I think these are not the main pain points.
The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.
Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.
The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.
This. I never felt recommendations were a problem. I stopped reading medium articles once everything was behind a paywall. When most content is mediocre at best, paywalls aren’t helpful.
But even if the content is good.. Annoying me with making an account and only viewing 3 random articles ensures I'll never find out how great it is. Making an account is a pretty big step if you're just consuming content.
Unless those 3 articles all happen to be amazing which is unlikely, and even then it's still a very large jump to a pricey subscription. Not everyone makes silicon valley money.
Ps not sure if it's still 3, because I haven't visited medium for about a year now.
Are there other platforms you'd be willing to name that you see as being grassroots "for users by users"? I may want to look into some of them.
Patreon still has some of this feel somehow - it feels more connected when I support someone
I think that's because not many people use their discovery. They usually end up from somewhere else. So they don't have that part to play with (eg charging money or using algorithms to recommend content that's profitable for them).
Also, their monetisation is pretty seamless because you come there with the intent to pay. So requests for payment don't feel out of place.
I guess for the people you patron it's less great now because I see many people moving to ko-fi.
You're on one right now. If that wasn't clear from my post.
Also, Reddit still manages ok on this front IMO. The only reason I stopped paying was that they doubled the price when they moved away from gold to whatever it is they call now.
Another one is tweakers.net in Holland.
Boards.ie in Ireland though I left that country years ago and I don't know how that site is fairing now.
Those are the main ones I can think of right now.
Reddit is doing everything they can to kill it though. It's gone from habitually including site:reddit.com in every google search to actively avoiding it on mobile.
I'm not going to install the app. Ever. I will never, ever, ever install reddit's app. No amount of nagging me will ever get me to install it ever.
Exactly my reasons as well. I just kept running into walls on medium. I recall commenting on articles that I did end up reading wasn't smooth either.
This is literally it.
Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down.
Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant?
That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.
It’s crazy to me that they seem completely blind to the root problem. When I pick a blogging platform I don’t want popups, paywalls, required logins, or anything other than the content. Medium took off because it had a simple clean UI and good posts, and seemed like the lowest friction way to blog. Now Medium has huge amounts of friction and feels like yet another business trying to pump money out of users, so Substack is the new go-to and someone else takes their place.
I assume the plan from day one was make a very appealing platform at a loss, gain a moat from a huge library of good content, then squeeze the profit out of it.
It's a deceptive business model, and people feel deceived and no longer want to do business with that company (surprise!).
> you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away
I cannot agree more. The brand has destroyed itself by putting everything behind a login/pay-wall. I don't even click on medium.com links anymore, regardless of how interesting the content may be. And if I accidentally click on one, I click the back button in less than a second.
I understand the desire to monetize, but this is not the way.
these days i usually immediately close a page if it's on medium.com because of these dark patterns
Same feeling here. There was a time in which it was pleasant to read an article in medium but not anymore and they made the experience so awful that I'm not willing to give them any more chances to improve. And reading the CEO here it seems they aren't even aware what the real problems are.
I wonder how much traffic they loose on that first pop up. I bet like 25-50% of all views never make it past that shitty subscribe thing
Exactly, it is the enshittifying of the service by corrupting it’s original promise and replacing it with “make more money”.
Nobody comes to use your service just because you want more money. People come to get value, and that has been sniffed out.
P.S. props to Corey doctorow for his fantastic “enshittification” posts.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
> The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away.
I'm not a spiteful person in general, but I won't pay for anything that does things like this out of spite.
I just assume I'll be paywalled before clicking a Medium link, so I don't.
Everyone needs to build a brand, with their own blog. When posting on Medium, it also feels like Medium is hijacking the long-term reputation that we’re building.
I don’t know, maybe Medium should promote individual articles that are on Wordpress instances of personal and corporate blogs. Who would be happy to pay to apply to the vetting process.
Exactly. X-views is just disrespect and ensures I never build a habit out of the platform’s content. Same goes for sites like FineHomeBuilding.com. Even if I know there’s good content there, I now avoid clicking just to not “use up” my stupid 3 views a month (yes, can copy/paste url to private browsing, but easier to just go elsewhere).
On top of that, medium just isn’t a site that matters much to me. I am not interested in exploring medium to find the interesting articles they are boosting. For me medium is just a place that hosts articles that I find through reddit or HN or mastodon. The best thing it can do is let me read that one article and get out of the way. It doesn’t need features, it doesn’t need recommendations, it just needs to not be annoying to read, it needs to not try to engage me.
But the investors will never let it just be that, there’s too much money involved.
Exactly, at the risk of repeating the same word that many other sibling comments begin with.
After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.
I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.
But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.
I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.
But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because of the possibility of making money off of Medium (even if I opted out), that gave them free license to make money off of me, so of course their pursuit of exploiting me of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of my own labor and content unless I systematically and enthusiastically played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.
