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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Two main reasons, IMO:

1. At a point, Medium stopped adding value to blog posts and their network, to the point that they had to strongarm some of the larger networks to try and stay on their platform (e.g. FreeCodeCamp) and failed. Currently, Medium's best value proposition is long-tail SEO which just encourages more low-quality content.

2. In general, the long-form content landscape has shifted more toward short-form content in terms of things like Twitter and TikTok. Even Substack, which is a reasonable Medium alternative and superior if trying to build a readerbase, hasn't received as much buzz as it did years ago.

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Long form content will become more niche, at least when it comes to text. I prefer long form reading content over short form content so it's nice having platforms like Substack and Medium, but IMO there needs to be something better. I would love a new social blogging platform that actually does well at showing you content you'd enjoy AND that ensures the posts are quality.

Easier said than done I imagine.

This made me sad. Long form content is the content I get the most value from. Short-form is largely pointless.

I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form content. Everything points towards short form content being the biggest thing while long form content and text content becomes niche.

This sounds like terribly "old-fashioned" thinking... at the same time, not everything new is good. I'm afraid you're right though. Seems short form is destroying attention spans across the board. I even notice it in myself.

Short form wins on ads is the main reason.

If you read one long article you may see three ads.

But each short article could have the same three ads, multiplied by however many short articles you read.

Long term I think the future is going to be more along the line of direct patronage - if I want to write I can say that at $Xk a month from supporters I’ll quit my day job and just make content for everyone.

I don't agree. It's not young people as such, it's the mainstream that love shallow short form content.

However the more intelligent, curious and thoughtful people that hopefully become our leaders, are more into long form content which simply has much more to offer than cheap one-liners.

Unfortunately selecting those leaders is where we are going wrong right now. Referring to a lot of leaders (politics and industry alike) that just love blasting cheap shots on short form services like Twitter.

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