Renewing Medium’s focus | Hacker News Reader

Renewing Medium’s focus

blog.medium.com

482 pointsminimaxir376 comments

Newly ex-Median here. This was not a huge surprise. On the surface, this is a change in product strategy. The underlying story is the company positioning itself so it can survive an adverse environment if it needs to. It's hard to fault managers for dealing with that potential (and its hard to deny that the next 2-4 years could be really bad). Hopefully not, but it would be malpractice not to prepare.

So better to focus resources now than be walking dead in a year or so, jettison unnecessary products/projects, and hope for the best. It's a great product, and with time and luck, they'll sort out a good business model, but like the rest of the publishing world, they're still sorting things out.

Despite being one of those made redundant, I enjoyed being there, and wish them the best. On that note, you should ask yourself if you are prepared for winter, because winter is coming.

What do you mean by an "adverse environment over the next 2-4 years"? Please be more explicit.

Local picture: the revenue model for online publishing is still broken, Medium is in the publishing business.

Big picture: Donald J Trump, and the potential to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody. Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

In either case, reducing your burn rate by $10M per year is a smart move.

Really? Blaming Trump for a terrible business model?

No matter how far you are in the SV bubble, even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.

> Hopefully that will not be the case, but if it is, money for startups with hazy revenue models will not be cheap.

Sounds like a great thing to me.

> even you must admit that was one hell of logical leap.

Yeah who does this ex-median think he is? It's not like he worked there.

Like if the economy was tanking in the US and rallying in foreign markets you could fairly make the argument that a Trump administration could be very risky in the next few years.

Putting it all in perspective though, to the extent it's a negative risk for SV based companies it's also a positive risk for things to be "disrupted".

If he knows how Trump has influence on Medium's business he didn't show it. I'm more than eager to hear that storyline. I would be interested in something more concrete than the numerous "the sky is falling" articles based 99% on the author's personal feelings and fantasies though. That obsession with Trump is a mania by now, that and "Russian hackers", a self-feeding frenzy.

The OP didn't connect Trump with a bad business model, or with Medium at all actually.

Big picture, Trump, and a Trump presidency, are a huge unknown. It's probably a matter of personal projection what you think the outcome will be, but it can hardly be dismissed out of hand.

For example, do you think Trump, a hotel owner, will support legislation that favours AirBnB? It's not as if he is above petty payback on people he feels have wronged him.

And of course there's a more general effect on the economy. Maybe he'll be great! Maybe he won't. You might think that's a good thing but you can hardly blame employees of vulnerable startups who would rather not lose their jobs.

I don't see how anything "Trump" has anything to do with Medium and publishing on the Internet except by the most far-fetched and useless "everything is connected" kind of argument.

You are literally responding to a comment explaining what he has to do with it saying "I don't see what he has to do with it". Do please reread. Truth is it's within his ability to wreck the whole scene dow, and it's an open question wether he wants or doesn't. So, big picture, it's something to take into account, just in case.

Yeah, those of us who got axed, many of us who also have mortgages and families, are just assholes with a political axe to grind that is disagreeable to your Ayn Rand worship or whatever.

The point I was making about Trump is this huge fucking black swan just landed, and everybody with money is snapping their wallets shut, and the rest of us can just go fuck ourselves and drop dead.

Just watch, many of you are next.

Adding vitriol doesn't make your ridiculous theory any more accurate. The markets had a sizable bump as soon as Trump won the election, and all indications are of a business-friendly administration and house after eight years of a business-hostile administration. Things are looking so good for the first time in a while that the fed may be able to raise interest rates without worrying about tanking a fragile economy.

Ergo, there will be more people with more money to invest. Maybe they all decide that they hate software, but I'm not seeing it. The only thing that's "bad" is the strengthening US dollar, and that ordinary interest rates make a bank a reasonable place to put some money.

Sorry to pierce your echo chamber. And your "might be you next" threat? So tacky. As if the many startup software engineers here haven't been laid off before. And if anybody at Medium making/announcing this decision said it had something to do with Trump's election, I hope you've lost all respect for that clown.

How was the Obama administration business hostile?

The market went up 150% during Obama's two terms, the best eight year performance of all other US presidents except Clinton and Coolidge.

It's because the economy has done so well under Obama that it can withstand Trump's nonsense, at least for the near term.

It started right in the dip of the 2008 recession...

> except by the most far-fetched and useless "everything is connected" kind of argument

Is it really so far-fetched or useless to project that there will be far reaching macroeconomic effects if Trump successfully implements any number of his stated policies? Sure, if you want to be optimistic you can hope the effects will be net positive, but that hope is at least as speculative as predicting that "winter is coming", so all we're left with is a high level of medium term uncertainty. Given that, it seems pretty strategically reasonable for a company (especially an over-leveraged one struggling to beat their VC clock) to reduce their risk exposure "because Trump".

Trump talked about opening up libel laws. That could means medium could get sued for anything its bloggers write.

Markets hate uncertainty. A new president introduces uncertainty in the form of policy changes and agency/department leadership changes via their appointees. And some presidents introduce more uncertainty than others..

So I assume you shorted the DJIA? Must have been rough.

I'm buying real estate in South America because I think the dollar is overvalued.

"I don't want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn't help"

If the new administration plans to rein in the stupidity of perpetual ZIRP/QE, then yes, there will be an impact on funding for startups with no revenue model.

Everybody knows the current situation cannot last, and in fact much of financial industry does not want it to last (for good reason), and knows that the current system must be reformed.

Framing this as a "hurrr Trump's gonna to cause widespread disruption that benefits nobody" makes you look very ignorant.

I believe this person is referring to the Republican-controlled US federal government and Trump presidency.

(I'm just explaining, not making any value judgements.)

Not the OP but I think the era of zero-interest money is behind us (even Germany posted a 1.7% YOY inflation rate, with people asking for the ECB to stop its bond-buying program as early as March), which means less money to throw at projects that don't have some strong fundamentals behind them.

The rest of the publishing world isn't "still sorting things out". Quite a few publications have figured out how to get people to subscribe to them and now make money from their online presence.

Can you name a few that are rolling in cash like Google or Facebook?

Should they be?

A couple names that come to mind as successful new publishing type entities examples could include FiveThirtyEight and GrantLand. Case studies more than full business models in my opinion.

In my opinion, Medium has a problem - It's not really a product that is supposed to make a LOT of revenue (for it's size).

In all honesty, it's very easy to technically build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business (not a crazy growth startup) that can generate revenue and most importantly be sustainable.

As for generating revenue: it's very easy to charge people a few $ / m for stuff I'd consider extra features (premium themes and custom domains).

It's sad those 50 people lost jobs (I feel for them - I had lost my previous job when a startup decided to downsize), but in all honesty - what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]?

[0] - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium#/entity

Well, 6 years in business, offices in NY, DC and SF (all expensive locations), 3 company acquisitions, salaries for 100+ employees. I can see them getting to 120 million easily.

Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question...

> Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question

Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number.

What these unrelated services did doesn't refute the point that a small team can put together a blogging service. Most components you need even already exist as pre-packaged FOSS. On top of it, one company on your list had a complex product that was built by a hand-full of college students in its early days. The Instagram company they bought also had just 13 employees.

> Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number.

While true, this doesn't really answer the GP's question, does it?

Twitter is another horribly overstaffed example. The Ev Williams signature touch.

for the first two, they are dealing with tons of data on people's interests, machine learning, spam algorithms, search infrastructure, not just the pageviews.

the only hard technical part of Medium is perhaps their content recommendations, but thats it. dealing with a ton of pageviews is hard, yes but nowhere near the complexity of dealing with what others are doing. you can solve that problem with more machines and money if need be. hard problems (ie google search) can only be solved with PHDs and thinking.

I think you are assuming that all of those 150 people are engineers. I guess most of them are not. You can build this blog platform with 10-15 engineers, but you also need people who will manage and sell.

Genuine question: manage and sell what?. Medium doesn't serve customer with products, it's ads only and I don't think that would require massive workforce to buy/sell them.

Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model.

Its due to a deeply embedded business philosophy where CEOs and other business people try to create bigger companies, and not necessarily better companies. Sometimes they are able to trigger a mushroom growth, but most of the times they fail. But due to survivor bias, they create a few more wannabe CEOs who again trey to create bigger and not better companies, and the cycle repeats.

Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices(which usually have about 1000+ employees). I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.

Even disheartening thing is that they might have already dried up most of their cash, and still don't know how to run a business. Executives are currently playing a dangerous game of "Let's see if we can raise more" and "We'll think of something".

> Its really sad for those 50 employees who had to lose their jobs due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model.

Isn't it worth considering that those 50 employees should have never been hired, but only were due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model?

Sure, but it seems excessive to blame them twice ;)

Those aren't mutually exclusive - Medium overhired but it is sad for the people who didn't make that decision but lost their job because of it.

There's opportunity costs for those employees for having taken that job rather than another option that may have been on the table at the time.

Or having taken on additional responsibilities (loan, started a family, etc) based on having the job.

Getting a job that shouldn't have existed and then losing it again isn't zero sum.

Agreed. In my experience, being out of a job six months after starting a new one is a net negative. I can spin a longer break between jobs a lot better than that.

just leave it off your resume

Right, but then you're getting into the areas where talking about, say, a 12 month gap (4 months looking, 8 months working, then canned) instead of perhaps a 5 or a 6 month gap. It can be done, but it looks awkward, and it really sucks.

Another concern is the growth and profit expectations that will come with more funding (beyond current expectations) and the lack of leverage they will have if they can raise more.

I'm not sure there are many companies such a scenario has worked out well for, but I'd love to dig into examples if people have any. And working out well can mean different things for investors vs employees vs customers vs free users vs readers. I would expect the interests to become less aligned the more investment they take on without being profitable (see Evernote's recent moves and resulting user backlash).

>Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices

Holy shit, sorry if I'm coming in to this discussion late and empty handed but isn't Medium basically a fucking blog?

It's really a blogging platform. I can see why they would need a large sales and customer support department. Whether it was too big, I have no idea.

It's way to big. This company could be run successfully with ~30-40 people.

It's a publishing platform, which sold itself to some smaller publications for use as their public facing site (like The Awl). It intended to make money through advertising. So sales and support is hardly out of the question. But at the size it grew to? No.

it's exactly that, an easier wordpress as a service with a cool, officially sounding domain name and one fixed theme better than competitors of the time but fading out of fashion fast.

> I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.

Yep, we are seeing this time and time again with startups in the Bay Area who went on a landgrab for talent a few years ago and now realize they can't support them as the VC money dried up. I actually wonder if Medium was trying to raise more and they were unable to, therefore they have to do this and are trying to spin it positively.

I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web. And I want Medium to do well. And maybe I'm too cynical about the startup and SV world (I moved away from SF in October), but this smells of the same old same old to me.

> I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web.

Serious questions: why and how?

I both write a blog and read blogs. I have never had any desire to move my blog to Medium, and ask myself "is it really worth it?" before clicking on any Medium link.

Blogger and Twitter.

Blogger was just another LiveJournal, BlogSpot, or WordPress (StudlyCaps IntEntional). Twitter (i.e. "public SMS") has very little to do with blogging.

>Serious questions: why and how?

