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It might be telling that no competition has really emerged as it's not clear to me what it was that Medium offered to make it obvious/popular at all?

Edit: Substack is an idea but seems to be the Patreon of writing.

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That is what I thought as well, I also have no idea why Medium is so popular still aside from the initial hype of being "a good experience" for writing.

I haven't used it, but I think the appeal was that by posting to a place with a pre-existing audience, you could catch traffic from an initial audience that you otherwise would not have.

I think Medium was the alternative to posting to Facebook, LinkedIn and Wordpress.com. In that sense, it doesn't need a killer, as it's the one dying under its attempts to kill.

Is it dying? I genuinely don't know.

The frequent re-positioning might suggest a lack of footing.

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