Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium?
Seeing a lot more Substack and fewer and fewer Medium articles. Anyone else notice this seemingly happened slowly but consistently over the last year?
You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.
It's the professional equivalent of people writing on blogspot or wordpress.com
A real company will have the resources to setup a blog on their own domain.
Wordpress.com recently completely revamped its pricing, pissing everyone off, then walked it back. And it's unclear what motivated it, or what's to come. This is the kind of omen that preceded Patreon's fall from obvious choice to reluctant best option of a bunch of bad or incomplete solutions. Automattic's pricing is more reasonable now, but the single $180/year plan they tried and walked back from hangs over it. It tells me they wanted to shift away from casual bloggers (like someone who doesn't want to worry about maintaining a .org install) to people who are willing and able to pay triple digits for all the features for business or personal PR purposes.
DigitalOcean also has one-click installers/images available for ghost and wordpress, but would still be at least $5/mo.
Both of these options start to go back towards the burden of having to maintain them though.
I don't know if it exists, but maybe there's room for something like a desktop version of Ghost that allows you to write posts/etc locally and then publish to a static github-pages (or s3/etc) site.
Maybe I'm in a different bubble, but most of the writers I see on Substack are individuals, not people writing on behalf of companies. If anything, companies using Medium is still more popular. Substack is also quite popular in the literary and arts circles, not just tech.
Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding.
This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links.
In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol
It is a difficult line, because sometimes you see a website become commercially irrelevant over time because functionality is not added. And I guess some sites need to follow visual trends to maintain customers.
Also there are long term changes that can force your hand. Mobile friendly required changes or you would lose those customers.
Some usability trends are improvements (and some trends are bad: Apple seems to prefer pretty looks at the expense of usability (Apple used to have a fantastic HIG (human interface guidelines))). https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
It's not because it was working from a user perspective that the underlying model wasn't broken.
Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you get stuck by the paywall. So on the user side there was this constant friction that was obnoxious. But on the author side, the incentive was to make your content as broad as possible because (if I understand correctly) everything got paid by the view out of one big bucket, a la Spotify. This is horrible for premium content (which almost by definition has a more niche audience) so not much of a surprise that type of content suffers in this model.
Substack seems to be more like Shopify: individual authors pick whether to monize, and if so how. This makes it much more viable to make true premium content, in the sense of "a thousand fans". I think this enables is creators who are very good at what they do, because their compensation is directly related to (number of readers times price each reader is willing to pay). In Medium that second term was basically fixed and the only way to increase revenue as an author was to write more click-baity articles. Substack optimizes the other direction.
As someone who has interacted with a lot of authors, I think this has a lot of value. On HN it's easy to forget that the vast majority of authors are not technical (and I mean this kindly, but really, really not technical). These are people for whom setting up any sort of a blog at all is challenging. Having a way to directly put up content, and charge for it, and be in control seems like a huge win for authors, and if it's a win for authors I think those authors will bring their audiences along to the platform, and the platform wins.
Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path.
The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff.
We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus.
In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others.
The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders.
A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers.
Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history.
So that’s the state of Medium.
Maybe I’m misusing or misunderstanding the product somehow?
Not only do I dislike that enough to not want to use Medium or Substack as a reader, but it also means that I would never want to use Medium or Substack as a writer, either; yeah, I have all of three blog posts to my name, but even my shitty writing deserves better than to have any association whatsoever with such user-hostility.
It’s wild to me that anyone ever accuses Ev of doing this as a hobby. He has been running media platforms for 22 years. That’s an obsession.
I would be shocked if this was not blatantly obvious to the people who created Medium in the first place.
What happened?
As far as I can see, Medium's unique competitive advantage is its recommendations - most of your competitors are individual tools, but do not have Medium-level recommendation and content discovery systems. Substack, though, seems to me to be on the right track - good recommendation system and good content creation tools.
Why do you think Medium will recover to go back to the right path? How do you know it's not too late?
They are doing a great job of unbundling traditional media. They are the most credible threat to the NYT digital subscription powerhouse. But that unbundling only works for some authors, i.e. that's why top Substack authors left and formed their own bundle (every.to).
We are in the job of rebundling. It's one price for everything. And that works for a different set of authors and publications. This fits much more what I want to see in publishing. I want a place that is friendly to subject matter experts. That is most people here and the thing that makes you a subject matter expert is that you are doing interesting work, not trying to build an audience.
I will never, ever want to sign in.