Branding

"So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.

It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is more focused but also less proven."

In so many words, "We'll think of something."

> In so many words, "We'll think of something."

Maybe they would try to get acquihired

Companies that raised $123 million don't get acquihired.

Why not? That's a genuine question, not trying to be a smartass. Would a company that raised that much money not be worth its value to be acquired?

Edit: Looks like Instagram had raised 50m before being acquihired. Definitely a much different situation than this one, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that a company which raised 100+ million would be acquihired.

I would not consider Instagram being "acquihired".

See definition from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring): "...the process of acquiring a company to recruit its employees, without necessarily showing an interest in its products and services—or their continued operation"

Because acquihires are at much, much lower valuations than that. You'd be relying on the investors agreeing to basically write off their investment.

Instagram was sold for $1 billion with just 13 employees. That's certainly not an acquihire.

>> build & maintain Medium with as few as 5 engineers. Add a few more people (say 5 - 6 more) and you have a good business

I'm guessing they have a lot more than 5 reviewers, writers, editors...

What is the editorial situation? I've not been paying close attention, but they seem to have gone from curated long-form content to Yet Another Blogging Site.

I always find it amusing when people say "I could run XYZ with a 10th of the engineers, easy!", as if they have any actual insight into the engineering backends that run these services.

I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.

That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until recently) to name a few.

Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to have over 1,000 employees?

There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.

Instagram had around ~50 million users and 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook.

Probably not the best example since the rumor was they were all constantly paged. But yeah, some sites don't require much engineering horsepower.

What do you mean by constantly paged?

Got a "pager" message about problems requiring immediate attention. These days it's probably iMessage or Slack or WhatsApp, not the actual pager.

pagerduty.com

> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Yes, I suspect that it is a bad thing. People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber people who like ones from the '90s.

The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is simple: network effects.

> People who like modern UIs

Even more people like stable UIs.

Mind you that you're writing that point on news.ycombinator.com (another '90s-esque site).

Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners, popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25 tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail.

The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends (make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on the server!).

The "how it looks" of Craigslist is fine, just like HN. The "how it works" is abysmal.

I can't think of a single modern UI that I like.

Presumably you're browsing HN using Lynx.

  People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber
  people who like ones from the '90s.

Maybe initially when the fancy graphics grab their attention. But as they start to work their brains notice the "fancy" less and less and usability takes over:

Just like in games like shooters or Starcraft the pros actually turn down graphics settings - they don't notice the graphics any more so they don't are!

Same as why after a month you stop noticing the wonderful paintings you carefully selected for your home's walls. I haven't looked at mine in years. That#s why we get reddit /r/funny posts where people replace the family portraits in their parents house and then make a reddit post with the funny replacement picture "2 weeks and nobody has noticed anything yet".

Brains are made to tune out anything

a) not new

b) not used

So you end up with Google and reddit as major websites.

I'm not quite sure where that leaves websites like USAToday, but I highly suspect people learn to navigate it despite the graphics, and the design only serves to attract people initially. I on't think it helps retain users once they've been there for a while, except that keeping it stable helps keeping customers.

I know that Germany's top 1 or 2 news website www.spiegel.de (the other one competing for the top spot is a tabloid, bild.de) decided to stick to a much more text-based linear design even after a recent major redesign.

So while a look at actually successful websites doesn't tell us that simple designs always win your claim certainly isn't supported by the facts. Probably not as-is, and when it applies a lot of terms and conditions apply: What kind of people does a site attract? What kind of content do they serve? How long do people stay, how much do they interact with and use the site? Is it mostly "look at" content, or are there many interactions (reddit: lots of "using", USAtoday: mostly "looking")? Etc. I would make the claim the more people actually use a site (interact with the contents - clicking, navigating, writing, searching in the broadest sense, not just the "Search" function, for example trying to quickly find the top comments on a page) the less important the "fanciness"/"modernity" factor. As you use an interface your brain stops noticing how it looks and concentrates on how it feels (for example when it's always hard to hit that tiny "expand" icon on a comment thread right next to a complete different icon separated by only two pixels, how the icons look like will be lost).

For some things, it is a bad thing.

Apartment searching on Craigslist was so bad for so long, services like Padmapper sprang up to supplement it. Now Craigslist has a similar mapping feature to Padmapper, but still far clunkier.

Their forums were never very good, and have largely atrophied.

Sometimes change is good.

I built a service with a buddy of mine (so 2 engineers total) that achieved a scale comparable to Medium circa-2014/2015 (given baseless guesses about Medium's scale), with a similar featureset (perhaps more sophisticated, apples to oranges somewhat). It's definitely possible to achieve scale on a small team.

But... As you say, your guesses about their scale are baseless...

How about Reddit? That's a site that's undergone a number of UI changes and I'm pretty sure even now still has <30 engineers. It had around 6 in 2012 I believe.

Doesn't Imgur still only have about 15 employees too?

> There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.

There’s WhatsApp. A billion users, and 35 employees, running on less than 100 off-the-shelf servers.

>> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch,

It looks similar but to say it hasn't changed is silly

Good point. I think it's easy to forget how much work engineers can make for ourselves (Uber has >700 microservices)...

Maybe 1 person can't make twitter by himself, but I think the necessary number is much closer to 1 than it is to 4,100

Recently listened to DHH's Software Engineering Radio interview, and his statement about teams of 3 developers bragging about their 4 microservices really stuck out to me.

We seem to be in an era of microservice dissing. It reminds me a lot of the recent era of monoservice dissing. Just an observation.

everything in the world is susceptible to trends. especially in the tech world we tend to embrace concepts and take them too far. we then realize we took it too far and adjust too far to the other side like a pendulum. As usual, somewhere in the middle is best.

Do you happen to have a link to that? I'm interested to hear it.

Haven't listened to it yet, but it seems like this is the mentioned episode http://www.se-radio.net/2016/06/se-radio-episode-261-david-h...

It just seems easier now to reinvent the wheel 500 times as opposed to fixing it the first time. It may just be agile thinking.

  >Good point. I think it's easy to forget how much work engineers can make for ourselves (Uber has >700 microservices)...

This! So much of modern development looks like a jobs program. Then one steps back and looks at SV development in general, and realizes that 95% of their engineering staff is redundant.

Worse, are these asshole companies crowding out the H-1B system with all these extra positions?

OpenStreetMap: no paid engineers, half a dozen volunteers, unmetered (though not unlimited) public API, one of only four global geodata providers.

No disservice intended to the volunteer engineers and project members, but don't forget about the thousands of geographic data volunteers as well. : )

WhatsApp: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

Kudos to Craigslist, Whatsapp, Instagram etc that managed to keep staff size low. At least until they were acquired...

Only a very strong non changing management that say no to nearly all feature changes can make that possible.

99% of companies and projects is not that. New features, new management, new customers, new priorities, leads to exponential complexity of services and staff numbers. And over-head staff such as sales, support, legal, hr, localisation, etc.

What's interesting is how fast they add engineers. Many startups will start out with 1-2 people, then slowly add people as they grow. So the team becomes 5, 8 people. You always read about this in detail when they talk about scaling at a conference. But then they have 300 engineers. That is the growth period I want to hear about.

A lot of people on here are familiar with sites that run at scale with just a handful of engineers, and are also familiar with the fantastic potential for bloat to creep in to organizations if you don't work to control it.

I bet the WhatsApp team could do it.

Not the number of servers, necessarily, but running a big site with a small number of engineers.

Ah, yes, @dpp, creator of the Scala web framework Lift:

https://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/15/video-linkedin-scala-te...

(Video is offline)

To which Twitter's Nick Kallen replied on stage, incredulously, "... I don't think that's correct."

> I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.

I worked with said person and I feel like he would get along very well with Arthur Whitney.

It's definitely easy to make guesses on how an org could be streamlined from the outside. Though Medium needed to grow quickly and that takes having a lot of people to create features, sell, etc. They didn't grow and needed to scale back and change their strategy. I've seen quite a few startups go through continuous hiring booms then layoffs over and over again.

Ah yes, the old "u don't even kno wat its liek!1"

For what it's worth, FreeCodeCamp.com has 1/3 the page views that Medium has, with only 3 full time staff. https://www.similarweb.com/website/freecodecamp.com?competit...

I love Medium and I hope it succeeds. It sounds like their headcount was substantially higher than it needed to be and that this layoff was the right move.

I wish Ev had mentioned all the additional facts that are in this article by one of Medium's investors: https://500ish.com/long-medium-b9ddfe2c3a0a#.ch2benant

So what's the alternative to ads? Are they going to try subscriptions or micro payments (like Brave's browser)?

Really the only other option besides those two would be content advertising (Sponsored Articles)... ick

The alternative is syndicating content to other publishers like AP does.

I think this hits the nail on the head with startups. Overinflated growth and expectations. If you make a platform and expect limitless growth then a lot of doors close. If medium was good enough with 15 employees, why make a good thing bad? Why is 15 people having a highly profitable sustained business seen as a bad thing today? If that is the limit, then keep that company slowly growing to 30 people over time if it becomes necessary.

But then again if you race to investor money and immediately have to make $1 billion to appease investors, it suddenly makes sense.

Medium still has years of runway...

Not if the same people who hired 50+ extra engineers are still steering the ship the same way...

I posted this Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249166

> what do 150 do at Medium and more importantly, WTF did Medium do with ~123 Million [0]?

Interesting people freaking out about this when if you point out the bloat at Twitter (which dwarfs Medium many times over and goes years without shipping anything user facing) HN posters will jump to defend it just because they have a few dev centric open source projects that are widely used.

It's disheartening to learn that advertisement apparently isn't even profitable (enough) for a platform that doesn't even pay for its content.

Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

There's obviously no shortage of hate for "mainstream media" right now, so probably many people can't await the demise of that industry. I'm just wondering which blogger we'll send to cover Ebola in Guinea-Bissau and which twitterer will file & finance 14 FOIA lawsuits[0]. But maybe democracy works just as well without people digging into "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court documents".

[0]: http://www.charliesavage.com/?page_id=303

I don't think these difficulties of Medium can be generalized to the wider industry. The CEO/founder Evan Williams is a billionaire who set out to create a good publishing platform for everyday Joes and Sues with little to no focus on monetization (as far as I can tell). Other text content based sites are more willing to sacrifice UX for higher ad revenue.

They would be profitable if they reduced the employee count 10x. Which should be doable, it's just a blog platform.

Automattic has over 500 employees, yet they are also "Just a blog platform"

Though I believe they are actually profitable.

Automattic has other services that compliment Wordpress.

>Just let it sink in what that means for journalism. If the economics of the internet come to be all-encompassing, there will be no revenue model to support any professional publications.

Even at the Washington Post (profitable now), what drove growth was their opinion pieces (which they're doubling down on). And opinion pieces, while having their own merit, is rarely journalism. It makes me sad.

I guess the argument is that journalism is, in many ways, a commodity. Journalism, when defined as the reporting of precise core facts (X happened in Y, Z people were hurt), is available all over the internet.

In order to provide value, newspapers need to provide exclusive value-add, which in many cases includes opinion pieces. Opinion pieces allow experts in the area to link many different news items together to provide a more holistic view of the news item.

