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> The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff

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.

I cut $1M/month in costs in the first month. Now we're working on quality.

You should get rid of the sign-in to read model. It’s avoidable with a browser extension or incognito, but also makes the medium experience horrible. Almost the main reason me and everyone else I know avoid the site entirely.

Aside, nice work. Excited to hear what you can bring.

Your username is “pirate”… why would a businessman care what you and yours want? You’re on different teams.

And your username is melodyfarm. Pretty good argument huh?

What is your opinion on the Substack model (both as a publisher and as the CEO of Medium)?

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I used to love medium. Such a rich source of content. Then a wall was built. And I started reading about writers having their content forced behind it. There’s just too much content elsewhere to justify subscriptions. Your only way back is removing them. Find another way to monetise. Micropayments maybe. Advertisements I could put up with. But until then Medium is this annoying platform that pollutes my search results and wastes my time.

Perhaps the solution is for the authors to pay to put it on Medium. Make that be the business model. Put no ads on the site. That may eliminate the incentive to spam and SEO.

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.

How would that work for existing authors? Would they be forced onto paid plans? Would their old articles still be available? Culling existing free plans is not popular, as we saw with Slack and Heroku.

> 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?

> Why would a writer do that specifically on Medium

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’d second that and can relate as I’d have loved to pay Medium for an enterprise global account that would’ve allowed selected, smart engineers from my current company to post blogs that would escape the Medium paywall. Looks like to me that option doesn’t exist on Medium - or I’m not able to find my way through your website.

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 (?)

Stop asking me to sign in.

I will never, ever want to sign in.

Yes, their business model can only be “Let’s shut down all free news aggregators on the Internet, HN and Reddit included, so customers will have to pay for us.”

Why I avoid medium is because of the free post limit. I don’t pay for a subscription and don’t particularly want to- so if the link I clicked on is a low quality article, it just used one of my credits, and I’m SOL.

Maybe I’m misusing or misunderstanding the product somehow?

If we want to put up a metered paywall, and we do, then we need to deliver. That’s how I see the problem. You are using the product just fine.

You are not competing with paid websites, you are competing with free Wordpress blogs. Paywalling content is a mistake in your case.

You seem to be saying that it's okay to put up a metered paywall as long as the articles are good. You are missing the point then. Substack is going to eat you alive. But I guess you got a good salary! Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't feel like Substack is any less of a nuisance than Medium. Seeing either domain name immediately lowers my expectations; I go in expecting to get a mediocre article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account, and sometimes I'll be pleasantly surprised with a good article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account.

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.

That's unnecessarily aggressive.

That only applies to posts where the writer has opted in to the paywall, right? If they want their content to be free, Medium will host it for free.

I like that you posted this here, and I like your humility. I'm also both a paid Medium subscriber and write (once or twice a year) on the platform.

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...

Any good ML post recommendations? I've found 9 out 10 people write the same thing and it is superficial once you start building your own DNN. The Annotated transformer out of Harvard is better.

This could probably be really well done with tensorflow.js

Thank you. I see it very similarly to you.

This is why I read HN: someone starts a discussion about a high-profile tech company, and gets a thoughtful reply from none other than the CEO. Thanks for taking the time.

Ironically, this is also why you use HN and not Medium. The Medium CEO himself has just demonstrated that the discussion happens somewhere else than on Medium.

Because, among other things, Medium has gone out of its way to make sure conversations never happen. Their comment system is unusable.

I like that too. I’ve been a daily reader here since 2007 and the sharing of 1st hand info is what makes it valuable.

Medium was always a hobby for Ev, it seemed. You guys were in the same building as me for a few years (760 market). I think we may have even subletted from you at one point. But even back then it seemed like you had too many people. You can't get rid of substack, but you can differentiate. I'd suggest going all in on a decentralized platform. It's clear mastodon and others currently on the market will never cross the chasm. You have the network effect to do so while at the same time offering something different.

Was I in that sublet with you? I was running Lift then.

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.

Hobbies and obsessions ain't necessarily mutually exclusive.

He worked full time.

Nah I was at Credit Karma and Nextdoor. One of my favorite buildings to work in.

Why decentralize? What does that get them?

I am really curious about the thinking behind the “wrong turn”. Was it not obvious that changing the incentives would poison the original intentions and destroy the quality?

I would be shocked if this was not blatantly obvious to the people who created Medium in the first place.

What happened?

I know the changes and the dates. Each seemed reasonable at the time. But they were often missing a coordinated understanding of the platform dynamics. Then there wasn’t an organizational culture that could spot and change those mistakes. It was on to the next thing.

I appreciate your comment - and I admire your belief in Medium's ability to go back to the right path, but why do you think Medium will be able to get people to its platform, considering Substack is already on the right path?

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?

Substack is on the right path for them. Medium needs to get back on the right path for us.

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 only have 2 suggestions for medium:

* 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.

Just go back to good old value trade mechanics rather than the predatory ones. People can tell when a transaction does not sound fair, you may think that they should think it is, but if the tactics employed are such as those done by Medium (and others) it’s always a tell that something is not right and transaction is not worth the money. Scammers on the internet employ similar tactics all the time.

I think Substack is clearly and obviously fairer than most competitors to both writers and readers. That’s why it’s succeeding.

Medium need to make one change and they would be back in the game immediately. Remove the forced signup and login. Monetise in a thousand other ways but that bait and switch is so user hostile.

RIght, that is the issue. As it is, Medium is just one of the domains I'm never going to click on. I expect low-quality articles everywhere. That's not the real problem. It's the ridiculous paywall, and it'll continue to die as long as that's in place.

>We like being an open platform

Then be one. Actions speak louder than words.

Allow us non-regular domain experts to easily post technical articles with pure Markdown, easy to make Medium one of the outlets I post to automatically along with Dev.to, and private blogs. Make it easier to have embedded code in the articles.

It’s wild that we don’t have proper code blocks already. But that’s going through QA right now and should be out shortly.

Seconding this. Markdown w/ code blocks is practically second nature to technical folks.

Thanks for chiming in.

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 saw this and will try to reply privately. I’m alarmed by the idea that a paywall was forced on you. That shouldn’t happen.

Responded through your contact form.

And responded back to you.

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!

A feature like Facebook stars (or whatever it’s called) is one way to pay publishers without paywalls. I default block medium posts on my search engine now. Until I see on HN how Medium has improved, this will remain.