1. The paywall killed your product. When I google something, and it leads to Medium, and I then see that it is not accessible, I CURSE and immediately go away.

1. The paywall killed your product. When I google something, and it leads to Medium, and I then see that it is not accessible, I CURSE and immediately go away. Let this happen three times and in my mind it is cemented that Medium is "that shit platform that wastes my time clicking on inaccessible content" - same like Quora, by the way. As long as the paywall exists, you will not get rid of that stench. 2. Substack killed you. I know that HN is mostly populated by extremely left leaning people who wholeheartedly believe in all the Current Things that MSM feeds them, so this argument will fall on deaf ears, but I will write it here anyways because it is the truth and if you aren't just a Woke CEO, you might actually care: During the pandemic, Substack was the only news source where I could get proper information about what is going on. Virtually everything that got people cancelled on Twitter and labelled as conspiracy theorists eventually turned out to be the truth. These people all moved to Substack. Thanks to Elon we all know now that Twitter was infested by deep state actors abusing the platform to spread disinformation and manipulate elections - I'm not sure if this is still true but I somehow remember that Medium emerged as a sub-company from Twitter, so I must assume that the exact same ways of censorship and propaganda that brought Twitter to its knees are also in place at Medium. If that is true, and as long as that is true, I can guarantee that you will have zero chance whatsoever against Substack.