Anyone can tell me that 5 Coalition soldiers were killed by an IED, but it takes an opinion piece by an expert in counter insurgency tactics to provide context about how that might represent a shift in tactics/approach by a group.

Even at that, I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism. News will continue to get disintermediated.

For news firms seeking survival or sustainable operations, you'll see your "value add" opinion pieces consume more of the content with less actual news. This is WaPo's strategy [0].

[0] http://digiday.com/publishers/washington-post-grew-digital-s...

I think the rise of freelancers and devoted hobbyists is competing away value adds for mass market journalism.

I think there's some truth to this. I think there's also a need for accreditation or other validation/reputation services, not to serve as a gatekeeper, but to assist in helping people determine which sources are likely worthwhile to listen to. If the vetting needs to be done for each person on a per-author basis, that can be overwhelming, not dissimilar to the paradox of choice.

In some ways this may end up looking similar to existing publishers, though with a little less tight-coupling between author and publisher. It's pretty clear there are large changes underway.

Money goes where it's treated the nicest. So where is it going now?

As a pretty committed Medium writer, I've been impressed by their platform and how it has worked for my purposes. Very similar to SoundCloud. I haven't ever really figured out how either intended - or will eventually - turn a profit. I'm quite familiar with the "value gap" argument and the acrimonious relationship between, ahem, content and tech heavyweights in the US.

>So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.

It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like.

Oh, I've got a guess, and it certainly doesn't involve me getting paid more per view or read than I do via Spotify or any other "Artistic Content as Commodity" platform. Medium has been a decent trade-off: They don't charge me, and I don't expect anything but "exposure" in the grand sense. Not surprised this isn't exactly rolling in dough as a business model, but I'll stick around to see how they fare.

https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/media-analytics-prtsc-beer-d...

You are helping them build their business by providing your content for free, as did contributors to Huffington Post.

How do you feel the balance of compensation is, and how do you feel about your control - or lack of - of your own content?

As with Huffington Post, the hosting platform of Medium also sets an expectation floor for audiences / readers that the format will likely be to their preference. Thus the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome somewhat: Do they come to Medium for my Content, or did they discover my Content because it is on Medium? I think both avenues are realistic. Equal? I dunno, really I don't, and I think that's the secret sauce too a "community" of getting people to latch on and stay in it (e.g. Facebook).

I think the balance of compensation is fine for my purposes. I don't recoup the $19.99 annual fee via DistroKid that gets me into iTunes, Spotify, etc, so I'm generally a skewed perspective. In practical terms though - and this I truly believe is important - I think less than 1% of the Content Creator Population in any given Commercial Art Enterprise in the United States earns a Middle-Class Living (Wage + Benefits). Basically I think it's unfair in Modern Times to think that Musicians and Writers really had a lot of opportunities to make a good living before technology came around. Of course I'd like that to change, and maybe Spotify and Medium can play a role in that, but breaking the grip of RIAA and AP/Reuters isn't exactly an overnight proposition.

Thanks for calling out DistroKid, that seems like a great service. Going to pass it along to some musical colleagues.

I would use Medium but the apparent (I can't find anything) inability to show previous/popular posts alongside the content keeps me on my own platform. My content is still useful long after I wrote it but on Medium it seems to vanish.

> Medium has been a decent trade-off: They don't charge me, and I don't expect anything but "exposure" in the grand sense.

Reminds me of this comic: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure in the grand theme of the flawed "sense". I'm aware that it kinda makes no sense.

If you check out all of the "sponsored" or "partnership" content on Medium, like:

https://theringer.com/

https://electricliterature.com/

https://medium.com/the-economist

https://medium.com/@generalelectric

https://medium.com/@Starbucks

You'll notice the engagement is absolutely terrible. Between 10-100 likes, and even those stats are inflated by (no doubt terrified) Medium employees. Keep in mind, the rough "like" to "view" ratio is ~1:100, so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 views. Those are okay numbers when you're paying your writer/marketing guy $200 per post. Hardly the foundation for a company valued last year at $400M.

Of course, Medium could monetize with banner ads like every other site, and it does have enough traffic to do that (it's the 371th most visited site in the world.) However, most writers only write on Medium because there aren't any ads. If Medium suddenly started monetizing on my content "YouTube style" I would leave them for Wordpress in a second. The Medium community is fine (they'll drive 100-1000 views per post on my pieces) but that's not enough to justify graffitying my content with ads.

It seems like there's a major identity crisis going on here. On one hand, a lot of great pieces are published on Medium. (Perhaps not as many since Medium de-funded/spun-out their flagship in-house publications, Matter and Backchannel). But there's also a crazy amount of crap. The top stories on Medium are almost invariably listicles and trite "How I Xed my Y in Z days".

I get the feeling Medium set out to position itself as a curated Wordpress (which might justify that gargantuan valuation) but these days it feels pretty much like an awkward, less popular, and slightly more erudite Buzzfeed.*

*Buzzfeed is not without its own problems. See traffic stats here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/buzzfeed.com

I used to love Grantland, it's sad to see it reduced to such a pale (and strikingly partisan) imitation as The Ringer has become.

The Bill Simmons media empire has crashed and burned.

I'm in your boat and was pretty disappointed by the initial incarnation of The Ringer.

I heard Bill say on a podcast that he had a different theory about where media had gone. It was faster, mobile and more immediate.

So the initial implementation of The Ringer seemed like short, trite pieces produced quickly. Like you'd get a dumb Game of Thrones piece within 15 minutes of an episode airing.

Thankfully, they seem to have backed off and gone back to long form, loving fan pieces with obscure links and embeds. For example, this Donald Glover piece: https://theringer.com/you-have-to-take-donald-glover-serious...

TLDR; I'm curious what you think of the more recent Ringer stuff. Because to me, it's so much better and is exactly why I loved the old Grantland.

Thanks for linking to this.

I too loved Grantland and have been disappointed with Simmons' more recent efforts, but this is good. And Atlanta is fantastic.

Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the new Ringer stuff has been great. The Simmons model of content written by true fans is a great model. The low quality version of that doesn't work. But they seem to have figured it out and new posts have been much higher quality.

I'll have to start checking it more frequently. It even appears that Bill has actually started writing again. Maybe there'll even be a mailbag again someday...

One thing that Simmons has never figured out is that just because someone shares your interest for football doesn't mean they share your interest for mafia movies.

Instead of making 1 site (or 1 show) that is a grab-bag of various things-that-Bill-Simmons-likes, why not have several niche sites that cover different topics?

I can't read The Ringer because I don't want to get movie reviews from the same place I get NBA game breakdowns.

Also, the ratio of joke articles to serious articles is all wrong. It should be 1 joke article for every 10 serious articles, at least.

I think this is interesting because I actually am fascinated by a great writer like Simmons, who is one of the last honest sportswriters. I'm curious about his other tastes because I view him as an authentic cultural critic. But I do wonder if I'm in the minority or you are with that opinion! Good comment.

I see Simmons as a fan with a platform. That's what I like about him, he's unabashedly a fan. I don't mind when he makes references to pop culture and other things he likes, but I mostly read/listen to him for his take on sports.

So when some other person writes on his website that "SoundCloud Comments Are the Only Good Comments", I just don't care about that. At all.

Do you think the problem is the site navigation? I subscribe to a couple of newspapers and it doesn't bother me at all that I get both movie reviews and financial news from something like the NY Times. I generally have found this to be true with the Ringer as well. The fact that I found a movie review to be insightful drives me to read more of the sports coverage because it carries a similar expectation of quality.

Yes, navigation is a big part of it. Currently for sports the nav lists NFL and NBA. That's all. I know the site covers more sports than that, I've read the articles. There's a college basketball podcast, an MLB podcast. But there's no "Baseball" section to the website.

Fixing the nav would help but it wouldn't be enough if 50% of articles are humorous.

Slight tangent, but this is why I stopped reading The Verge. Their editorial product went from tech to tech + sci-fi + American pop music + cars. Which I guess is great for a large subset of their readers, but alienates those of us who read contemporary fiction, listen to classical music, and ride bikes.

(By contrast, the one print newspaper I still buy, the (UK) Observer, does all of the above and more.)

BuzzFeed is an interesting reference because they've switched to an emphasis on video content (higher engagement + more ad opportunities) as a hedge against the declining publishing industry.

If Medium allows native video publishing, that would certainly be a curveball.

> so hardly any of these posts are even cracking 10,000 view

I think there's probably a problem in these numbers, but I'm 99% certain you've misread the tea leaves.

The Ringer page views are through the roof. But those are not coming from regular Medium users who typically leave reviews. So the problem is, why don't these visitors engage more, rather than why doesn't The Ringer have any page views.

IMO, big sites like The Ringer are bets that obscure what's wonderful and working at Medium. For a blogger like me, posting to Medium is a 10x on page views. 37Signals posted something similar. All the mid-size blogs that come over are having a great time.

To be fair, The Ringer is a pretty big outlier. "Have Bill Simmons tweet every article we post" isn't really a replicable business model.

Yeah, and it's the only site on that list that I know anything about. Just wanted to point out that you can't judge page views based on the number of recommends that a Ringer article gets.

you still would get way more viewership on linkedin posts, even though their system sucks

I've been trying to get to the heart of Quora and LinkedIn view numbers. My experience is that the absolute value is high but that the value of those people is close to nil. I know I'm not alone, but I don't know if that's a near universal experience.

My anecdotal experience is that I never get retweeets or mail from things I post there, whereas the people who read and then respond on Medium seem like the exact kind of people I want to influence. Not all viewers are created equal.

Okay, that's a fair criticism. I don't have inside info on The Ringer's page views. I have info on another dozen or so publishers though, and the ~1:100 ratio generally sticks.

Since you're a Medium advisor, maybe you can shed some light: how many of The Ringer's page views are coming because of native Medium readers vs. because Bill Simmons is linking to articles?

If I'm a deep-pocketed advertiser with little social media engagement (unlike Simmons), how does posting to Medium benefit me? Why am I not better off paying Bill Simmons to tweet about my product than pay the Medium middle man?

Relatedly, is it fair to extrapolate Medium's "10x on page views" on your blog to the average user, who doesn't start off with 20k Twitter followers? (Note: Medium uses Twitter followers to kickstart your Medium following.)

For the average user who doesn't know how to market their posts, I agree, Medium is a godsend. There's a small community of committed readers (good for page views) and the design is great (good for sharing.) But do you really think that these are game-changing advantages? Do you think that these advantages will survive once/if Medium starts plastering its posts with banner ads?

Here are my recent stats. I don't know really that the 1:100 ratio is real at all: https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-Stubblebine

I do know though that specific to The Ringer that their page views are completely decoupled from what you can see in engagement. I have no idea where that's coming from or even what's required for them to be a media success. But I do know that they are getting heavy traffic.

Re: game changers. I wrote in one of the other threads that my analysis of the market is that there is has been a non-stop demand for personal publishing products since 2000: blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Twitter, Tumblr.

And we're in a moment now where many of those seem institutionally unable to modernize. This word "game-changer" is so loaded. Is changing the game the goal? Or just serving a huge market?

From the start, I've seen Medium as at minimum a modern version of an evergreen class of software. Obviously, they've done that by simplifying out features that end up not mattering a lot (customizable themes) and making a beautiful text editor.

