysis I did last year (using BigQuery HN data), but on HN there are more Medium links than ever, but they tend not to get voted on at the same rate as older stories which tells me at least for the HN crowd it isn't worth clicking on them.

I mean yes, I would not click on any article hosted on medium. And it is not just because of incessant login popup that many correctly noted. It is also because I feel if any individual / company can not host their articles and blogs on their own platform they are not worth reading. I dislike their reasoning on at least two counts:

1) It is too much work: In world of static site publishing and easy cloud hosting it is not too much work for technically competent person to host their own content if they have something worthwhile to say.

2) Not our core competency: Many companies or teams who say this sounds to me management style BS. If hosting few articles in your domain is beyond their competency then I can't really trust whatever cloud, big data, distributed, serverless computing they are talking about.

I'm really torn about this because I don't think dealing with domains and web publishing is a good litmus test for who has something worthwhile to say. That said, I can't ignore the signal when it comes to tech-focused writing. For broader subjects though, I don't think tech-knowhow is better gatekeeper than traditional book or magazine publishing provided.

Ultimately I think lowering the barrier for publishing is a good thing, but that comes with an inherent cost on quality and the incentives just aren't there for businesses / brands to solve this. The backstop for me is personal reputation. Individuals can maintain integrity and principles, businesses cannot (except as a function of stable individual leadership). Therefore, I believe platforms which orient towards scalability and anonymous algorithms will be a race to the bottom (eg. Medium, TikTok), and platforms which orient around the individual (eg. Substack) will at least have a chance at representing quality (monetization, scalability, VC-pressure concerns notwithstanding).

I don’t get your reasoning. I have hosted my own static site for years, but I wrote primarily on Medium today because I can get paid that way. You cannot make a living writing blogs on a static site.

Medium significantly improves your reach and access to statistics to understand readers better. Until Medium came around I had clue I could ever make a living as writer.

A lot of us use Medium because it has solved a problem long plaguing the internet: How do you get paid for creating content?

I know myself that so don’t want to sign up to one dozen places for subscription. That would be the problem hosting your own site. Few people want to have 10 different subscriptions. With medium one subscription gives access to a lot of writers.

It’s interesting that you draw the line specifically at the software serving the post. Should the individual/company own the hardware also? The OS running on the server?

I don't think the parent is making a point about ownership, but rather publishing. He's saying that in 2022, if you're not competent to publish yourself, it creates doubts about what you have to say about high technology.

I think it’s just the branding awareness that is suspect.

You can host a WordPress site on blog.yourcompany.com for an amount that rounds to $0, and it will probably satisfy most people who dislike Medium and other aggregators.

Or you can roll your own of course, but the extra geek cred you will get for it is minimal. Not saying don’t do it, I’ve done it more than once, but do it for the doing.

I guess I can kind of see the point if the post is specifically about tech, but OP said "any article hosted on medium"

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.

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.

> There's so much junk in the way of the content

There's a lot of junk in the content too. In the software topic, I have read some articles that had interesting code by what sounded like entry-level to mid-level software engineers, and it was helpful for me when I was grasping with similar problems. But most of the senior-level author articles that are more about concepts, high-level project or organization problems and similar, most of the interesting stuff was outside of it. On medium I rarely see articles like that, what I see most are articles that try to be about that, but read like written by a non-senior author, and is sometimes buzzwordy or has no information I can extract beyond self promotion of the author.

+1 - Medium is a damaged brand, my immediate response is a negative association. Basically the opposite of Substack.

+1

Yep. Damaged goods. Sorry Tony. If a medium article comes up as a link or a part of my search, that's a thing I won't be clicking.

There's nothing lower than those asshole scripts that mess with highlighting, copying, and pasting text.

Agree - they may seem like minor design decisions to the visionaries at Medium, but those things alone are why I perceive Medium to be user-hostile. And they’ve had this anti-functionality for many many years. It feels like they don’t want me to be there.

I quit your platform because you didn't have Partner Program in India.

I do not want to monetize my writings anymore, but there was one day, when I did.

But your behavior made that impossible. You said once Stripe start working in India, you'd start MPP in India, then they started in Beta. Then you said when Stripe comes out of Beta, you will have MPP in India.

Then when Stripe started full-fledged service in India, you stopped mentioning India.

This behavior really frustrated me and made me stopped considering Medium seriously for anything.

