Re:Ask HN: Why Did Medium.com “Fail"?
by tonystubblebine on Saturday February 11, 2023 @11:46PM
(#34759878)
Re: 3. No but I wouldn't want to speak for them. But the obvious difference is that we want to hear from people that are too busy to be full time on building a mailing list. Someone above called me crazy for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article, but if you think about it at all you realize journalists are relying on sources and Medium is a place where you can just hear directly from the source. (Except when we are hiding those posts in a mound of content mill stuff)
Re:Ask HN: Why Did Medium.com “Fail"?
by freediver on Saturday February 11, 2023 @11:57PM
(#34759953)
> for saying the best Medium article is better than the best NYT article
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!
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