On top of that, none of those other platforms ever did anything to boost my page views. I think that's a real benefit of the platform that goes well beyond whatever audience you bring with you.

I see my own stats (based on 20k Twitter followers) and the stats of people in my publication (Better Humans). It really seems like the pairing of a strong title with strong content is the primary driver of traffic. Publications will take those articles and then recommends will drive a ton of traffic.

Many of the people who write on BetterHumans are starting with no audience to speak of. It's certainly a huge ego boost to experience a few thousand page views for the first time.

Would people still have problems with advertisement if it was extremely tailored towards them? I'd presume Medium already collects data on their users and their preferences -- does Medium sell that to ad. companies, and is it effective in its current state?

Maybe Medium can still expand outwards, such as if they created a Google chrome extension or browser annotator to save all the highlights I have on other websites that I read (e.g. NYtimes, Bloomberg); and later using that data to give better ads -- I probably wouldn't mind if it wasn't intrusive.

> As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally.

This is an enormous failing on the part of management as well as Silicon Valley culture in general. These startups hire far too many people far too early, piss away a bunch of money, and then lay off half their workforce and "pivot" once they realize their business plan actually sucked balls from the start.

Meh. It's a hard balance to strike, between being poised for growth, and knowing the growth will work. It's expensive and failure-prone, but if you don't do it that way, you get passed up or hit an upper boundary.

You also hurt people in the process, and that's something that tends to fall out of the calculus.

At the end of the day, humans are pretty much the only thing that matters.

What would you prefer instead? That they not hire these 50 people at all?

I'd prefer that they adopt a sane and reasonable growth strategy that doesn't depend on pump-and-crash cycles. There's a certain pernicious idea in business in general and in startups particularly that your worth is in large part how many people are working for you (I've heard multiple people answer "hey, how are things going" with "we just hired five people!" and my blood runs cold) rather than the efficacy with which you are achieving your goals.

(I'm a little less sympathetic in the case of engineers, who are an in-demand resource and so their opportunity costs are less, but the opportunity cost of your support people is higher and the recovery from the problems that that failed explosive growth phase cause is much worse.)

Is it any worse than some lumbering giant laying people off who've been around for twenty years, because the business model of 20 years ago doesn't work anymore?

It's almost like there was some risk in starting something new...

You have literally quoted the SV mantra.

Hilariously true, since the mantra is purported to be "fail fast" and not "prop up on VC money than fail spectacularly years later when it runs out"

I honestly don't think this counts as a spectacular failure. It's not like the entire company imploded. Spectacular failure is, I dunno, like Fab.com, Color Labs, or maybe Megaupload.

The Medium situation looks a lot more like Mixpanel to me. They overhired, they are laying off. Business are actually supposed to be able to do that, in a functioning flexible labor market, and I don't see why we should vilify them specifically.

It's far easier to say that a business plan sucks balls and be right 90+% of the time than to get a business plan right.

In practice even the good business plans run into myriad reasons why they aren't actually good plans, they are just lucky enough and have a determined enough team to survive reality.

That's not to say there aren't good business plans, but I think that criticizing Silicon Valley culture for having a high failure rate is counter-productive to encouraging people to take necessary and potentially transformative risks. Whenever you're trying to do new stuff, a lot of retrospectively dumb stuff will get discarded along the way, and it's easy in hindsight to point at the survivors and say "why didn't all of the failures just give up sooner?" I think that underestimates how much the successful ideas only just barely avoided ending up also on the side of the road.

I agree with a lot of the discussion here around what 150 employees are/were actually doing. I also wonder – as some other commenters have mentioned – what Facebook/Twitter/Google do with their many thousand employees.

However, the more I reflect on it the less I feel this is isolated to tech. What on Earth do 55,000[1] employees find to do at Morgen Stanley for example, or 200,000[2] employees at Ford?

I see two possible options:

1. This is just a limit of human perception. Companies do so much stuff it is hard for us to conceptualise.

2. Some combination of bullshit jobs & making work for ourselves.

I find the former believable simply because there are a hell of a lot of humans and 90% ish have a job.

The latter quickly leads to me to wonder: do we as a society bias towards job creation regardless of its function.

I therefore suspect both are the case, at least to some extent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company

It's mostly 1 in your examples. Morgan Stanley and Google do lots of different things, which requires lots of different people. Ford does lots of labour intensive stuff with a heavily unionised workforce. Facebook and Twitter do more than you'd think, but more importantly do it at massive scale. Medium, however, has one relatively simple website, at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google. I struggle to imagine what they all did.

>> at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google

Medium - 150

Google - 55,000

Facebook - 15,000

Twitter - 4,000

I don't know about Twitter.

I don't have the feeling they are moving very fast.

They could probably still do good with 1000 people.

Ford has about 65 factories. Assembly plant in Chicago employs about 4500 people. If factory has to work 24h/day you have to have 3 shifts and probably something extra for the weekend and holidays.

For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.

>> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.

On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k

The fundamental difference with Ford.

Even though most of the Ford employees are not devoting their full effort toward physically adding value to natural-resource-derived materials, some of them are, that's where the wealth is generated and the reason money comes in.

At a company with none of these type employees generating the profits, wealth originates from markets, not materials themselves.

Ford may appear to be a bureaucracy (because it is), but it is not a pure bureaucracy.

The non-material companies CAN be operated as pure bureaucracies, and the more pure, the greater degree that success comes from streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes.

Companies like Ford might also need to have as streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes as possible (simply because many types of bureaucracy can often be a dead weight).

For that reason, either type of company might also profit most when the smallest amount of bureaucracy actually is imposed on the fraction of employees who are devoting their full effort toward adding value, whether it is through materials processing, data processing, etc.

Even though facebook and Google might be making a profit on every piece of hardware they are involved in, that is not where significant amounts of their money comes from. They are huge but it didn't come from them creating wealth from scratch.

Market-dependence of course applies to either type of employment organization, but there are extremely different weightings between capital markets, materials markets, and sales markets between such diverse industries, depending on where the money is coming from at the time.

Ford & Morgan, Stanley also are large and successful companies that were founded before most anybody living was ever born. Which is also huge, but everybody knows that.

There could still never have been companies like Morgan, Stanley until after companies like Ford were developing a need or desire for these service providers to exist.

Wealth is always traceable back to natural resources, whether renewable or not.

Plus mechanics, janitors, foodservice folks, truck drivers, Folks handling supplies, and folks moving stuff from one part of the plant to another.

Heck, one of the Subaru plants in Lafayette, Indiana, employed multiple people to park new cars. Yup, they drove them from the line to an assigned space in the parking lot.

Plus management and inspectors and so on.

I watched a talk from jon blow [1] where he mocks twitter & facebook for their huge number of employees. I too think that Facebook in particular seems to employ a lot of mobile engineer for a meh result.

However, he also mocks the complexity of displaying a feed.

This is not trivial at all on mobile, at least if you want to :

- display a highly customized feed of basically unlimited size where each item is slightly different

- keep it running fast, even on low end devices

It is a problem faced by all the major apps and there are a number of techniques you can use in order to improve performances but those are hard trade-off that are difficult to get right.

Making such a feed work can keep a lot of engineers occupied.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA

Medium downsizes by 33%, disenchanted by the ad-supported model. Pledges to pivot to heretofore undefined but different publishing model.

/me reads the word "focus" in the title. Then reads this in the text: "It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like." I thought the content would have more "focus"...

^ This should be the real title of this post.

"Renewing Medium’s focus" is a pretty underhanded way of saying "Medium downsizes by 33%"

This is a glorified article saying 'no one is buying our ads'

I hope they know what they're doing, because that post was extremely vague. I guess downsizing gives them more runway to pivot.

The obvious alternative to advertising is micropayments, either behind a paywall or on a donation basis - similar to what Brave is trying to do. The problem is our habits as consumers are so deeply ingrained to expect content as free it's going to be a huge uphill battle if that's what they're thinking.

Could also be a huge pile of money that gets distributed to writers based on words read or something like that. Just like Amazon's KDP Select Global Fund.

Although I guess on Medium, this would result in even more click-baity shallow articles, which doesn't seem aligned with the mission to make people smarter every day.

I wrote a response to this medium post, figured I'd copy it here since I'm unsure of the overlap in forum participants:

I had an idea for a model last week that I think would be worth consideration. It’s sort of a Humble Bundle x Kickstarter x Patreon model.

I’m envisioning a system that allows consumers to pay what they want for access to the content they value, but also allows creators to establish a threshold point where the content would become freely available.

So Ev Williams does a bunch of research and writes an article and says “Awesome article Ev! I probably put 10 hours into it and if I got $500 in return for that work I’d be super psyched… but I also want EVERYONE to read my awesome article cause it’s important…”

I would propose a system by which the article is published with a paywall indicating that the article is only available to contributors until $500 threshold is reached. After the $500 threshold is reached, the article is released publicly and those contributors who paid get Patron/Contributor credits on the article (or some other social reward).

Consumers interested in AI will pay for AI content, those interested in Marketing will pay for marketing content and any content in any subject good enough to reach the threshold can be enjoyed by everyone.

This is off the cuff and I’m sure there are issues, but I think this category of model is worth exploring since it compensates creators for their work, allows eventual free distribution of information and doesn’t make the platform or creators beholden to advertisers.

Not a bad idea, I was working on something very very similar until few months ago.

> article is only available to contributors

So contribute $1 then copy-paste to pastebin?

Sure, just like signing up for a 30 day trial of Netflix and then ripping all the content to bit torrent.

While I'm sure it's a concern I don't think Netflix looking to change their model over it. Good actors still outnumber bad actors.

Ripping from Netflix and sharing is hard.

Total idiots can copy/paste articles.

I see full paywalled articles copy/pasted into Reddit threads every day, and in hacker news threads about every week.

Agreed, but why do that when the paywall is designed only to make a set amount of money in total and then make it public for everyone?

My assumption is that people release paywalled content free as as a form of protest, I would think that with the proper model piracy would be reduced to negligible harm.

A twist on this model could also be to put a secondary release for the content that is time-based. So the content is going to be freely available no matter what, why pay even $1 to be Robin Hood when everyone is just going to need to wait a few days - week to get it?

Wouldn't 99% of content go unread? For those who would get readers, wouldn't most be willing to wait?

I think that would depend on the content and the reputation of the author.

I think that this model would be optional per article... so if you don't have a following willing to compensate then you need to work on your craft till you do.

Honestly, I can sit here and defend my idea all night but I really don't know what would happen. The only way to find out is for someone to test assumptions with an actual test and I ain't got time for that... Medium does though and they have the money and the resources and the imperative to try something new... so why not try it and see what happens?

Would it mean 99% of all content is worthless then?

Not necessarily, just unknown authors who may have a lot of great content, but would never achieve escape velocity for the world to discover them if there's a patron paywall in place.

Internet doesn't work that way and people don't want to pay, it's simple as that. Even HN readers avoid paywalls like plague. Just check every thread when it comes up.

Internet is all about sharing and linking. Ads suck but this is the best model we have yet come up with the way we assume Internet works.