I made good money on Quora in the past. They could send money to India- no problem, but not you guys.

I don't want money for my writings now. I want all of them to be free. But I am angry at Medium, and would never be returning.

Please fix the horrible UX of Medium. The site is trash to use. For a while I just had an extension parse and proxy me to a better, cleaner alternative.

It’s full of banners, popups and annoyances that is completely opposite of what you’d want in a site where you focus and learn something

I was writing on Medium for many years building a small audience of 1300 followers.

While the posting experience is nice. Content discovery is terrible. Content monetization is even worse. I can't justify researching a post for hours for no reads and no money.

What do you recommend instead. I have had some measure of success on a medium but don’t like it’s current direction and need to find alternatives.

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.

So you mean fund magazines or writer collectives? I feel like mirror was trying to be that but then moved away from it. Presumably because peopel don’t want to read the same crypto shill articles over and over again

No, funding individual pieces.

Instead of a freelance writer pitching a story to an editor of the NYT, throw it up on a site where the pitches can be seen and funded directly by their potential audience.

If the NYT was going to pay a few hundred dollars for the article, that's a very low threshold for funding.

Obviously writers with a portfolio of past work will have an advantage in that system, but even fresh talent could build up a portfolio with interesting pitches at low funding goals.

A lot of content curation is built around a paradigm where the editors speculate about what their audience actually wants, and that's not always very accurate.

I recall a friend who wrote about sexual politics for major publications who had a hard time getting a pitch for a story on child free attitudes sold to the editor, and yet that piece ended up the most read and shared for the year.

Remove the middleman and allow writers to sell the pitch directly to the audience - who if they care about it enough will fund it and read it when finished. And then don't care about trying to control or hinder further distribution or handicapping the piece/headline to optimize clicks or ads.

Monetize the creation and not the distribution.

I feel the main problem with medium is that i breaks the web. Putting a paywall at the other end of a link makes that a broken link.

Somewhere I feel that when an author link to an article, that link is an invitation to consume the linked text. It just feels uncivilised to put out links and then not deliver on it.

That said, I was at one time a subscriber of LWN. The model there was that articles were subscriber only the first week, and then public after that. _Unless_ a subscriber decided to provide a link, then the article was also available for anyone following that link.

Perhaps thats a model that could work for Medium? If I ever get an rss-reader up, and start following sources again I could perhaps see my self pay a subscription for “early access” feeds (to support some pore journalist doing actual reporting if nothing else)

I see a lot of complaints about the paywall but few offer any suggestions for alternatives. Somehow people who create content have to be able to get paid. One cannot write everything for free.

If you read my post again you might find that I did, in fact, suggest an alternative.

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).

can you cool it with the javascript?

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.

But you choose yourself if you want to paywall an article. If you don’t like paywall articles then don’t create them. What am I missing?

When I wrote the article on Medium, it was no paywall.

Transaction costs to find good content within Medium is too expensive (in time invested). Sporadic posts, with hit or miss in getting quality content Opinion masquerading as facts most of the time Hidden agendas not revealed upfront Editorial standards unknown In a world where everyone is an expert, there no real experts Twitter long form (in limited rollout now) will kill Medium

I just created my account @ Medium and got this weird sign-up follow up page:

https://imgur.com/a/ItWEJoI

are you complaining that Medium wants your email address to identify you?

Fight the good fight I guess.

In my experience, if it's not somewhat of a pain to sign up, I know the platform will be completely filled with spam.

Isn't this a completely normal sign-up flow? Seen it many times.

The website you're on right now doesn't require an email address.

To me, Substack just looks like a clone of Medium. What makes it different?

The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience. They're a middleman where both the author and reader is a customer of Medium, which puts them in the position of having to balance the needs of authors and readers.

The Substack model is that you provide both content and audience, and they provide hosting and monetization tools. They're a service provider where only the author is their customer, and so they're able to focus exclusively on what the authors need.

> The Medium model is that you provide content, and they provide an audience.

This doesn't happen in practice. Like most marketplaces they have an incentive to market things that are popular or appear to be trending. That means in order for Medium to promote your article you need to do the marketing with your own audience or outlets to get eyeballs on the article and after Medium flags your article as popular it might get promoted.

This is a really big concept because it means if you're just starting off with no audience you might as well grow your own audience on your platform because most marketplaces like Medium (and others) aren't heavily promoting folks with no prior audience.

