
All Medium paywalled stories now free, unmetered when you’re coming from Twitter - yarapavan
https://twitter.com/ev/status/1100899021621583872
======
manigandham
Medium always confuses me on how hundreds of millions are spent on making such
a poor product. It's a very basic blog, something that's an "intro to
programming" youtube video at this point, yet it's slow and annoying to use
and has never made any serious money for anyone.

It's starting to get to Juicero levels of absurdity.

~~~
jbob2000
If your only consumers are developers, then yes, it’s really straightforward.

I made a small CMS at work that started to gain steam. 2 years of me using it
and no issues, but then I turned it over to the marketing team and they
crashed the VM it ran on in 2 days. I have no idea how, it’s just a bunch of
text boxes and a SQL DB.

That’s what medium is trying to build. A text box that marketing people can’t
fuck up. It’s just sad that technical skills are so low in society that it
takes $130mil to do that.

~~~
manigandham
Considering that there are hundreds of blog engines from Wordpress to
Squarespace that work fine with even more control and advanced layouts, I
think this is a solved problem.

~~~
spookthesunset
Do you have any idea what it takes to run a Wordpress service at scale in a
way that doesn’t get the host rooted every ten seconds?

You have little idea what you are talking about for somebody so dismissive.

~~~
manigandham
Honestly, yes I do. I've single-handedly built global applications serving
billions of requests daily for several startups. I understand hidden
complexities but a blogging site like Medium is as simple as it gets. It's
$132M to build a blog that's not even as advanced as 15 year old software like
Wordpress.

If you need another example, look at [https://dev.to/](https://dev.to/) for a
fantastic blog UX, and it's open-source so Medium can just copy it for free
and end up with a better product.

~~~
stone-monkey
Isn't comparing the scale of the two like comparing apples to oranges? I think
most wordpress sites are self hosted. There's wordpress.com hosting, but I'd
guess that most of their sites are self hosted for the explicit purpose of
customization.

While WordPress still dominates large areas of the web, they have a
decentralized model vs medium. It's like comparing scaling web forums to
reddit ("why do they have so many outages? All they do is store text!"), but
reddit obviously has a way higher load than any single forum. I'd wager the
same is true for medium.

To continue on with the metaphor, medium, like reddit, is solving a different
problem than the wordpress/squarespace model: you don't have to roll your own.
You get a built in audience due to centralization and the cache of the site
(For some reason I associate a medium link as being more legit than seeing a
WordPress hosting site. Strange, but better branding I guess.)

~~~
manigandham
The discussion has gotten muddy. The point was that this custom-built
expensive site is just a blog and still offers less than Wordpress in terms of
features.

Scale is differently, but again there are plenty of sites with far more
complex usage and data that took much less to create and run. Stackoverflow
being that example.

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rchaud
Are there Medium publications that are consistently of a high quality? I
recall Backchannel being one (written and edited by tech journalists) but the
issue is it's hard to know which publications are contributor-driven and which
aren't.

Contributor-driven content is why Forbes.com, Inc.com, etc are unreadable.
It's all puff pieces for some startup, unoriginal life-hacking advice and
entreporn.

~~~
braythwayt
As was once said of a computer magazine, but is really an evergreen
observation about all business media:

“The publication is packed full of advertisements, some of which are clearly
labeled as such.”

~~~
organicdude
What a great insight. Thank you for sharing.

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danols
I used to like Medium as a discovery tool for interesting articles & ideas for
authors to follow (on Medium or Twitter). But since the introduction of the
premium model it is completely broken for this purpose. Now all you see (at
least 80% of their recommendations) is premium articles on the Medium website.

For the topics that I am interested in (Data science, ML, Cloud, Programming
etc) very close to 0% of the quality authors write to make a few pennies of
the articles. They do it to enhance their own personal brand or as content
marketing for the companies they work for. For this reason the premium article
star marker works as a filter for things I am not willing click and invest
time in reading since they are rarely written by experts with actual
experience in the topics that I am interested in.

So when they skew their recommendation algorithm so hard towards the premium
content it is just not worth it anymore and I never click around on the
Medium.com website anymore. 90%+ of my clicks to articles comes from Twitter.
I wish they built their business model to charge for features and not content
since the path they are on is not going to work out. It is reducing the
incentive for quality authors to publish on Medium since the exposure they
will get through the recommendation algorithm is being smaller and smaller.
Most people don't publish on Medium because it is difficult or expensive to
run a wordpress blog. They do it because of it is a good way to find new
readers of your content.