I think there is something to micropayments here. The cost per incremental page view is extremely low, so the payment should be 2-3 orders of magnitude lower than it is now (more like $0.50 per month for 50 articles than $4/mo @ WSJ).

That would put a ceiling but not a floor on what people can earn.

Not saying it's unworkable, but just that it would have that effect.

Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible. You need to have some metric to calculate impact. Likes and views can't have too much weight in the equation, because they can be gamed. Furthermore, page views are heavily influenced by Medium's recommendation engine.

I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game.

Ultimately, Medium might introduce something like Amazon's KDP Select Global Fund that pays money to writers based on some metric, but I doubt that it will be much better than what've got. Why? Human nature.

The current media landscape is refined to perfection already, in a way. "Modern" articles push our buttons, we are like junkies waiting for their next fix of information (I guess every HN reader can relate to this – I certainly can). That's what we really want. We read what tingles our senses, preselected by a relatively stupid algorithm and social proof.

How on earth would you construct a better algorithm that truly measures impact on our lives?

>Medium set out to solve the impossible. They want to reward writers who have an impact. But impact is actually hard to measure, maybe even impossible.

That's not the problem. The problem is that most people could not care less about either impact or rewarding the writers -- and the kind of writing on Medium is not the kind that has a paying fanbase (like e.g. fiction might).

Well, my impression from the start is that Medium was much more of a "we want to try some new things for blogging and see what works" model; the assertions Ev and company have been making that they're on a noble mission to save the web from itself are relatively recent. They didn't set out to solve the impossible; they set out to apply what they learned from Blogger to do something better.

I think an argument can be made that Ev is right that the advertising model for web content is broken, but there's no sign that they have any idea how to fix it. My own posts on Medium perform wildly inconsistently -- views from highs around 45K to lows around two or three dozen -- and at least for me, the main differentiator seems to be links from outside Medium. Articles that get selected for attention by Medium editors also get increased traffic, but I suspect it's hard to get that attention unless you're already getting recommendations.

I'm enjoying a lot of things about Medium, although 2017 may be the year I quietly move all my stuff back onto my own platform again, just cross-posting certain articles over to Medium.

> I, as a nobody, won't be read. So I need to gather followers. I do so in the traditional way of commenting, liking, recommending, doing all kinds of community stuff. But again, this can be gamed. This is not impact, but merely hours put into the social game.

While this may be true for most blogs, I curiously found myself in a different situation, having spent almost no time trying to game the social system on my blog (only setting up auto-posts of new content on facebook/twitter, very seldom manual tweet to promote archived content). Somehow I got up to today, with 1-2k daily hits for derelict content, and enough name recognition to get job offers and occasionally run into fans in real life.

I'm astonished there were 150 people working at medium.

I'm still astonished there are 100 people worked at medium.

Yes, I'd really like some insight into why they need _that_ many people.

> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.

There's an incentive alignment issue with these types of models which try to quantify "value" from a holistic perspective. You could say those Facebook Pages which steal memes and do likes-as-votes shennanigans "create value" for people too as they generate tons of Likes and EdgeRank exposure.

Medium was always a hub for clickbait thought pieces, but a revenue model like the ones implied would only make it worse.

I'm not sold on using Medium, or definitely not exclusively.

Why would a content creator publish content on the Medium platform when you can't even get the e-mail addresses of your subscribers unless THEY pay you for a membership (that's what I got from their membership FAQ).

In other words, Medium expects content providers to produce top content in order to grow the Medium platform while the content provider has no way to realistically obtain a following that's not directly tied into Medium.

That means when Medium goes down, you lose not only all of your posts but your entire following as a content producer.

I split the difference and setup a custom domain for my Medium blog. I own the content URLs. If Medium dies then I'll pick a new blog format and new web host. It won't be the first time and it won't be the last I'll have to make such a change.

Yeah but if you have a bunch of followers on Medium, all of them will no longer receive updates when you post new content.

Sure, some percentage of them will know your domain name and check manually but you're going to lose a huge amount of readers.

My concern isn't so much with Medium dying, it's spending 3 years building a brand around yourself and eventually figuring out how to monetizing your audience but now you can't because you have "Medium followers" instead of your own subscriber list.

I don't have any strong opinion about Medium, but generally when a firm lets 1/3 of its workforce go it's a Big Problem. This is hot news insofar as it tells us something about the future of the media market, but bigger point to me is that 50 jobs is such a tiny number. Of course it sucks for those let go, but 50 new unemployed people won't dramatically reshape the SF tech landscape and Medium is a well-known firm, so most of those folk will likely land on their feet.

The reason I think it's news is that it's a glaring example of how network effects leverage employee productivity so drastically. The tech industry is always looking for more people, but it's simply never going to employ the same huge numbers of people that other sectors like manufacturing have. google only has ~60k employees, which is only about 1/5 as many as IBM. Jobs are a form of political currency, and while it may be a lot harder to fill 50 tech jobs than 5000 warehouse jobs people often choose quantity over quality. I would expect the tech sector to carry much less weight under the new administration and that the next 2 years will be characterized by vicious competition and consolidation.

My biggest issue about Medium so far, is the content. Too much opinion, not that enough investigation, like junk food dressed as fine dining with clucky javascript.

So you object to blogging in general. Which is what Medium is.

Github pages are good, if that could be classified as blogging, I am a big fan!

No surprise. Investigative reporting is very resource intensive, and the people who are good at it don't do it for free.

Opinions, on the other hand...

I'm very very surprised that Medium has issues and they needed to cut 50 employees. And sad. I was thinking they were doing quite well.

Now, I'm concern that there are other startups which have similar problems like Medium even if they are considered as success stories. So I'm not even sure which companies I should use as example of "this is how to run the startup".

What you think about following companies?

- Slack: maybe it is just a temporary hype?

- Uber & Lyft: maybe rides should be 100% more expensive?

- AirBnB: a lot of money is spent on fighting regulations - but elections are every 4 years and regulators will change...

- Dropbox: maybe it is the end of PC <-> cloud sync?

- Github: maybe it is just hype because they are have free option? Maybe large companies are not ready to source dev to github?

- Stripe: Maybe they have high valuation just because a lot of small startups are using them - but as soon as startups grow they move to cheaper systems?

Yes all valid concerns. You and I will get downvoted for even mentioning these companies in a pessimistic light but it doesn't make it less true.

Slack: used it at a hackathon and found it better than Facebook or Skype or whatever groups use to organize; happy that the club I joined recently as an officer is using it for communication

Uber & Lyft: haven't used it personally because public transportation is cheaper and I can wait, even though they were giving out free credit on my campus; I think carsharing is here to stay, especially if selfdriving cars become mainstream.

AirBnB: surprisingly cheap, found a $200 a night place in downtown LA for 6 people; I enjoy the concept of people sharing their homes and introducing tourists to local culture; however, some regulation is needed to protect both homeowners (from issues like squatting), customers, and renters -- no home should be used for the sole intent of renting to AirBnB and acting as a hotel.

Dropbox: I only use Google Drice so I can't say.

GitHub: hasn't this company been around long enough so that it isn't just hype -- anyhow they should find a way to stop burning so much money.

Stripe: I've heard their API is easier to use than competitors, and it seems they launched Atlas this year to diversify themselves from process payments to include business incorporation.

Uber & Lyft are NOT carsharing. Carsharing is when you let someone else use your car without you being needed.

Github used to be a no-vc company, then they took a bunch of money and grew really fast. I do not know if they are profitable again, but this two part history is why people worry.

> - AirBnB: a lot of money is spent on fighting regulations - but elections are every 4 years and regulators will change...

AirBnB have gotten stuck in some real regulatory problems worldwide that are going to manifest themselves this year. In London alone they could make $400m less than was expected. I don't see it ending well.

What do you think about Quora ?

Yahoo Answers without the Answers unless you succumb to the onboarding bait.

> We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform

So they are going to start charging for reader access[1] but they don't yet know how. Is there any other interpretation?

I am sad they did not explore a restrained, regulated advertising model. As much of a dirty word it is, it's not in practice as disliked as "paywall". Daring Fireball does good ads. Even Google (at least in its earlier days) had restrained approach to text-only, short, clearly separated ads that people were ok with.

[1] Note: as I read it the quote specifically precludes a paywall-free approach such as charging writers for premium features a la other hosting platforms (sans paywall, at least). They want writers to receive compensation and they don't want ads.

People who say Medium is "just a blogging platform" obviously haven't written many blog posts. Writing a post is easy. The interface to do that is easy. Distribution is hard - that's the bit Medium solves in a revolutionary way: getting people to read your stuff.

What about when they were brand new and didn't have the distribution at the start?

They had built a free platform that was dead simple to use and it grew from that :).

Is this just an extremely well written PR piece to handle layoffs?

Or are they actually making some concrete changes to their focus?

I was genuinely curious to hear how they were going to switch their focus, and agreed with most of what he was saying throughout the article, but after having finished the article, I came away with no new information. It made me feel like it was the former--an extremely well written PR piece to cover for the layoffs.

Am I missing something?

I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of networked blogs, started by a really popular Silicon Valley dude.

And now they've realized that ads slapped onto content isn't sustainable. Gee whiz, welcome to the wonderful world of content publishing, that all other newspapers and magazines have been made painfully aware of in recent times.

It sucks that a bunch of people lost their jobs today, but really, to think that Medium was doing literally one single thing in an innovative way was just plain naive.

Especially now that video is eating up bigger and bigger chunks of the content market everyday.

The problem is that some of us have faces best for radio and voices for silent movies.

Eh, that would probably mean I'm an outlier -- considering I spend most of my time reading rather than watching videos on Youtube or Facebook.

I think their main innovation was [HUGE IMAGE AT TOP OF ARTICLE].

Their editor was absolutely amazing. I know a plenty of folk who blog on medium because they love the nontechnical editor and minimalism of platform.

Private notes are also nice if you want an editor to do any cleanup after something has been posted.

Another innovation was popularizing the "2 minute read"- those estimates put the reader at the forefront - we value your time

Agreed, it's a great editor. The downside of the minimalism is that, when they change the design, it's not obvious when old features are just gone.

The "huge picture header" is a case in point. A few years ago Medium's default design was to have a large picture at the top, with a headline laid out in white text on top of the picture. That design is not possible anymore (I think they removed it because it wasn't mobile-friendly)... But if you took a break from Medium and came back, you'd just be left wondering how to do it.

I remember spending about 30 minutes googling for that option, until I found mention of its deprecation tucked away in a FAQ section at Medium.

I had the same issue. It's odd too, because it's still possible to do that in old posts i.e. they remain unchanged, but new posts are in the new format.

The success of Medium back in 2013 was the first thing that drove me to recreational data analysis, because I was confused myself.

However, in 2016-2017, Medium is the best answer to the questions "How do I quickly write a pretty blog post?" and "How do I get people to read my thoughts?"

Tumblr fading out of public consciousness made room for Medium too.

Exactly how I feel. I loved Medium when I first discovered it. Good quality content in many different areas. Nowadays it's just a collection of IT students that heard it's a good thing to be blogging to find a job but who aren't good writers and write about non-exciting stuff. On the other hand you find "founders" with (if at all) mediocre startups that recommend you their book list on how to become "successful".