Maybe the right path is to reduce costs and fire a good percentage of your employees and create a sustainable business model where Medium can be profitable without paywalls AND liked by its users instead of taking on more and more VC debt and try become the next Unicorn? But that may be impossible depending on the board. I think it's too late to reverse course with the current product. Without knowing anything about internal politics, I think it's nearly impossible to change the public perception that Medium if full of low quality spam behind an ugly paywall, and nobody wants to sign up or pay for that. My brain already skips all Medium content by default.
Like another comment mentioned, if you want to play the VC game, maybe it's a better idea to completely flip what you're dong and make a huge risky bet on something new in e.g. the decentralized space.
Aside, nice work. Excited to hear what you can bring.
So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
That being said, you Medium folks - as it looks like you’re actively reading this thread - should work in priority on the global perception that Medium is hosting more and more clickbait and superficial content, as that is a possible concern for people like me who’d be willing to give you corporate money so that our possible readers would bypass the paywall.
In a nutshell: work on an option (or pivot to?) making good writers pay for publishing content and get rid of the others. Some of those writer will be fine with paying (corporate branding is their goal), while some others will ask for their share of the fame created and you may want to go the Patreon way for them, i.e. asking readers to pay as an option (?)
> So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
Why would a writer do that specifically on Medium and not on, say, Substack?
Maybe they really have a unique and loyal audience. It's hard to say without knowing their traffic data. But if a lot of their readers come from social media, does it matter to the reader if the shared link leads to medium.com or substack.com?
If it made Medium the go-to place for people looking for high quality content that was free of SEO spammy articles, that would be an excellent reason.
Heck, I write articles and I'd pay to have my article posted on a well-regarded site. But I see no point to posting it on free sites with a reputation for low quality. There's an old saying "it's free and worth every penny".
Instead I post them on sites under my control, like digitalmars.com, where I can control the quality of the site.
I think Substack is clearly and obviously fairer than most competitors to both writers and readers. That’s why it’s succeeding.
Then be one. Actions speak louder than words.
I am certainly not anything close to your ideal contributor, but here’s why I decided to stop using Medium.
WHY DO I WRITE?
Writing is important to me, but I guess for different reasons than for most folks. I do it for myself. I am not interested in making money, or being famous, but I write as if these are my goals. It’s really a personal exercise, and much more inward-facing, than looking out.
I don’t charge (or expect others to pay) for my writing, and am quite aware that most folks find no value at all, in most of my work (including my software development).
WHY MEDIUM?
I liked the fact that Medium provided an SEO-friendly substrate for my writing. I’m a working engineer, and my writing is a side gig. I am glad to have things taken care of for me.
Although I am quite capable of “rolling my own,” wrt creating a Web site, it’s a distraction from what I really want to do, which is create world-class Apple applications. I enjoy writing. It helps me, more than anyone else, and Medium gave me a “one-stop shop.” Before Medium (and after), I have used fairly basic WordPress sites, with minimal customization, as a platform for my writing[0].
There are many frustrations with Medium, wrt to formatting and dashboard/editing stuff, but they aren’t crippling. I work within boundaries all the time. I know that it is not a technical writing platform, and most of what I do is technical writing, so beggars can’t be choosers.
WHY I STOPPED USING MEDIUM.
Because of this story[1].
When Medium arbitrarily slapped a paywall on my free, open, and public writing, I realized that you guys believe that you own the material that I publish using your platform. The fact that I pay (admittedly a fairly token amount) to post this stuff, means nothing. Despite the claims in the silly “congratulations!” email I got, this did not increase the exposure to my article. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can no longer refer to the article, as most folks can’t read it. Good thing I have a non-paywalled variant (the original)[2].
It’s my writing. Not. Yours. PERIOD.
Since you guys have control of the platform, you hold all the cards. I’m a relatively “bit” player, and cannot expect any special treatment. In fact, I consider this very screed to be nothing but a fart in a tornado (I write in the vernacular).
But you did step up, which I appreciate, and I believe that it would be disingenuous to complain privately, if there’s even a chance that I might make a difference.
If Medium ever changes back to something that is useful to me again, I might consider using it. I maintain my subscription, because there’s stuff up there, and I don’t feel like going through the agita of changing all the callouts in my stuff[0], but I don’t plan on adding anything new.
Thanks for stepping up.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
[1] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/the-curious-case-of-the-p...
[2] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/swiftwater/the-curio... (non-paywalled version)
I really feel as if it can be said that I "didn't read the manual," but that also begs the question "Why does this need a manual"?
Thanks!
What sets Medium apart to me from Substack, and why I would write in one but not the other, goes back to your original vision, that people should be able to write even when they don't want to write regularly. A newsletter is a continuous commitment; a single article is not.
