Maybe I’m misusing or misunderstanding the product somehow?
Not only do I dislike that enough to not want to use Medium or Substack as a reader, but it also means that I would never want to use Medium or Substack as a writer, either; yeah, I have all of three blog posts to my name, but even my shitty writing deserves better than to have any association whatsoever with such user-hostility.
It’s wild to me that anyone ever accuses Ev of doing this as a hobby. He has been running media platforms for 22 years. That’s an obsession.
I would be shocked if this was not blatantly obvious to the people who created Medium in the first place.
What happened?
As far as I can see, Medium's unique competitive advantage is its recommendations - most of your competitors are individual tools, but do not have Medium-level recommendation and content discovery systems. Substack, though, seems to me to be on the right track - good recommendation system and good content creation tools.
Why do you think Medium will recover to go back to the right path? How do you know it's not too late?
They are doing a great job of unbundling traditional media. They are the most credible threat to the NYT digital subscription powerhouse. But that unbundling only works for some authors, i.e. that's why top Substack authors left and formed their own bundle (every.to).
We are in the job of rebundling. It's one price for everything. And that works for a different set of authors and publications. This fits much more what I want to see in publishing. I want a place that is friendly to subject matter experts. That is most people here and the thing that makes you a subject matter expert is that you are doing interesting work, not trying to build an audience.
I will never, ever want to sign in.
Maybe the right path is to reduce costs and fire a good percentage of your employees and create a sustainable business model where Medium can be profitable without paywalls AND liked by its users instead of taking on more and more VC debt and try become the next Unicorn? But that may be impossible depending on the board. I think it's too late to reverse course with the current product. Without knowing anything about internal politics, I think it's nearly impossible to change the public perception that Medium if full of low quality spam behind an ugly paywall, and nobody wants to sign up or pay for that. My brain already skips all Medium content by default.
Like another comment mentioned, if you want to play the VC game, maybe it's a better idea to completely flip what you're dong and make a huge risky bet on something new in e.g. the decentralized space.
Aside, nice work. Excited to hear what you can bring.
So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
That being said, you Medium folks - as it looks like you’re actively reading this thread - should work in priority on the global perception that Medium is hosting more and more clickbait and superficial content, as that is a possible concern for people like me who’d be willing to give you corporate money so that our possible readers would bypass the paywall.
In a nutshell: work on an option (or pivot to?) making good writers pay for publishing content and get rid of the others. Some of those writer will be fine with paying (corporate branding is their goal), while some others will ask for their share of the fame created and you may want to go the Patreon way for them, i.e. asking readers to pay as an option (?)
> So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
Why would a writer do that specifically on Medium and not on, say, Substack?
Maybe they really have a unique and loyal audience. It's hard to say without knowing their traffic data. But if a lot of their readers come from social media, does it matter to the reader if the shared link leads to medium.com or substack.com?
If it made Medium the go-to place for people looking for high quality content that was free of SEO spammy articles, that would be an excellent reason.
Heck, I write articles and I'd pay to have my article posted on a well-regarded site. But I see no point to posting it on free sites with a reputation for low quality. There's an old saying "it's free and worth every penny".
Instead I post them on sites under my control, like digitalmars.com, where I can control the quality of the site.
I think Substack is clearly and obviously fairer than most competitors to both writers and readers. That’s why it’s succeeding.
Then be one. Actions speak louder than words.
I am certainly not anything close to your ideal contributor, but here’s why I decided to stop using Medium.
WHY DO I WRITE?
Writing is important to me, but I guess for different reasons than for most folks. I do it for myself. I am not interested in making money, or being famous, but I write as if these are my goals. It’s really a personal exercise, and much more inward-facing, than looking out.
I don’t charge (or expect others to pay) for my writing, and am quite aware that most folks find no value at all, in most of my work (including my software development).
WHY MEDIUM?
I liked the fact that Medium provided an SEO-friendly substrate for my writing. I’m a working engineer, and my writing is a side gig. I am glad to have things taken care of for me.
Although I am quite capable of “rolling my own,” wrt creating a Web site, it’s a distraction from what I really want to do, which is create world-class Apple applications. I enjoy writing. It helps me, more than anyone else, and Medium gave me a “one-stop shop.” Before Medium (and after), I have used fairly basic WordPress sites, with minimal customization, as a platform for my writing.
There are many frustrations with Medium, wrt to formatting and dashboard/editing stuff, but they aren’t crippling. I work within boundaries all the time. I know that it is not a technical writing platform, and most of what I do is technical writing, so beggars can’t be choosers.
WHY I STOPPED USING MEDIUM.
Because of this story[0, 1].
When Medium arbitrarily slapped a paywall on my free, open, and public writing, I realized that you guys believe that you own the material that I publish using your platform. The fact that I pay (admittedly a fairly token amount) to post this stuff, means nothing.
It’s my writing. Not. Yours. PERIOD.
Since you guys have control of the platform, you hold all the cards. I’m a relatively “bit” player, and cannot expect any special treatment. In fact, I consider this very screed to be nothing but a fart in a tornado (I write in the vernacular).
But you did step up, which I appreciate, and I believe that it would be disingenuous to complain privately, if there’s even a chance that I might make a difference.
If Medium ever changes back to something that is useful to me again, I might consider using it. I maintain my subscription, because there’s stuff up there, and I don’t feel like going through the agita of changing all the callouts in my stuff[2].
Thanks for stepping up.
[0] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/the-curious-case-of-the-p...
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/swiftwater/the-curio... (non-paywalled version)
I really feel as if it can be said that I "didn't read the manual," but that also begs the question "Why does this need a manual"?
Thanks!
What sets Medium apart to me from Substack, and why I would write in one but not the other, goes back to your original vision, that people should be able to write even when they don't want to write regularly. A newsletter is a continuous commitment; a single article is not.
You talk of experts, and I concur - my value out of Medium is the ML content. Most of it is written either by people who are new to it and are detailing their practice, or by those who really know their stuff. Both types help me get the gist quickly. In that sense, it's a knowledge-gap-plugger. Not Stackoverflow, obviously, but also not unlike it.
But here's where I think you've not thought it through deep enough. Experts also want things in exchange for their effort. You mention audience, and that's nice, but, frankly, it's a vanity metric - the audience isn't specific or useful in any way. It's wide rather than deep, so dopamine hit aside, experts don't really care about that.
Instead, experts care about CREDIBILITY. It's a status game. And that's where the publications come in. The difference between publishing an article just on my LinkedIn vs in a good publication is a signal it was vetted and accepted. Most publications on Medium are garbage, but some of them, through the diligent work of their editors, are not.
If you want to attract experts to publish on Medium, you have to help them play that status game. And for that what matters more is the publications and their editors. You've kinda tried it before: Medium had previously lured publications onto the platform only to shut them down. And also had its own publications and then fired a whole bunch of reporters.
But if you're serious about attracting experts to post, then just getting a couple of thousand random eyeballs on their content doesn't really help them be better experts? If experts (of any domain) are your target audience, you need to think through how you're helping them be more of what they want to be...
This could probably be really well done with tensorflow.js
* when a non-subscriber click a premium link, don't show the whole content and let the user choose whether to spend the allowance on this article after seeing a snippet.
* Keep an eye on your javascript size. Right now it is grossly out of whack for what it does. It put people on slower network at a huge disadvantage.
Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path.
The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff.
We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus.
In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others.
The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders.
A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers.
Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history.
So that’s the state of Medium.