I remember putting some of my blog posts on Medium and setting the canonical URL back to my site. Out of the hundreds of thousands of visits my personal blog got I only had a few hundred total hits on Medium. That's because I didn't promote and drive my own traffic to Medium and in turn they didn't promote me.

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.

Getting your content onto a Medium publication with a large and/or relevant following is such useful method of distribution. All of my most widely read Medium posts have been via a publication that I reached out to.

There's no way to pay Medium to promote your content on their platform ?

> 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.

So: Medium is to Amazon/Best Western, what Substack is to Shopify/Airbnb?

https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

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.

The substack model seems to be more focused on building and supporting individual brands. So I don't think of visiting Substack, I think of checking out what X, Y or Z said. The Substack brand is subordinate to the individual blogs/writers.

> both the author and reader is a customer of Medium > only the author is [Substack’s] customer

That suggests that Medium should be more reader-friendly than Substack, but it seems the opposite is true. I suspect that even when readers are nominally customers on Medium, they are really still just the product (in the sense of “if it’s free, you’re the product” — except it’s not free here).

Most (all good?) authors will prioritize good reader experience as one of their own requirements, so a good reader experience comes naturally downstream from being author-first.

So they don’t promote content in the way that Medium tries to do?

Correct, no promotion at all.

There is some discovery if you go look for it actually. It's just toned down and left for the user's initiative, instead of bugging you every chance it gets :)

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.

When I load a Substack article, I see the article, with only the distraction of the "JavaScript required" banner at the top, and the page works without JavaScript.

When I load a Medium article, half the article isn't even on the page initially, and it may or may not load, depending on what they think my status is at the moment. The page janks around repeatedly as all of this is happening. Then, as I am reading the article, which I usually don't get around to doing, because I've already conditioned myself to never open medium.com links, there are other things competing for my attention on the page, such as the same author's other articles, other authors' articles, and promotions for Medium itself.

I also skip any article that is from medium, not just because of the noise on the screen, but medium seems to just be people "building their brand" by repeating what other people have already said.

This is what I’ve found - (medium.com) indicates medium quality at best, rehashed junk at worst.

That's true for every medium, including paper.

FWIW I don't like medium because it is unpredictably paywalled.

Try Scribe, a private front end for medium and GitHub Gists.

https://scribe.rip/

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.)

You can install an extensions called libredirect that would auto redirect, Medium, YouTube, Twitter and many others to private proxies.

Its not available on the chrome store because of manifest V2, there is privacy redirect but its abandoned and doesn't support scribe.

https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

At some point, Substack will require Javascript, just as Medium eventually did.

That is an interesting prediction, what makes you think that?

You can open medium links in incognito mode.

I can. I shouldn't have to.

Because you have a right to view an article on medium?

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.

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.

The big difference is that Substack puts its writers front and center, while Medium focuses on itself. People read Substack content every day without even realizing that the company exists. Authors can build their own brands and gather a dedicated following without too much interference.

For now at least, Substack has much, much better UI.

Beyond that, Substack is currently positioning themselves as a platform/tool for content creators to create their own brand and market to their own audience. If you aren't paying attention, you might not even notice that your favourite author was on Substack; they're functionally a spiritual descendent of the independent blogs of old (who might be running on MT or Wordpress or whatever, but weren't a "Wordpress blog by Joe Smith", but "Joe Smith's blog" (which happens to be on Wordpress).

Medium has been positioning themselves as a content brand in their own right for some time; they have been undergoing relentless business model churn, but at various times they've had editorial teams, they've commissioned work, they've had writers on payroll, and they've had verticals or "editorial teams" or whatever such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental. Those last I think were launched in 2019 and killed off in 2021; but functioned like magazines published by Medium with editors and staff writers. I'm not quite sure what todays strategy is, but it seems to still be focused on the publisher/magazine model where the brand is "Medium" and the author just gets a byline.

You can see this approach in terms of features like theming, URL structures, support for custom domains, etc. (Eg, Substack supports custom domains; Medium recently ended their support.)

Substack fills an explicitly free-speech need (for now) in an age where the backbone/service providers of the internet's conveniently forgotten why that's important.

You get a lot more interesting writers on board than Medium in that case. People who stick to the safe areas of thought don't make history (for good or ill).

