Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media | Hacker News Reader

Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media

bloomberg.com

26 pointswalterbell10 comments

Outside of the writing, I kind of don't like the design of Medium. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it looks light but feels heavy (as a reader). I also don't like that every post pretty much looks the same, with the exception of the header image; with other blogging services you could style it at least a little (for example, it's generally obvious when a blog is on blogspot, but there are times when I didn't know until I searched and noticed the URL. Tumblr is very customizable too.) I even prefer Livejournal's interface as a reader to Medium's.

As others have pointed out too, it didn't seem to get past the 'hipster SV writer, dad, astronaut, all around awesome sauce' style writing and showboating aspect. You can do that on other platforms too (add the tag line and write the typical 'Medium way') but it feels like on Medium it's really uncommon to see a post from someone who doesn't add too much to the tag line.

Medium would have to get over this mentality and make it more appealing for regular writers, not just appeal with the interface, if it were to become bigger.

> No business model that involves selling content can get around a fundamental fact: Content can only be consistently good if its creators can make a living from it.

Not really. And this is probably why the 'professional' media is having so much trouble.

Because there are lots of people out there who are willing to provide high quality for free on a regular basis, and it makes people hesitant to spend money on the same from those trying to sell it.

All that high quality content being available for free is exactly why written content has so little value any more and why platforms can't monetise it. Because there will always be people willing to provide their work for less money than you.

The problem is collecting all this quality writing in an easy-to-consume and easy-to-access fashion. Of course we all know 10+ bloggers who we read and who offer great perspective, quality writing etc. The idea is to consolidate this content in one place which makes it easier to access and also to find new good-quality stuff.

the keyword is "consistently"

That's just a problem of finding the good stuff, we have many tools for that(search, recommendations, curation, etc) and i think it's the place we could improve - for example if Google(or someone else) had an option to filter for in-depth, quality content - that wold be very useful.

You gotta wonder about the whole vision speech. It would have been a better service to the world to explain where exactly did the idea get stuck: not enough volume, wasn't the platform big enough, is it a technology issue (ad management, the cms), was is the corrupt budget managers of various brands ... idk.

This whole bla bla "our vision is to be the saint content liberators" is a both funny and completely useless. It is not to say that Ev has no inner drive or that Medium is a company that doesn't stick to their mission or vision, but it is just that they communicate:

- hey we tried to do better - they didn't let us - we're leaving

WTF :)

I liked how this article described about monetization approaches and compared with other options (like Blendle). Any kind of content - be it writing or TV shows or movies - will remain tough to sell individually because nobody wants to spend their entire pay check on all these. Only some kind of aggregation and advertising (consumer money flowing back to producing content without the consumers realizing it or directly paying for it) have proven to work somewhat well.

I'd be interested in ad-free and ad-tracking-free options that provide more of a buffet kind of system than an à la carte option (the latter is what Blendle is trying with micropayments that don't actually look micro enough). But scaling this with millions or billions of customers to reduce base costs is not easy, especially for written content, compared to TV shows or movies (like what Netflix, Amazon and others are doing).

The article says the problem with Blendie is you have to make a decision for every article. What if the default was you paid a micropayment on an article if you just had it open for more than, say, 30 seconds, and in the relatively rare cases where you didn't want to pay you could hit a button to stop it. I think that would eliminate maybe 90% of the decisions and make it a lot more attractive.

On Medium as a platform, somehow, to me it always seemed like a place for pompous people to write long articles ("Hey, look! I'm published on Medium!"). But like the rest of the web, there were many time wasters among the few gems.

I did like the typography and readability initially (and still do), but some of its design decisions, like blurred images coming into focus on scrolling, almost seizure inducing flashing GIFs and others really annoyed me a lot and put me off from visiting Medium links.

Lastly, it also bothered me that it could become one more large scale platform like Blogger or WordPress, concentrating content into one platform (many people wrote directly on and for medium.com, while a few used it with custom domains).

Random cool thing:

They control a .gov (kinda)

greatagain.gov

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