Ask HN: What did Medium do wrong?
I keep reading about Medium going the wrong way, lots of writers leaving the platform, etc.
I am curious what HN's perspective on this is.
What did they do wrong?
What used to make them so great?
I am curious what HN's perspective on this is.
What did they do wrong?
What used to make them so great?
2. Bad timing. Medium probably could have been Substack, but Substack seems to be capturing a lucky moment when trust in mainstream media is completely imploding, censorship is rife, and lots of independent voices are looking for alternative platforms. Substack is also attracting lots of domain experts who aren't traditional writers / journalists but see in Substack an easy way to monetize their expertise.
3. As for an exodus from Medium -> Substack, probably a lot of that is just Substack seeming cooler / more exclusive than Medium at this point.
My expectation is that Substack will inevitably have a censorship crisis when it is forced to deplatform writers with "fringe" ideas (most likely on the right) and then it will lose its reputation as a more independent / free-speech platform, and the attention will move on to the next platform.
E.g. the irritating JavaScript they use that messes with the user’s ability to copy text from a Medium article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28494328
Stuff like that will irritate readers and give the publisher a bad name.
It might be possible to run a publishing platform without resorting to nasty hacks like that, but the growth hacking shortcuts will be very tempting.
If Medium had some advantage, like better content (for users) or better discoverability (for writers), it would be worth paying for. But it just doesn’t. There’s nothing I get out of Medium that I can’t find on other sites. There’s almost nothing a writer gets out of medium vs. creating their own site.
There's always been this huge demand for cheap blogging, and someone who met them then messed up that trust.