"Free speech" isn't a business model, unless the business plan is to sell a story to VCs and get paid a percentage of the term sheet.

Substack has to pay the "I'm being cancelled" blowhards huge sums to get them on the platform to begin with. They earn nothing from eyeball traffic; people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage. And even if they did, Substack would earn a tiny pittance from their fraction of subscription fees from that demographic.

That's not how it worked. Some authors got paid a big advance in return for giving up all subscription revenue for one year. In at least some cases, authors said they would have made more money taking the regular subscription deal, where Substack gets a cut.

So in those cases, Substack provided financing and made money on it in the end. I don't know if that's true on average, though.

It is a classic platform bootstrapping model. It worked with new book publishers in the 1800s too. It worked for new video game consoles, etc ...

The content creator doesn't fully trust the new publisher/platform, so they need upfront monetary assurance beyond a normal advance/royalty type deal, in case the platform fails. Likewise the platform values exclusives from big names that will drive demand for the platform. So the platform gives up potential upside to secure the exclusivity rights and the content creators get a premium.

I've seen a fair bit of discussion about this, and so far, every author who I've seen talk about this has said they took the deal and came out behind, or they refused the deal but would have come out behind if they'd taken it, ie, subscription revenue ended up exceeding the offered advance.

I imagine there must be some authors out there who didn't mmet Substack's expectations, but they're apparently few and far between.

That's the opposite of what happened. You may want to double check this. :)

> people want to be outraged, but they don't want to pay for outrage

Some prominent Substacks have tens of thousands of paying subscribers. Glenn Greenwald is apparently clearing (after Substack's fees), something like $100k USD/month. Matt Taibbi has even more paying subscribers, so will make even more; Andrew Sullivan is close behind. Last year Substack announced they had over 1 million paying subscribers (generally around $5-10/month), and the top 10 newsletters were at that point generating over $20m in revenue/year (ie, averaging over 2m each).

As it turns out, a non-trivial amount of people are willing to pay for writing, whatever the reason is.

Whereas Medium works better for network effects/SEO (and why it became super popular before Facebook/Twitter became the most reliable methods of distribution for personal articles), Substack has a better writer/reader relationship, which matters when trying to make a living off of it. Although as a result, it incentivises "thought leadership" more than Medium, which is funny in retrospect since Medium was the blogging platform that started the trend.

Conversely, technical content doesn't do as well on Substack.

The paywall on Medium prompts me to subscribe to Medium (and presumably, some of the money goes to the authors). It feels like a magazine. My relationship is with Medium, not individual authors.

With Substack, I'm prompted to subscribe directly to newsletters from individual authors.

None of the authors I follow on Twitter tell me to subscribe to Mediums. A bunch of them point me towards their Substacks.

Individual writers control their own email lists

The UI is better.

Better how? I remember when Medium first came out, everyone fawned over the quality of the UI.

A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions. And a personal subscription model.

This seems like a pretty uncharitable take, and one thats unlikely to be true.

Do you think substack has some metric on "unsubstantiated opinions" that they're trying to maximize? Or have you just noticed more content that you disagree with there?

> A focus on contrarian writers with unsubstantiated opinions

These are also features of Medium, maybe most blogs. Being discerning is also a required feature of the internet, regardless what one might dream of, imo.

Substack exists because someone launched a very different business model than Medium. They also have a program where they pay prominent people advances to switch (https://on.substack.com/p/why-we-pay-writers).

Greenwald's Medium is still up. He just never really used it. https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/almost-nobody-reads-these-pos...

Medium is simply YouTube for written content. So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.

YouTube has a great personalization algorithm and a lot of content. Content and personalization make up a virtuous cycle, and drive higher engagement rates, which drives ad rates higher. Medium has neither the scale, content nor the engagement to be as valuable a platform for advertisers.

> So what holds for Medium holds for YouTube and vice versa.

I think the fact that YT hosts video makes it quite a different beast from Medium. Self hosting video is still quite difficult, and expensive. Hosting text is much cheaper and simpler.

This fact changes the game quite a bit.

On the other hand, managing a monetization platform (subscription billing, customer support, linking posts to email to social media notifications) is more complex than self-hosting. Not impossible, but more than most writers would want to take on themselves.

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.

Except YouTube is wildly more popular and sustainable. Any company would kill to be the YouTube of [xyz].

> Medium is simply YouTube for written content.

They wish! Medium is Vimeo.