Medium Editorial Team Update | Hacker News Reader

Medium Editorial Team Update

ev.medium.com

45 pointsminimaxir51 comments

Notable context: the Editorial Team recently failed to unionize.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp7y3/medium-tells-journali...

> A current Medium employee said they believe that the move was retaliation for unionizing: “Editorial was the department that supported the union most vocally and visibly ... this is coming basically a month after a failed union drive preceded by pretty blatant union busting tactics by management.”

Important (IMO) to note: All employees attempted to unionize, not just editorial.

This quote from earlier in the article:

> The move comes less than one month after all Medium employees—including the editorial unit—attempted to unionize and lost by one vote. Employees at the company say that journalists who work at Medium’s nine publications were not the initial driving force behind the union, but were some of the most vocal supporters of it. The news media industry (including VICE) is highly unionized; the tech industry is not.

The fact that the news media industry is heavily unionized seems indicative of a bias in itself. It means the members are more likely to take labor centric stances and be against free market stances - in other words, left leaning. Unions also often force institutional political stances on members (see NEA and teachers for example) - it’s an avenue by which a neutral institution can become ideologically compromised.

This is exactly what was reflected in the editorial work of Medium, such as their first party magazines. It turned off readers greatly, and the comments in this very post even call it out.

Unionization is not at odds with free market, as long as it’s not mandated by regulation.

Germany and Japan both have unions, yet free markets in both places are doing just fine.

I find it funny how you're contrasting labor centric and free market.

What is the market based on, if not labor? Why do you consider that caring for that labor is anti-"free market"? I guess a purist might think that even a minimum wage is anti-"free market", but I'd argue that such purists are living in an alternate reality and that argument is wrong.

This is probably demonstrating my ignorance, but what does it mean to 'fail to unionize'? Does it mean that they were trying to create a new union but not enough people joined?

Typically in Australia people join unions related to their award (broadly correlating with industry) rather than a specific employer, so it's not something I'm familiar with.

> The move comes less than one month after all Medium employees—including the editorial unit—attempted to unionize and lost by one vote.

The employees voted against having a union.

Ok so this is a union specific to Medium. What I'm not understanding is can't you have a union anyway? Why does it need to be a majority/some threshold?

In the US, a union must represent a majority of the workers identified as potential members of the collective bargaining unit in order to gain that negotiating status under Federal and State laws. Once recognized through a vote or collection of cards representing a majority, the union can negotiate a contract and labor agreement representing all employees (I’m fuzzy on whether recent judicial decisions have weakened this to just formal union members).

A union that is lacking in majority has little bargaining power?

Even 30% of your employees have significant bargaining power - losing them all at once could be devastating to any entity.

Probably because unions are rather useless in most parts. They take a cut from your salary to do basically nothing at all. You don't need an union to make yourself heard, just gather your colleagues and protest.

I'm pre-conditioned to believe this, but I think I'd need to understand how generous in the US employment context the VSP is to refine my views further.

There's enough hook to hang this on. But, the overt language does go to a pivot. Of course, in the event a lot of people took the VSP, subsequently there might be re-hiring. It would be stupid for them to hire "editors", if they did hire people. Presumably, on some new terms and conditions.

> Medium was both open and high quality

I've rarely identified Medium articles as high quality. If I saw it was a Medium post I usually assumed it was low-quality and was surprised on the occasion that it was high quality.

I’ve rarely identified them as open since they frequently try to make me log in just to view content.

There's about a 50% chance I won't even click a link when I see it's to medium.com.

This reads to me like an admission that Substack is succeeding at Medium's original goal much better than Medium ever did and that they need to make changes to try to keep up.

100% agree. It's buried so far down the story too. I didn't keep pace with all of the editorial activity Medium had undertaken, but the sentence "We tried to replicate the traditional model" really spells out everything you need to know.

Big validation for Substack and the author investment model.

Until a few months from now when Substack is also filled with lowest common denominator content. Then it’s a race to the bottom.

Data point: I've never browsed Substack for content. I have no idea what may or may not be on the platform, and I don't really care. The quality of the median post - or author - could decline any amount, and I wouldn't even realise.

I've subscribed to multiple Substack newsletters because content creators I already liked moved or launched new projects on Substack.

Obviously everyone is different, but my impression is that Medium was trying to sell the "Medium brand", and struggled because a lot of people didn't find the "Medium brand" worth $5/month. Conversely, Substack is a platform for people to sell their own brands, and a lot of people find those brands to be worth $5 (or $8, or even $10 in some cases) per month.