Of course some good writers are still there but they are lost in all this really annoying noise that stopped me from reading medium.

I have noticed the same thing. I have a lot of topics selected there, but my front page is still usually full of 'how to succeed in life' posts even though I even mark those as 'don't show more this kind'.

I think that one of the reasons for that is a bad discovey system. The algorithm that generates front page is oblique and not controllable.

I wish I could decide which people/publications to follow, and be certain that I will not miss their posts. And I would love to discover the content reddit-style, sorting it by number of upvotes and filtering it by tags. Instead, I get recommended a bunch of garbage by some weird machine learning algorithm.

It creates problems for writers as well, because I can never be sure that my followers will read my posts, and the amount of views I receive from Medium, compared to HN/subreddits is truly pathetic.

I really wish they would fix the discovery system, because I'm a huge fan of everything else they're doing and I would love to use Medium as a platform way more.

Have you seen this page? https://medium.com/me/following/tags

Unfortunately this doesn't work well. Reddit works well because you can see the most upvoted posts of alltime/year/month/week/day, and it is extremely convenient and straightforward, it makes it super easy to discover the best content.

The tags only have "top stories", which is obscure, and looks like it works more like a "hot" sorting. I can't see the most upvoted stories to discover the best ones, and at the same time the "top story" in the tag I'm interested in hasn't changed in a long time.

I can neither browse the best stories of all time, nor the best stories published since the last time I've checked. So either way it's basically worthless.

Also, if I follow the popular tags, I'm afraid that the firehose of the new content published in them will bury the new stories published by people whom I explicitly decided to follow.

That is why should be a way to view the posts from the people I follow in the reverse-chronological order, and a completely separate system for discovering the most popular/upvoted posts. As in HN + RSS reader.

I just don't get why people consider X to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Y 2.0, in a prettier outfit. It's just a whole bunch of networked Z, started by a really popular Silicon Valley dude.

Not to be too unkind, but that's the reality of lots of stuff coming out of SV.

Right, but in this instance, Medium was created by the guy who created Blogger. It's the exact same thing, just newer and prettier.

He came up with Twitter, too.

It's sad that we don't value incremental improvement or realize that pretty much everything "revolutionary" were incremental improvements on something else. iPods, iPhones, laptops, Google Search, etc.

Whether or not Medium is "remarkable or innovative" is whether it becomes successful. If it's successful than it's remarkable and people will bend over backwards to determine what innovations made that possible.

Innovative is different than remarkable though, which just means "worth talking about." Why something became more successful than some other virtually identical thing is almost always remarkable.

Some other virtually identical remarkable thing will have at least one "innovation" that sets it apart. Often identified only in hind-sight.

Or it won't, and it'll just be the right time, the right place or the right connections.

surely "pretty" can be legitimately considered a core feature of a blog site

I just went to their home page https://medium.com/ these were top 6

1. let’s stop coddling white feelings

2. Women in Salt

3. I Have a Maiden Name - An exploration of surnames, beliefs and actions.

4. Warm Takes on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4

5. The UBI already exists for the 1%

6. Atheism and Honesty - My atheism will not be about making believers comfortable.

Love the destructive spirit on HN today!

He just posted a list of facts. That's only destructive if you think the facts are embarrassing to medium (which in this case I think they are - it's simply not clear what kind of community was supposed to gel around medium, if any, and it shows).

So, they've clearly stolen Tumblr's user base

That first article made me CRINGE. I hope to God it isn't real. I'm latino and I would be pissed if I saw an article on the frontpage called Let's Stop Coddling Latino Feelings.

You’re missing the point. Latinos are a minority. White people aren’t. The article is great; and the fact that you’re pissed about it shows we still have progress to do on these issues.

The article is well written, but there's some odd stuff in there, like

"Be that police officers or the descendents of those who hung us from trees with smiles on their faces, I want to limit any interaction with people who seek to harm me or my loved ones."

That's not out of context either. There seems to be some implicit definition that all white people == people who seek to harm me.

Doesn't matter who's the majority and who's the minority, it's still a racist thought process.

Nope. Racism is a domination system, so it _does_ matter who’s the majority.

That distinction might be interesting if you're defining systemic racism but otherwise racism is having preconceived notions about a group, or attributing qualities and flaws to a group, based on race. That's exactly what the author of that post is doing, lumping all whites people in a single group, ignoring their multitude of opinions and experiences.

No. The author of that post is denouncing systematic racism and as such the domination of white people over minorities. That’s why they must talk about white people as a whole.

White people are less than 10% of the world's population.

When we talk about racism and "white people" domination we usually refer to the occidental world; it doesn’t make sense in the whole World because there are too many different situation, whereas in Occident it’s pretty clear which populations are oppressed and which one isn’t. This is especially relevant on HN because readers here are mostly young white men.

I'd admit that Medium has occasionally weird stuff on its frontpage -- but doesn't every website where content is written by its community have that? Just create an account and browse for a few days to get stories tailored to you. Honestly, I'm fine with Medium as it is because it exposes me to stories I wouldn't have else read.

It has weird stuff because Medium clearly hired "editors" who are all politically extreme and/or culturally homogenous.

My medium.com home page has some technical articles that interest me, an article by some Obama press flunky, and then "We should be meaner to racists", apparently because the editors recommended it.

Did I ask for a mediocre but otherwise acceptable list of technical articles to be gunked up by college student identity politics? No? Then why do the remaining 100 medium.com staffers think this is a good idea? Is that what they're getting paid to do? Why can they not be replaced entirely by an algorithm?

I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative.

The same (silly) logic was once applied to facebook. "It's just another friendster/myspace!" people said.

Same with Slack, for that matter.

Well, it was. It bootstrapped its userbase with college students, creating an air of exclusivity and giving highschoolers something to look forward to. The profiles were clean-cut and professional, as opposed to the garishly styled HTML themes and autoplaying music on Myspace.

Once they opened up to everyone, they captured an entire generation. And once they introduced Chat, they basically killed every other IM service [1]. At this point, it was game over for everyone else.

Meanwhile, Medium is another Tumblr, or another Blogger, or another LiveJournal, but the visual design attracts thought-piece bloggers instead of personal ones. This is a self-selecting but heterogeneous group, so there's no strong network effects. How do they grow beyond this, or adapt to monetize their existing userbase? What makes them think they won't just jump to the next free blog host?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

It's not silly logic if it's true. Medium may or may not have better features / quality than alternatives. You need to actually argue why Facebook is better than Friendster or Myspace to invalidate the argument that Facebook is just like Friendster or Myspace.

Roger. I have seen no indication that facebook is anything other than Myspace with more capital.

Many can also make the argument that facebook is worse than Myspace, quite validly for a number of reasons.

Some people are talking about charge for premium content. Others are talking about WordPress and Blogger. Am I missing something, or is the text just like @ev want to go in the opposite direction?

And making money from opposing models would act as an anchor, preventing from following the direction they believe.

[i]So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.[/i]

He wants to give great rewards to people who create great content. It's not just about views, numbers of followers, or how many people shared the content. It is about how this content impacts other people's lives and how positive it could be to have your brand or signature supporting the creator.

I personally think it's kind of hard to achieve this on a big scale. It is the opposite of the most successful program on the internet. Google AdWords.

But will change a lot of concepts if he succeed

Real innovation isn't your company doing something in a new way. It's getting your customers to do something in a new way.

Medium has unambiguously, objectively succeeded by that metric. They are by far the premier blogging destination. President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium.

If you think that's easy, you should try it yourself. Maybe you'll be the next Ev.

I think Medium can strongly credit its success to Google.

Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform, and then once they became enamored with social and Google Plus they let it languish to the point where it had almost become unusable.

Medium's genius was recognizing this empty market that Google had conquered but abandoned, and created what blogger would have been had it continued to be updated for the world of gifs and emojis.

And then failed to get acquired :-). Only half joking here.

I think your analysis is spot on, Google did a great job of consolidating the world into a place you could pull off a single RSS feed and get lots of good content, and then pissed it away. And I think Medium has done an excellent job of stepping into that space.

What I find interesting is that Google hasn't done the follow on which is figure out that this team understood the blogging space well and could be a part of a "print" side of Google (much like Youtube is the "video" side of Google). Of course there is that whole Tumblr thing which did poorly under Yahoo!'s care.

Sometimes I think it is like playing Milton Bradley's "Battleship" where each effort helps map out a part of the space where there is, and is not, a possible product present.

> Google built blogger to the point where it killed every other blogging platform...

No they didn't. Wordpress powers some absurd number of all websites (25%-ish). Tumblr is still fairly popular. And Medium of course. What google did do is effectively kill off RSS readers, but that's a different story.

>No they didn't.

I'm with this guy. Blogger if anything, brutally assassinated LiveJournal. Unless you're in Russia.

"President Obama didn't post on Blogger. He posted on Medium."

Is that really "doing something in a new way"? Or is it "doing the same thing in a new place?"

You could say the same about Obama posting on Tumblr: http://barackobama.tumblr.com - except he hasn't done so in three years.

Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

You say that as though it's easy to do these things...

No, I'm not saying it's easy, just that doing something very well isn't particularly innovative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down Medium's product - it's fantastic. But the OP claimed that Medium has "unambiguously, objectively succeeded" in being innovative, and I just don't see it. I'd actually argue that Tumblr was far more innovative - there are some fascinating forms of content that came out of that place, not to mention the whole social network, reblogging effect, etc. etc.

But neither has shaped up to be a particularly successful business, and placing perceived innovation above that might not be wise when you're talking about user generated content. What happens if either of them fails?

Yeah but it's not that hard either if you have the resources. Now we see, though, that the cost of doing it has so far exceeded the return.

Easy? It's beyond easy. It's trivial.

> Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration. That's all.

That's... not an easy thing to do. Making anything to do with technology "easy" is no small feat; that Medium was able to do this with as big an incumbent player as WordPress (for example) is an even bigger feat.

hard != innovative, was OP's point.

OTOH, solving well-established hard problems sometime requires more true innovation than developing new ideas. I prefer to do both.

Well they did that by basically limiting what the user can do. The editing options were extremely limited. There was also no customisation until recently. They built a basic-function responsive blog platform. How is that hard?

It's very hard to tell people to use your software that has 1/100th of features of the incumbents but it's done better. Apple did it with iPhone for instance, but normally startups die trying.

That's because the iPhone didn't have 1/100 the features of competitors -- it had 80/100 of the features, but focused on the 80% that mattered (no "fm radio" or "mobile flash" for example).

Imho that was mostly achieved by marketing , not technical innovation (which they claim)

Also helps a lot with the amount of connections Ev Williams and co have. I would guess that having all the right connections was a huge part of Medium's success, especially really early on. With enough connections you can grow (almost) any half-decent service.

>That's... not an easy thing to do.

Offering something easy to post that's looking good across devices?

Gimme a break, they have a single basic template, and minimal authoring tools. With these constraints, there are literally tens of thousands of Wordpress, Ghost and vanilla HTML templates by various developers/designers with 1/1000 the resources of Medium that look just as good across devices.

So first of all, Wordpress.com/.org is the premier blogging destination, powering some stupid number of all websites in the world. Medium is the premier platform in the Silicon Valley Techno-Bubble.