You talk of experts, and I concur - my value out of Medium is the ML content. Most of it is written either by people who are new to it and are detailing their practice, or by those who really know their stuff. Both types help me get the gist quickly. In that sense, it's a knowledge-gap-plugger. Not Stackoverflow, obviously, but also not unlike it.
But here's where I think you've not thought it through deep enough. Experts also want things in exchange for their effort. You mention audience, and that's nice, but, frankly, it's a vanity metric - the audience isn't specific or useful in any way. It's wide rather than deep, so dopamine hit aside, experts don't really care about that.
Instead, experts care about CREDIBILITY. It's a status game. And that's where the publications come in. The difference between publishing an article just on my LinkedIn vs in a good publication is a signal it was vetted and accepted. Most publications on Medium are garbage, but some of them, through the diligent work of their editors, are not.
If you want to attract experts to publish on Medium, you have to help them play that status game. And for that what matters more is the publications and their editors. You've kinda tried it before: Medium had previously lured publications onto the platform only to shut them down. And also had its own publications and then fired a whole bunch of reporters.
But if you're serious about attracting experts to post, then just getting a couple of thousand random eyeballs on their content doesn't really help them be better experts? If experts (of any domain) are your target audience, you need to think through how you're helping them be more of what they want to be...
This could probably be really well done with tensorflow.js
* when a non-subscriber click a premium link, don't show the whole content and let the user choose whether to spend the allowance on this article after seeing a snippet.
* Keep an eye on your javascript size. Right now it is grossly out of whack for what it does. It put people on slower network at a huge disadvantage.
> Spez - I want our users, user-users and moderator users, to make money on reddit. Specifically, I want them to make money from other users. And so we need to have business models where users are paying money to other users or to subreddits. I would like subreddits to have the ability to be businesses. We have a lot of subreddits that are kind of trying to do this, but the platform just doesn't support it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/xhuaqf/are_we_a...
But not everyone who has access to the free money can produce quality writing, the supply goes even further down.
on edit: fixed you have the time to who have the time, writing on 2-3 hours of sleep does strange things at times.
It's not that, but I was going for a cold, hard truth tone. Some of them absolutely are worth reading, it's just that supply outstrips demand. It's the same with musicians. There's an endless supply of good enough musicians in their 20's that are marketable. Or aspiring actors in waiting tables in LA.
https://on.substack.com/p/getting-your-first-100-signups
I guess this is useful if there is no difference between your professional and non-professional personas, then you can get a lot of people reading you from linkedIn that are your professional connections and interested in what you write because you write about your professional interests.
Or if you are a naturally convivial person who has done nothing but expanded their supply of friends from high school on.
Or who has the free time to go to social events and socialize.
I'm writing on Medium https://medium.com/luminasticity because it seems to have an understandable way of building an audience that does not require you to do much other than write (although there is a detestable social aspect to it as well), it certainly isn't going great and it has taken 3 months to build 97 followers, most days I get only 4 or 5 views with every now and then a large amount for no discernible reason (by large I tend to mean 70 views), pretty much everything I write gets less than 100 views - whether a short funny piece about how suggestions by computers tend to be useless if you are actually competent [Suggestions from Idiots](https://medium.com/p/6b023acc30ae ) to a multi-story time travel narrative https://medium.com/p/adb84f467d8a with a recurring character.
I have however had one article that got 4.500 views - [To Speak Meaningfully About Art](https://medium.com/p/329093dbce7f) - why? Not sure, the Medium stats don't really tell you much.
As disheartening as it all is, looking at substack and I can't help but think I would probably be much less than that. Maybe I should have put both up and posted to both to see which got more traction instead of relying on my personal sense that Substack is for people who have an audience, and while Medium might be a ghetto you can maybe build something there.
I expect this to remain the case because they do cool things like provide legal support for their customers https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers
Substack lets writers retain their own brand and their own access to their audience. They empower their writers with the platform.
Medium requires writers to give up that independence to support Medium’s (imo crappy) brand and ad driven model.
It's effectively a blog generator with a built in payment button. A lot of the success of Substack hinges on the fact that Twitter exists. It's the social media funnel to the site where most of the actual value is.
There are quite a few right-wing sub stacks that I don’t agree with but they tend to be well written by people who treat it as a job. And that’s the thing, Medium is mostly a way to express or promote yourself, but some people really make a living writing a substack.
I'm glad that they're leveraging this- but I also hope that this doesn't become the entire site. Seems like it's a very diverse range of writers so far, and I hope it stays that way.
If you mean the people who think they know more about trans people than actual trans people and the entire credible medical establishment, here you go: (this first episode of the new season is free) https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc....