Will people now subscribed to slowboring.com suddenly stop in significant numbers because there's another blog/newsletter built on the same platform somewhere which is really low quality? How would they learn this, and having done so, why would they care? In another comment, you say:

> [LCD blogspam] will devalue anything published solely on Substack

I don't value anything now because it's published on Substack. How can you devalue zero? :)

I don’t use Substack, but what you say matches my understanding of the service. Substack isn’t a brand consumers look for or trust, it’s a brand authors look for and trust. If you are an author, it is a platform which you can build your brand atop. Substack is the platform where you can monetize that readership.

The incentives are different. Medium has it so that everybody pulls from the same pot of money; blogspam pays. Substack, everybody is running their own newsletter. If you want to make money, you need repeat customers. Blogspam doesn't pay.

One person’s treasure is another person’s blog-spam. Substack will fall victim to this too regardless of how writers are paid. Eventually LCD blog-spammers will want a piece of the pie and will “scramble”, as they say in blog-speak, popular posts/information to generate a post of their own. This will devalue anything published solely on Substack and create a similar Medium/Google search effect when a user is seeking info. At some point the game isn’t about generating an image that you pay writers but proving your platform can support ANY writer.

That's the thing about Substack. The stuff that's monetized isn't even on Google. There is no incentive to do SEO for monetizing Substack.

So? I subscribe to individual authors who happen to be on Substack, not to Substack or all newsletters on its platform in general.

So it goes.

I don't know anyone who goes to the substack.com homepage to surf for new content. I subscribe to authors I already follow via Twitter, or through other writers the people I sub to recommend.

So I'm not sure how substack being full of low-quality SEO content hurts me.

How are you defining success? Is Substack actually profitable, or do its VC-financed authors just receive more clicks than Medium’s?

Reading between the lines, Medium tried a model where they hired authors, paid them to create content, and sold subscriptions to this content, and it was very unprofitable. Worse, it was unprofitable in a difficult to fix way, because it's unclear which authors you can let go with a minimal impact on subscriptions. (And firing people from a paid team of writers is always going to have significant costs in terms of moral, productivity, etc.)

Substack seems to be trying a model where they will, in some cases, guarantee an author will receive a minimum amount of subscriptions for the first year, in exchange for a hefty cut of subscription revenue. I don't think we have information on how the program is doing on net, but in at least some high profile cases they've turned a profit on it. Also, even if the program is significantly loss making, it should be easy enough to shift to profitability; just scale down offering new contracts to people without large existing readerships.

The model is not enormously different at the twenty thousand feet level, but I think it has the potential to play out quite differently in practice nonetheless.

> Also, even if the program is significantly loss making, it should be easy enough to shift to profitability; just scale down offering new contracts to people without large existing readerships.

Yeah Substack's server costs are probably fairly low, so they could also probably lay off some engineers and coast for a while before a competitor gobbled up the market.

I never understood why Medium tried to be the Netflix for words. To me it always made more sense for them to follow Vimeo's model (disclaimer – I work for Vimeo): create tools that paying customers use to help them showcase their work, tools that let them customise how it appears, and tools that let them monetise that content.

I can’t even remember what Medium’s original goal was, but from what I remember it was pretty much a blogging platform. In some ways it sounds like they’re going back to that.

Completely agree. Substack..at least what it is so far is what Medium failed to do. And Substack isn't even that big yet.

Does anyone know who reads content on Medium regularly? Or are there people/orgs you think of as credible publishing on the platform?

They've always been the TEDx of blogs in my mind: well-marketed, but of variable and unremarkable quality. I wonder if I'm missing something.

Medium has a very strong SEO long-tail (case in point, Towards Data Science, which is hosted on Medium, dominates the Google search results for anything related to data science despite the variable quality of the articles).

I haven't seen any recent articles on Medium go viral on Twitter/HN in a surprisingly long time.

I end up on Medium from searches or from posts to the HN home page. Either to medium.com or to some domain hosted there. In the latter case I realize it's Medium because of the 5+ seconds when the browser stops at a blank page, probably because it's loading some huge JS file instead of just the text content I'm there to read. To say that I don't appreciate that design is a big understatement.

I regularly read Medium stories linked from the front page of HN, but I don’t think they’re generally Medium original content, which I think is the point of this editorial change.