I'm not saying what they've done is easy by any means, I'm saying that what they've done is not innovative and should be considered so just because they have a lot of users. Clearly a lot of users does not solely make a business successful, as evidenced by their layoff of 1/3 of the company today.

Also, innovation is doing something in a new way, whether by customers or product. And nothing they are doing is by any definition new.

You're reaching here with the Wordpress example (.org isn't even applicable to this discussion -- it's an open-source CMS). Wordpress.com is a hosting platform. Just because as a subset of the options you can make a blog (vs. an ecommerce site, a portfolio, a landing page, etc.) doesn't make it Medium's competitor.

Visit their homepage. Do you see a content aggregator or something closer to Squarespace?

Wordpress is 100% a competitor to Medium. Probably their biggest competitor.

Even if you want to restrict to .com, WordPress.com (VIP) competes for many of the same users which Medium has been competing for.

> I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative. It's just Blogger 2.0, in a prettier outfit.

Agreed. I feel the same way about Dropbox. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Link to exact quote that the OP is attempting to satirize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Satire doesn't work if most people believe it.

Your analogy is flawed. There were and are plenty of other "create a blog with a few clicks that you don't have to host" services.

There were - perhaps it's than just that. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13322075

Namely "Medium makes it really easy to post something that looks good across devices etc., and has good sharing integration"

Woosh! He's making a satire comment about when Dropbox was first introduced to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

thus implying that the parent post made the same mistake when judging Medium, which nawitus (IMHO rightfully) thinks is a flawed comparison. No "Whoosh".

Fair enough.

Well, maybe there's nothing wrong with being the best or the most popular one of them? What do people expect Medium to do, cure cancer?

It's a blogging platform. A good one. Someone wanted to make it, and he built it, and now it's successful.

Maybe it didn't revolutionize the way we make toasts, but it's a solid incremental improvement over the alternatives. So was facebook, so was iphone, so were most of the other things people have made.

With statements such as "To build a platform that defined a new model for media on the internet." it is not completely unreasonable to expect bit more than more of the same

> You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

...are you serious? Yes, I could do all of those things, then I'd have a terrible Dropbox-like clone that only I can use. And I'd be responsible for running it.

Human society is literally built on the idea of us not needing to do things that we could do for ourselves. Most of the things you can do "for free", or even "for cheap", are only on that value spectrum if your time is worthless.

It's a reference to a HN comment saying that when Dropbox was first presented on HN.

Ahh, gotcha. That's what I get for not stopping by very often...

I can't tell, but I feel like you're being sarcastic.

But medium has tasteful whitespace!

Slow clap!

I can tell you weren't part of the Medium community, otherwise you would come up with better arguments and not such a simplified reality.

On the consumption side all blog engines seem about the same. On the production side they've added a few nice things that a static blog engine doesn't have - collaborative feedback on a draft before publishing, paragraph-by-paragraph statistics on "read ratio", time spent with an article, etc. https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-use-medium

When you compare Medium to Wordpress (which you mentioned in another comment and which is extremely popular) you can see the value that Medium provides; the reading and curation experience is better and the addition of "# of readers" vs "# of views" is also a great metric. Another win is how easy it is to assemble articles into magazines. Because it's all on one platform, it's really easy to do.

Those are all valuable features that give it an edge over Blogger and Wordpress and other platforms.

You can also see the difference in quality of comments/discussion on wordpress vs medium. On medium, people are highlighting and sharing and discussing. On wordpress, they aren't doing that often (at least not on my blogs).

Just to call it out: innovation is a tactic, not a goal.

I'm pretty sure the goal of people at Medium is to create value and it's not obvious to me how much innovation is required.

For 15 years or more the world has demonstrated a huge appetite for personal publishing: Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr.

And in this moment, a lot of those options have not aged well. They haven't stayed particularly current and a lot of them seem institutionally incapable of modernizing.

So, Medium can provide an enormous value just by being the same thing we already know works but done in a modern way.

Read the 'Vuja De' section of Andrew Chen's 10 yr blog post.

Did you read the post? Ev is essentially agreeing with you and stating that this was not the goal of Medium, therefore they are reducing staff in areas that are not leading them to reach the goal.

As I read it, Ev is aiming medium to be a TedTalks of the blogging world. Somewhere you go to find deep/compelling/interesting content, not just your average blog platform.

Exactly. The people that think Medium is innovative are the same people that think Farm From the Box (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610) is innovative. Some people just live in their pretty bubbles.

The primary innovations of medium was mixing together:

1) Easy publishing with high quality layout (your prettier outfit comment)

2) Easy collaborative publishing.

3) Extremely easy inline editing.

4) Contextual comments

It's really just digital publishing done right.

To look at a business model that works I believe much more in the Khan Academy, BrainPicking and WikiPedia models.

1) Innovation is not necessarily a primary goal in itself (at least, not if you're a business).

2) What you're struggling with is the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges [1]. Purely solving technical problems (what you call, "innovation"), will not get you anywhere if you don't pay attention to adaptive challenges. You might simply just be deluding yourself to work hard on "hard problems" that don't really matter for the course of your company and your success.

[1] I actually wrote a blog post exactly about this common misconception on Medium just this week: https://medium.com/@melvinmt/so-you-want-to-work-hard-and-ch...

Excellent comment & article, but when innovation is your primary unfair advantage, effort needs to be focused on where it can be applied as desired rather than wasted. In this case there may never be a need to refrain from maximum innovation. There is always some waste regardless of the type of resources. And I personally have been a business, single-handedly making a living off my own innovations.

I would like to reply to your article, but there is still a sign-in wall on Medium. Maybe that's why there are no other replies yet either. I'm surprised it was even readable on my main rig, where Medium failed completely to provide text for quite some time after they launched, so I gave up a long time ago until now. I'm just a user, not a developer (of software), and I'm not in California so I usually find the most buzz about these type of companies after they are shrinking rather than growing. For me to even be aware of Medium at launch was solely a function of HN. I would have been more impressed if it would have had a user (reader) experience as satisfying (advanced?) as you used to enjoy with well-done HTML from the '90's, but time marches on, and lowered standards are the direction of movement.

Everything I ever had was a result of doing without, rather than prosperity, but sacrifice is not necessarily a factor, especially when you are not actually seeking a reward. Frustration & upset are also very common when there is not any sacrifice at all, and after numerous rewards have been received.

I disagree with your logic. Small, technically trivial but conceptually polished tweaks can add up to a difference that takes over the market. For example, everybody used to clean their hair with soap, then somebody decided to sell it in liquid form with pretty scents, and now you always buy "shampoo".

Medium can have the same key ingredients as Blogger and still replace it.

That's not true, bar soap gets stuck in hair and doesn't rinse well. Look at the ingredients in soap vs shampoo.

I have. Formulas for both have of course changed over the years, but the way in which they work has not.

Both have also become more tailored for their use case. For example, shampoos sell better if they create a pleasant lather, and soaps if they also moisturize your skin. Those additives are why a modern bar of soap might not work well in your hair. But pure soap does, and so do some modern soap bars.

The "networked" part is pretty important. Medium makes it easy to post and makes your posts look nice, but it also helps build an audience. If you manage to make it on the leaderboard it can have a pretty massive impact on traffic. Look at this list of publications and their follower counts (https://toppub.xyz/). Now the numbers aren't very impressive from the POV of the NYT or even something like Daring Fireball, but there are some good editors who have amassed impressive followings in short order. I'm not convinced that Medium will live up to it's valuation, but saying it's just Blogger 2.0 is like saying Twitter is just a 140 character Blogger.

A CRUD app that limits me to 140 characters. Outside of celebrities and SV dorks who even cares right? Nice innovation morons. Then you realized you got more than 50% of your news from Twitter.

Can I ask how many long form publications you've read lately on Medium? For me it's a lot. To be so dismissive of a product that's quietly made its way pretty deeply into your life is strange.

140 char limit is innovation.

Yes, and after all that investment and engineering you can't edit text on mobile? Wth?

They wasted a lot of dev time reinventing the wheel with not enough time left over for essentials.

> I just don't get why people consider Medium to be so remarkable or innovative.

Medium managed to make normal the act of downloading around 1,500 KiB of javascript and 500 KiB of CSS in order to simply read a text blogpost.

Unfortunately, this is the reason for so many users that websites like this will never actually be worthwhile regardless of how "normal" or unavoidable they become.

A really popular dude, if he is persuasive, can sometimes be the most likely type of salesman to bring in the most money, especially selling to those whom he is most popular with.

It seems to be quite common where capital markets are guided by popularity or capitalist connections, that the lowest hanging fruit & largest source of money for many persuasive operators are those particular capitalists themselves rather than potential customers or profitable operations.

Ads are a serious problem, and they're failing. However, the standard alternative (people paying directly) has serious problems of its own. Basically people pay for what they want to hear. Woodward and Bernstein wouldn't have survived that model.

I hope that trying a non-ad based model will be successful for them. It would be a huge breakthrough if it happens.

Switching away from ads from a moral standpoint as presented in the article is a harder sell when the content publishing industry as a whole is having issues making money off of it.

Ad driven media has been crumbling for decades. It's good that Medium is seeing the light.

Even a startup gets blinded by the fake money that ads promise. I would hope that this move starts something in the media industry to stop thinking about ads as a revenue source.

As a creator of a publication that got invited to join the beta test of their new monetization strategy, I am very happy about their decision to pivot away from ads.

I was very disappointed when they have introduced the ads, it never made sense to me, it flies in the face of their main value prop - clean, elegant, beautiful, distraction-free blogging platform.

On the other hand, they are in a great position to create a content monetization system, where people are paying for the content they enjoy. So far, most of such systems have failed, but I think that Medium is one of the few companies that can actually make it work. I'm really looking forward to what they will do with this during the next few months.

Interestingly, all products tied to Twitter are struggling (twitter, medium, vine, periscoope etc.)

And all products tied to Facebook are thriving (fb, instagram, whatsapp, messenger)i

I don't think Medium understood the online media economy when it began, and I don't think they understand it now. With the advent of the Internet, content creators like newspapers and television networks saw the barriers to competition slip away. They were confronted simultaneously with burgeoning supply (which pushes prices for that supply down the curve) as well as more rigorous methods to track how people respond to advertising. One reason why online ads cost less than those in the print edition of newspapers is because they can be tracked, and the results show that people don't respond that much to them. The argument for pricing print ads higher is that print editions have actual subscribers, and therefore disposable income. That subscription model was the basis of a golden age of news for decades, because publishers could be assured of their income, and disengage their reporters from the battle for clicks. They were free to pursue the most newsworthy news. It was a kind of ivory tower. Now that tower is crumbling, faster every year, even if Trump's election caused an uptick in subscriptions in the digital editions of some newspapers. Online subscribers will always be a tiny minority of all readers (I subscribe to some publications, but I understand why many don't), because of the river of free content. In an age of disintermediation, content has gone in the opposite direction, handing more and more money over to middlemen like the ad networks and search engines and social networks, while content creators get less and less of every dollar. They are, in a sense, like farmers, who raise our food from the earth but receive very little compared to the distributors. Laying off 50 people and changing one's business model won't change that dynamic one bit.