Of course, there's plenty of existing media and documentation, but he covers a lot of recent developments in anti-trans misinformation and even had on religious, conservative parents who were initially skeptical of their kids' trans identities in the panel portion. Jon Stewart is also way more liberal than the usual person who covers this, so he carries weight with the sort of people who fall prey to this sort of propaganda.
The interview portion reminds me of his bits on Crossfire and Mad Money. He doesn't get mad, he gets aggressively disappointed. He likes to like people regardless of politics, and doesn't like when someone makes that hard, and it shows here.
Either way, I'm not a fan of censoring "misinformation" in general, bad ideas should be countered with good ideas. I'll check out that episode, thanks for sharing.
I also find it interesting that Substack is now migrating toward an app approach ("read all your articles in this app!"), which is basically what Medium was from the beginning. I have wondered how much the Substack team intended this from the beginning, and if the newsletter angle was largely for differentiation ("what makes you guys different from Medium?").
Also, in case anyone was not aware, Medium's founder/CEO (Ev William) departed this summer. [1] I wonder what the circumstances were, who owned what share, etc.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliecoleman/2022/07/12/medium-...
My contact info is in my profile. Either way, good luck! I will look forward to seeing what you have in store.
At first I thought it was a Bear.app feature but it's actually a separate free, open-source blog service: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
I'm signing up just for the pun I didn't see coming.
The single exception to this is Bandcamp. <-- evidently I jinxed it. So maybe Bandcamp is not the exception.
The game plan is this:
1. Draw capital from Fortnite and investments (Tencent, Sony, etc.)
2. Build up creative tools (Unreal Engine, Metahuman), marketplace ecosystems (Bandcamp, ArtStation), and platforms (Epic Games Store) to build the movies and games of tomorrow. Make them more compelling and synergistic than peer competitors.
Tim Sweeney is gambling he can turn anyone creative into a filmmaker or game designer. The long term game is to then take 10-15%.
It'll be interesting to see if Godot develops at a fast enough clip to become compelling to the next generation of game developers and eventually companies that want full IP rights.
It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe and other media companies can stop Epic from eating their Hollywood lunch.
AI/ML might also throw a wrench into these plans.
On the supply side, it's a different business and discovery model, as many others have noted. But you are asking about the demand side, i.e., what people are reading and sharing.
As pointed out by a number of people already, money will end up corrupting what was once a great and easy outlet for people to share original ideas. A better alternative is to continue building systems that make it easier to publish independently AND create search engines that are not optimized to return SEO optimized click bait garbage for profits. I want blogs from real people who write because they want to teach me something.
Let’s get back to writing good content, share it freely, and change the world.
Therefore, unless it's basically a diary, writing one "article" per day will necessarily either stop or turn to blogspam over time.
Maybe substack is similar. And maybe it's better at monetization though I don't really care and I suspect serious monetization is a real power law thing anyway. I'm not convinced personally about posting to substack rather than keeping on an independent blog.
Because of that particular dark pattern to trick people into giving Substack their email addresses, I wouldn't call their design unobtrusive but it is nonetheless still better than most of the modern web.
Maybe I'll give Substack a try.
My takeaway from this entire thread is this: We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts.
It's really the only way to create a platform with staying power and maintainable core values.
> We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts.
I'm not getting what you mean by "based on."
Two further observations:
- The fact that it is a newsletter service and articles land in people's inboxes makes me much more cautious about trying to ensure that the work is of sufficient quality than I suspect would be the case for a blog / medium. I don't want to be embarrassed and I don't want readers to unsubscribe. This seems quite different to Medium.
- Substack's recommendation system does provide a very meaningful boost in subscriber numbers. There is quite a bit of concern though about whether this is reduces incentives for writers to attract new readers to Substack and so will ultimately harm the platform.
[1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/substack-friction-and-t...
I rarely click on Substack links, they managed to attract all the propagandists and cultists other platforms weeded out for a reason.
Deep state, conspiracy, Dr. Who is paid by Pfizer. Heads you lose; tails you lose. All of that crap. It's a losing game that keeps you on the defensive. You can cite facts and evidence but your up against memes essentially to reduce the sound bite to its essence. They will make shit up and have fake experts to support their positions and publish it in second tier places including substack. It drives clicks. Mainstream news orgs cite twitter of all places.
All you can do is encourage critical thinking which means asking people to explain their positions and being genuinely curious about their answers.
There's that weird effect when you read a newspaper article about something you are expert in and notice everything they get wrong... then read the next article and take it all in verbatim. Not sure what the psychologists call it.. if it doesn't have a name it needs one.