Nope. I don’t follow anyone. Mostly end up there reading links posted to HN.

They were what came before Substack.

The only one I read regularly is the Netflix Engineering blog.

Pretty sure everyone saw this coming and we should expect the same from substack and all the others.

[1]https://medium.com/@doctor_island/medium-isn-t-building-comm...

So let me get this straight:

Medium pushed all their 3rd party community publishers off the platform, in many cases destroying said communities. Even ended 3rd party domain support.

Went on a censorship spree, hired 80 people to create their own publications, started pushing mainstream media narratives, and stopped driving traffic to individual users to drive traffic to their publications.

Those publications then failed to grow without Medium driving their traffic, so the 80 paid writers tried to unionize, which Medium busted, so now Ev is basically publicly daring his staff to quit by making it sound like it is a fair and reasonable pivot for Medium (when it clearly isn't)?

Did I miss anything?

Why should anyone trust Medium at this point?

They've pivoted so many times, and every time they do they screw their users over, and now even their own paid staff.

I agree with all of this except the statement that Medium busted the union. There really was no need. The union organizers did a very good job of harassing, intimidating, and alienating many of the union-eligible employees. Several people were very turned off by this and as a result the union couldn't secure enough votes.

Source: Medium employee

If this is true, then it should've been a top-level comment or you should write about it publicly.

It is true - however, why would I put myself in such a bad position with a number of my coworkers by writing about it publicly? I still have to work with them. There is a reason this is a throwaway account.

Yeah, I understand. That came off a bit lecturing; I should've said "I wish you would".

That seems broadly accurate, yes. If anything, you're leaving out a few pivots, mistakes, and embarrassing backtracks. This article from 2019 is a bit out of date (https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-e...) but has a lot of details.

What's happened since fits seamlessly into the pattern.

I’m surprised journalists would tempt management with unionization, as the industry is on life support, and backing management into a corner on behalf of labor concerns seems like a fast way to push the business off the cliff. The only thing I disagree with is union strikes, because that hurts everyone, those in the union, and those out. Perhaps unions would get a more favorable reception from businesses if they take the ability to destroy the company off the table.

Somehow, trying to find specific graphql/apollo solutions I run into 3 blocked medium articles before I can find something open. A little niche of course, but not something that should be served up by google... I suspect (and hope) their very nice SEO of the last years will finally go the way of the experts exchange of old, and re-promote small bloggers who are excited to share what they have learned.

I don’t understand how they thought publishing could work out for them, economically. Every other similar publication has a two-pronged approach to monetising — advertising and subscription revenue — and AFAIK they didn’t have any advertising.

You give an editorial team a chance to leave if you want them to take a different stance and you think not all of them will be onboard.

The following is probably just glib speculation and (trigger warning) I apologize for the mortal harm, and deep and long offense it will cause to our delicate and venerable brothers and sisters who have awakened their righteous moral zeal for a bit of the old fashioned ultraviolence (I mean mob executions) in the woke movement but could this be related to the confluence of:

- Rise of Substack and "unedited/uncensored" writers having a diversity of opinions, readership and success without having to toe any ideological line dictated by the venerable offices of the ministries of politically correct truth (our beloved overlords)?

- Impending decline or unprofitability of cancel culture and Medium's nascent wish to adopt a wider net for writers of all perspectives to try to capture some of the value Substack is surfacing, while acknowledging their existing editorial team is probably too ideologically inflexible and overly fixated on the woke tropes of hunting witches, mob-executions of resistance sympathizers and exiling heretics to be able to benefit from these trends?

- The impossibility of a leader of the Silicon Valley set couching anything in such counter-revolutionary terms, so it needs to be infused with anodyne positivity in order to pre-emptively counter any woke-police criticisms and fly under the counter-woke-dar of our venerable overlords?

- Missive sent from output 9, with greatest respect to our eternally and most woke overlords, may they bless us

I’m a long time paid user of Medium, but ever since they went on a censorship spree during COVID, wiping out amateur analyses and discussions, I have a bad taste in my mouth about supporting them. They have shown that they will abuse their platform position to enact their own censorship, leading to dominant manufactured narratives. If they’re going to behave just like every other existing news or social media channel, I’m not sure why I need Medium. More recently I’ve seen Medium begin their own online “magazines” which carry the same biases, except it seems more officially blessed.

Here’s the WSJ son controlling the virus narrative, specially about Medium: https://www.wsj.com/articles/controlling-the-virus-narrative...

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