------
tomatotomato37
I don't get it, who looks at Twitter and thinks "Yes, I want more of that type
of audience."

~~~
astrodust
Who looks at Medium and says "Sure, I'd love it if you own my content
forever?"

~~~
grody
I wonder what happens if a Medium user copies someone else's original content
onto Medium and the post is uncontested by a DMCA request. If Medium or a
subsidiary profit from reproducing that content, could the original creator
sue, and for how much?

Copyright is something I haven't taken the time to fully understand.

~~~
elliekelly
This is an important legal question that's currently being debated by many
legislators around the world. In the U.S. there's a law frequently called
"Section 230"[1] that protects online content publishers from being held
legally responsible for user-created content published on their platform. It's
the reason why Tinder isn't on the hook for fraud every time someone uses
their service to catfish and why Backpage & Craigslist (until recently at
least) weren't accessories to prostitution every time someone sold sexual
services on their sites.

Likewise, Section 230 acts as a "shield" to protect the platforms from
copyright liability for content posted by their users.

This is _good_. It allows platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and even
Hacker News to exist without needing to constantly police everything being
said on their platform. It allows users of those platforms to have free and
open discussion.

You've probably heard about "Article 13" and the "upload filter" in the
European Union. Article 13 takes away the European equivalent of Section 230's
"shield" that protects online platforms from copyright liability.

And the United States has been slowly chipping away at Section 230's
protections as well. Last year Trump signed "FOSTA" (sometimes called "SESTA")
which "creates liability for third-party content on websites “that unlawfully
promote or facilitate prostitution." I would encourage you to read why this
legislation is a problem for anyone who enjoys the open internet as we
currently know it.[2][3]

[1]
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230)
[2] [https://www.eff.org/cases/woodhull-freedom-foundation-et-
al-...](https://www.eff.org/cases/woodhull-freedom-foundation-et-al-v-united-
states) [3] [https://stopsesta.org/](https://stopsesta.org/)

------
dangoor
From farther down in the thread[1]:

> It doesn't affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program. That's
> determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted
> (assuming they're logged in).

Ev also said that they'll watch to see if this change negatively impacts paid
subscriptions.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/ev/status/1100905414089031680](https://twitter.com/ev/status/1100905414089031680)

------
JustSomeNobody
One of the tweets suggests Twitter is going to buy Medium. That's ...
interesting.

~~~
kradroy
It's not too farfetched given that Evan Williams founded the company.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Serious question: does he also own the Bourbon company in the same name?

~~~
Matticus_Rex
No.

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petercooper
Or, more accurately, if you go to the Medium article via a t.co redirect
(Twitter's outgoing link redirector). So if you want to share a paywalled
article outside of Twitter (on HN, say) then submit the t.co link and there
you go.

Example (this is usually paywalled):
[https://t.co/EkfcBtSUdo](https://t.co/EkfcBtSUdo)

~~~
nyuszika7h
I don't get a paywall when opening the destination URL of that directly in
Chrome's incognito mode.

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, I _think_ you get up to 5 paywalled articles a month anyway if you're
not logged in and incognito basically resets that over and over. But if I'm
linking people to stuff, they're not usually going to go through that process
and it'd be easier for me to make the t.co link for them.

------
Sephr
It looks like it's time for an "Un-paywall Medium" Chrome extension.
[https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1101176562274037760](https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1101176562274037760)

I imagine that most causal desktop users would rather install an extension in
seconds than take the time to enter their payment information for an easily-
bypassed paywall.

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sodosopa
unfortunately, it's still Medium. If they improved their accessibility it
wouldn't be as bad, but they're more pro design than pro accessible design.

------
gnicholas
Does this mean they’re tightening the paywall in general? I have run into
annoying meaaafws but never been blocked from reading an article, and I’m
always logged in.

My understanding is that if you do hit the paywall you can just open the
article in an incognito window. Is this not the case, such that a twitter
workaround would now be necessary?

~~~
gnicholas
Too late to edit, but that gibberish word was a crazy autocorrect from
“messages”

