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.
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.
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."
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.
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%.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I read a lot of “serious” things online, probably more than I should, and I never even remotely felt like Medium had any kind of dominant position.
For a certain kind of formulaic, clickbaity, “who needs an editor” kind of content sure, it was popular, but for serious writing?
Sorry, nope, not even close, not even temporarily.
Substack at least can make a claim for serious journalism and opinion that’s hard to monetize elsewhere — much but not all of it heavily libertarian — but what, please, was Medium’s claim to gravity?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I completely disagree. It used to be so easy to subscribe to everything I wanted to read via RSS and consume it quickly how I want to consume it. That user experience was 100x better than what we have now.
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.
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.
[+] [-] picardo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonystubblebine|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blowski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weeblewobble|3 years ago|reply
"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|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
Doesn't seem like Musk did any obvious damage.
[+] [-] etc-hosts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] radiojasper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunglee2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnymuch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biztos|3 years ago|reply
For a certain kind of formulaic, clickbaity, “who needs an editor” kind of content sure, it was popular, but for serious writing?
Sorry, nope, not even close, not even temporarily.
Substack at least can make a claim for serious journalism and opinion that’s hard to monetize elsewhere — much but not all of it heavily libertarian — but what, please, was Medium’s claim to gravity?
The highlight feature?
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bspear|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rg111|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dodgerdan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroman|3 years ago|reply
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..)
[+] [-] caseyross|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robmerki|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] capableweb|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lesstyzing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pottertheotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indogooner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1777|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __rito__|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zerocrates|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1193234501373005824
I haven't really kept up with Medium or the discourse around it at all since then. Have things changed meaningfully?
[+] [-] minimaxir|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EricE|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] simonswords82|3 years ago|reply
Am I wrong and in fact Medium is doing well and Ev decided to get off whilst the going is good?
[+] [-] erichocean|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvr219|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stereoradonc|3 years ago|reply