I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.
I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.
If I write an article about ray tracing lime jello, then why can't I submit it for syndication to three specialty groups about ray tracing, jello, and limes, without restricting everyone on the internet from discovering and reading it for free in my own channel? Why are all the popular syndication channels there for the express purposes of exploiting me to make money for themselves?
That's like having not one pimp, but an entire pyramid of pimps trying to bully my customers and restrict and exploit my work, that I'm happy and willing to do for free.
I'm not going to get into the user interface, which would require writing a hundred page Medium article in itself (that would be promoted to and read by exactly zero readers). I'll just say that at first it was the thing that attracted me, but then once I actually started using it, it was infuriating and frustrating and purposefully lacking obvious and crucial features (not to mention those that I came to depend on that were later removed or hidden).
There are some great things about the ease of writing and editing and formatting articles, but also so many conspicuous trepanations of the skull and lobotomization of the brain that it's obvious it's all part of some dark pattern to brutally control my mind and behavior.
The final straw was when I found myself unable to control the formatting of my images. I was SURE I was able to do that before, but the interface simply was ignoring my mouse clicks that I'd learned to use. At first I thought there was something wrong with my mouse. Then maybe my browser was broken. Or possibly it was my internet connection. And then finally I felt like I was losing my mind and mis-remembering that I used to be able to do this simple obvious thing, and wondering how it was that my previous articles were formatted in ways I couldn't figure out how to apply to my new articles. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I am being gaslighted?
Finally I googled for "why can't I control the formatting of images in my medium articles", and this came up:
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Image-formatting-feature-deprecation https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/4420609316375-Imag...
>Image formatting feature deprecation
>As of January 2022, Medium no longer supports formatting options for images in the Medium editor.
>All images in stories are now displayed in a single image size. Other features, such as the alt text, captions, grids, and image links, remain unaffected.
>Medium has recently redesigned parts of its website in order to deliver a more browsable, consistent, and faster experience to all users. To that end, we have removed certain design elements on the published story page, along with the ability to format and resize imagery in the story editor.
>We know image sizing matters to many writers. So, why did we remove this feature? Simply put: We removed image sizing to accommodate a new right-hand column that provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading, along with related reads across Medium. Our data shows this new right-hand column benefits writers by presenting their stories to more readers across the network.
Then why the hell don't you program your web site to respond to the mouse clicks on images with a big red popup and loud buzzer that goes "BZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!! YOU CAN'T DO THAT ANY MORE!!!!" so I know it's MEDIUM and not ME that's at fault?
FUCK Medium's right-hand column. I don't give a shit about it. I don't want Medium to "provides readers with relevant context on the story they’re reading", I want readers to READ MY STORY. But obviously the only thing Medium cares about is castrating my formatting and gobbling up my precious square centimeters of screen space for the express purpose of diverting and distracting people away from reading my free content that I'm paying them to publish, and sucking them into the click-bait paid content that they actually make money off of.
The patronizing phrase "Our data shows..." is as bad as "I'm not racist, but..." because it tells me beyond doubt that Medium has become yet another data driven Zynga Cow Clicker skinner box.
http://www.cowclicker.com/ http://www.cowclicker.com/
Medium's and Zynga's only goal is monetization by metrics, which suck out every drop of human creativity, design, and intent, and incarcerates my readers in the Clockwork Orange Movie Theatre Scene!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQApGLbgNg
>I believe in second chances. I want us to work together. I want you to become a valued member of our organization. Surrender, and you will find meaning. Surrender, and you will find release. Take a deep breath. Calm your mind. You know what's best. What's best is you comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply, Agent 33?
You nailed it.
The same goes with coding. SO and github are good. Everything else is pretty much garbage.
Their clickbait-optimized recommendation engine is still a major problem, though.
The main landing page is such a shitshow. The feeling sticks to you no matter what after that.
I love these. Someone posts a scathing critique of a company. Company representative responds with a mea culpa that misses the mark, and includes plans to fix. Top reply nails the actual problem, why the fix won’t work, and gets massive agreement. Company rep doesn’t respond.
You know it hits hard though. Hopefully they take it to heart. I like using medium as an author but HATE the “4 articles remaining” crap. I’ve been planning to move elsewhere but have been lazy. I’ve noticed from my readership numbers that I’m not alone.
I think it's just cause there's two options.
As the platform goes to shit, keep milking it for all it's worth till the bitter end.
Or
Try and fix it and earn a bit less money for a year or two as it becomes healthy again and thrives.
It's not easy to tell investors that losing money for a year or two is ok and "just trust me".
This x 100000000
Yeah, the paywall is also a huge part of it. They basically committed suicide when they locked everything behind a paywall. At least most Substack authors are smart enough to make most their content free.
+100