I applaud Medium for renewing their focus on achieving what seems to be the holy grail for virtually all content producers, but especially writers: getting people to pay directly for content. Netflix and the like seem to have it figured out for video, but somehow it is a much harder nut to crack for text.

I agree that it would be better, both for producers and consumers, to find a different model, so I hope they can figure it out!

> However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content.

You can't make people buy something they don't want.

Could this be any more vague and Silicon Valley baloney-ish?

> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day. > It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like.

I like the general message - acknowledging that the ad model is broken, not being a jerk to the (many) people they are laying off. I am, however, uninspired that nothing was actually said about how or what their new model will be. I can see NOT putting that in the "we just laid off a bunch of people" message, but that's when you mention that you'll be going into more detail next week, or at such-and-such conference, or ANYTHING to indicate this isn't a sign that the company is doomed and this is just the first step.

Yes! This is what I was looking for from Medium when I heard of their ad driven plans:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13089574

Ad driven content basically is a sham. It's a way to let companies do whatever they want with people's minds.

Semi on topic: how does this "top highlight" work? I select sentences and paragraphs while reading as a marker - but it's unrelated to the content, it's to track where I am. Do other people only select text they find important or so?

If you select a chunk of text, a tooltip pops up and one of the options there, is some kind of icon that vaguely looks like a highlighter and has the CSS class 'svgIcon--highlighter'. I assume clicking that registers as a highlight?

This post explains it. It's related to Medium's "Highlight" feature, not the ordinary text selection:

https://blog.medium.com/introducing-highlights-a4df69e8ed43

> but it's unrelated to the content, it's to track where I am

If you're reading a lot of stuff on Medium, you stop this behavior after a while, because the tooltip is too annoying. But generally speaking: No, you're not alone with this.

Maybe it's not focus but quality of content.

When I see that a story is from medium I don't bother with it. History has taught me that once in a while something there might be of value but mostly it's very light reading and not worth the time to explore.

Plus a whole lot of "first world's problems" and "white person's activism".

My hunch is they're going to go to a subscription/patreon model.

IMO, Medium (like Twitter/Blogger) is about self-expression, not publishing. Medium should optimize more for fostering self-expression and community discussion and decouple from Twitter.

Perceived consumer demand to fix publishing is overstated and solves the wrong nonproblem. Consumers arguably like fake news and click-bait, deriving self-reinforcement and entertainment value.

I wonder if hiring content marketers to write in verticals with high paying affiliate programs could get them profitable without compromising their social mission.

tldr; they aren't making enough money and don't have an idea on how to change that. They are laying people off who worked on the old failed model and are winding down to maintenance mode until when/if they can figure out a new model that no one else has been able to figure out.

> We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this problem.

I don't know what model they can come up with except the Ad-revenue model from per post views. This is not a tech issue, but an issue with the business of Internet.

Since they have got a lot of good quality publishers, they may go for a subscription model, but then it would not seem very open to new publishers/readers. They may go for a per-blog subscription model for some high-quality publishers like The Economist, Backchannel etc.

Another thing about Medium that gets me boiling is their news feed, its always populated by very popular bloggers and I have to literally scroll a mile to get any post from a new or a small blogger with less than 10K followers on twitter. So it becomes about Popularity rather than Quality(Starbucks articles about Christmas gifts is not as good as my CS Professor's ramblings). So to get those posts I would have to unfollow other popular bloggers. There is nothing like Facebook's "See it First" approach. Only reason I use Facebook these days is for its "See it First Feature" which lets me control my news feed really well.

This really looks like failing CEO's post from here. But they have got so much content from good posters like Addy Osmani, Kevin Rose etc, that it would be hard to see it go. I don't know why many posters on Medium gave up their own managed blogs. I know it makes posts look pretty, but so does Wordpress (which even gives a lot of customization options).

I love to read on Medium but it nly works for me when I NEVER recommend, reply or even read anything that's not outside my focused interest, which is programming topics.

Their algorithm is bad , way too sensible. I read a single opiniated post about politics or what have you and the next day my mostly Javascript / Front End feed is flooded with angry women talking about feminism, or people talking about Trump, or that idiot "SF Ali" writing pointless drivel.

They really need to add a way to make magazines of sorts, to be able to have different feeds. The notion of mixing together all kind of interests doesn't make sense. WHen I want to read about web development, I don't want to read about Trump. And vice versa.

I think the design of Medium gave it a certain "chic" but I quickly began to realize it's just another blogging platform and there are a LOT of badly written articles on there.

I wish there was something like Medium focused on creating ediucative content, where banter and personal opinions are frowned upon. So I can go to a feed, and just LEARN things. I don't know if it's even possible to do that though.

It would be interesting to see if Medium pivots into a model similar to Spotify or similar streaming music services that charge a subscription and work out some sort of revenue split with writers/publications. However, they would still need ads to supplement free users. Should be interesting...

Some people who publish on Medium (me included) have a commercial arm which is trying to gain recognition from publishing.

Better known examples would be 37Signals and Buffer.

Increasing sales via the commercial arm is the aim and so being rewarded for publishing is not completely necessary. In fact I would consider paying for more premium features. Such as ability to restrict read next to particular publications or even pay for greater reach in other publishers "read next" areas which could then compensate them.

I also use Medium to publish personally with no real need for financial reward. I use Medium because it is easy and I don't get distracted playing with navigation or sidebar or thinking "I could stick Adsense on this and earn $2.00 a month".

I hope they try micropayments for content. Paying authors 1 cent per read, taken from the readers account, for example.

I've been waiting for someone to do a really good job of that, since the good 'ol days of Gopher.

These guys have a big enough audience to make a genuine attempt at it.

That was a very meandering, unfocused article about renewing focus. Granted, the important news about cutting 50 jobs is in the first paragraph, but the rest just seems like an attempt to distract from that fact without saying anything substantive.

They may try a central Medium subscription setup that trickles funds to authors based on some criteria, or maybe medium as a subscription manager for authors. Google played with this approach. Does anyone know if they've had success?

Does anyone have any insight into what happened to Svbtle (svbtle.com)? In its heyday it seemed to have a ton of momentum / buzz, albeit on a smaller scale than Medium does today.

Still around.

The tldr story seems to be: Be a better version of Patreon somehow.

Calling it now.

Medium.com pivots to become marketplace where you can either publish for free on their platform or put your writing in an auction for other publications to buy it.

Journalist/writers/whatever all write in a single location and get published to multiple publications. The new model.

===

Shameless plug: Consider writing a guest post on scotch.io. Great exposure, help others, and get paid https://scotch.io/write-for-us

What about the twitch model? Writers rely on donations and subscriptions.

Wait, they had 150 employees? Wow...

Unfortunately this is a bit of a flawed blog post on Medium's behalf. The facts are that 50 people were fired due to burn rate and lack of revenue.

The second fact is that "NO" fact is given to how this will be rectified in the future.

The third issue is an opinion. That people need to be paid for the content they produce. This isn't true. There are plenty of people that are happy to contribute purely for the common good or for fame. Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do it anyway.

Lastly, if you do provide a platform people can monetize their following, just like Instagram and Snapchat celebrities can monetize their following on their own with Instagram or Snapchat providing them a direct tool for that.

No blogging platform outside of Wordpress has succeeded to monetize and self-sustain and it is the exception that proves the rule.

Basically that the content generated on blogs is too long form with a disjoint following and not enough focus on entertainment which is the primary driver of ad revenue to survive.

It's the same issue that is facing the news today, they either pander to the lowest common denominator or they aren't compensated enough to sustain themselves. That or they just have too much overhead.

Overall the reality is that many people lost their jobs and the response is just a bit of fluff, when the reality is we screwed up our business model and had to make cuts would have been much more honest.

Instead they are trying to revolutionize something? It just sounds empty.

It's interesting because I think that the means of distribution of information is getting revolutionized, and it's needed (e.g. wikipedia, youtube).

However, medium saying "Well, we're pivoting away from click-baity profit-mongering to solving society's problems because we always cared, and it's just a coincidence we were losing money" is hard to swallow.

I'm still willing to give them the benefit of a doubt and would like to read more press releases by media outlets searching for alternatives to ads/tracking – preferably without the firing part.

Full agreement. Minor quibble:

> Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do it anyway.

I've read that Linus has a personal fortune of at least $40 million. (He presumably commands an hourly consulting rate in the high five or even six figures).

So yeah, he's no Gates/Jobs, but he's doing pretty well for himself. And Linux would never have been viable as a commercial product. (It would just be some Finnish dude's buggy/incomplete Solaris clone).

IMO a better example in tech of a founder making a financial sacrifice for the common good is Jimmy Wales. If Wikipedia had been a for-profit/ad-supported site, he'd be a billionaire now.

And both are outliers. There are very few hugely successful projects, but billions of blog posts.

$40MM is definitely nothing to scoff at but if you consider the overall enterprise value of linux out there in the wild, then it's definitely less than even 1% of the value that was created.

So on absolute basis compared to a regular salary it's great, but relatively to the value created, it's no where near the value that he brought to the world.

But no value would've been created if Linux hadn't been open-source.

> The third issue is an opinion. That people need to be paid for the content they produce. This isn't true. There are plenty of people that are happy to contribute purely for the common good or for fame.

It is true that some people will produce art without compensation. That's one of the really cool things about human nature. Given the freedom to do so, we just seem to love making and sharing stuff.

However, there is a scary downside. The culture of a people is defined and propagated in part by the content and art they produce. If that content is only produced by the people who have the financial freedom to do so for free, then you miss out on the voices of the people who can't afford that.

I don't think that's healthy for a community.

Depends on how you view financial freedom. The reality is that financial freedom is anyone who has free time. That means you aren't spending 100% of your existence to sustain yourself.

Once you have free time you have the ability to create art.

Certainly well over the majority of today's population in any 1st world country has free time and thus the ability to create art.

>> "There are plenty of people that are happy to contribute purely for the common good or for fame."

This is true, there is so much content available now. But 90% of it is shit (Medium is a great example of this). The other stuff is good but I don't see as much stuff on the level of the great music, art, writing etc. of the past. For this it seems compensation is necessary as it requires long focus/dedication to produce.

TLDR:

Not meeting profitability targets.

Starting to run out of money.

Selling ads isn't making enough.

Fired a bunch of people.

VC's want us to get back to hyper growth, whatever that means.

Hoping for the best.

“The current system causes increasing amounts of misinformation…and pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, originality, or quality be damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for producers and consumers alike...We need a new model.”

This statement sums up today's social media state.

> We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.

Does that mean they are going to start paying people blogging? "Rewards" is a bit unclear.

To those speculating as to the new monitization model: NLP. Improvements in NLP will open new opportunities for data mining behavioral trends. A company like Medium is very well positioned to benefit from this coming trend.

Medium's customer isn't readers nor advertisers. It's publishers - they're a B2B business and should syndicate content to publications around the world.

"blog.medium.com" - Why does Medium have a blog?

It would be interesting to know what Medium's main expense is? Is it the people? The infra?

Also would be very curious to know how much do they earn for advertising.

people's salaries is by far the biggest expense for most software startups.

Here's a medium alternative built by one guy: www.allthink.com.

Medium.com and their propaganda can all go to hell.

This site was doomed from the moment they started taking money from politicians.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com