Medium's decade-long journey to find its own identity | Hacker News Reader

Medium's decade-long journey to find its own identity

fastcompany.com

9 pointslaurex16 comments

When Medium first arrived I thought it was fantastic. The readability and lack of distractions and badges was quite different than most reading experiences on the web at the time.

But at some point the identity seemed to switch from reader friendly to reader hostile, throwing up a paywall/login wall for seemingly every link. This created a negative feedback loop where I avoided any Medium link for anything and haven't given them another chance.

Now it seems less relevant than ever.

Worse, when I tried to subscribe it then informed me I was already subscribed, and when I tried to reset the password... couldn't get it to work. I eventually gave up.

It is very user-hostile.

> But at some point the identity seemed to switch from reader friendly to reader hostile

The cycle of enshittification: companies are happy to provide a friction-free experience at the start. Once it's time to start squeezing revenue out of the product, you have to pay to remove the friction.

> At the very least, Medium is doing much better than X these days.

huh

Medium should have like 5 employees and just simply be a blogging platform. I think the challenge is they want to be something they can’t be. And they have too much capital seeking a high return.

We need a good, simple blogging platform. We don’t need a twitter competitor or whatever medium thinks they want to be.

Just publish blogs and rss feeds and keep costs low.

There's a lot of platforms that are just that, why do we necessarily need anything new?

Investors tend to lose interest if you tell them the sky is in fact, not the limit.

They should rebrand to Large, after their signature feature, the nagwall popup on every article.

Especially when it's so large it obscures all content even when said content is not premium-only.

Also, several times I had issues because Medium would go on a crazy loop of trying to push surveillance data to the mothership... which for "whatever reason" was a blocked URL (do not fret, Manifest V3 is going to remove that functionality! Disabling all JS on every medium site still works, though).

Medium is anti-user and have refused to change for a long time. The reason it fell out of favor is because the readers hate it.

This is my experience. I have no interest in registering just to read free content. It’s also annoying with its UX and spammy when I did register.

I’m not sure what user wants this.

Yes. I'm surprised that the OP's article is so laudatory. Almost like a paid ad.

The only reason Substack was able to take off as the de facto "thought leader" platform was because Medium massively dropped the ball.

...and also because its main competitor Twitter acquired and then abandoned its own newsletter product, Revue.

Fast Company's been on a much longer journey than that, and they still haven't found theirs, so maybe...

Fast Company has been advertising dressed up as mid grade journalism for as long as I can remember. I think they're exactly where and what they want to be.

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