These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to "cross the chasm" - Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform.
You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
I am Medium’s new CEO and was a major publisher there before that. I’m reading a lot of “go the way of Medium” type comments. Completely fair.
Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path.
The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff.
We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus.
In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others.
The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders.
A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers.
Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history.
> The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff
Maybe the right path is to reduce costs and fire a good percentage of your employees and create a sustainable business model where Medium can be profitable without paywalls AND liked by its users
instead of taking on more and more VC debt and try become the next Unicorn? But that may be impossible depending on the board. I think it's too late to reverse course with the current product. Without knowing anything about internal politics, I think it's nearly impossible to change the public perception that Medium if full of low quality spam behind an ugly paywall, and nobody wants to sign up or pay for that. My brain already skips all Medium content by default.
Like another comment mentioned, if you want to play the VC game, maybe it's a better idea to completely flip what you're dong and make a huge risky bet on something new in e.g. the decentralized space.
You should get rid of the sign-in to read model. It’s avoidable with a browser extension or incognito, but also makes the medium experience horrible. Almost the main reason me and everyone else I know avoid the site entirely.
Aside, nice work. Excited to hear what you can bring.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I used to love medium. Such a rich source of content. Then a wall was built. And I started reading about writers having their content forced behind it. There’s just too much content elsewhere to justify subscriptions. Your only way back is removing them. Find another way to monetise. Micropayments maybe. Advertisements I could put up with. But until then Medium is this annoying platform that pollutes my search results and wastes my time.
Perhaps the solution is for the authors to pay to put it on Medium. Make that be the business model. Put no ads on the site. That may eliminate the incentive to spam and SEO.
So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
How would that work for existing authors? Would they be forced onto paid plans? Would their old articles still be available? Culling existing free plans is not popular, as we saw with Slack and Heroku.
> So why would a writer do that? To build a reputation that can be turned into money elsewhere, like being able to charge higher consulting fees.
Why would a writer do that specifically on Medium and not on, say, Substack?
Maybe they really have a unique and loyal audience. It's hard to say without knowing their traffic data. But if a lot of their readers come from social media, does it matter to the reader if the shared link leads to medium.com or substack.com?
> Why would a writer do that specifically on Medium
If it made Medium the go-to place for people looking for high quality content that was free of SEO spammy articles, that would be an excellent reason.
Heck, I write articles and I'd pay to have my article posted on a well-regarded site. But I see no point to posting it on free sites with a reputation for low quality. There's an old saying "it's free and worth every penny".
Instead I post them on sites under my control, like digitalmars.com, where I can control the quality of the site.
I’d second that and can relate as I’d have loved to pay Medium for an enterprise global account that would’ve allowed selected, smart engineers from my current company to post blogs that would escape the Medium paywall.
Looks like to me that option doesn’t exist on Medium - or I’m not able to find my way through your website.
That being said, you Medium folks - as it looks like you’re actively reading this thread - should work in priority on the global perception that Medium is hosting more and more clickbait and superficial content, as that is a possible concern for people like me who’d be willing to give you corporate money so that our possible readers would bypass the paywall.
In a nutshell: work on an option (or pivot to?) making good writers pay for publishing content and get rid of the others. Some of those writer will be fine with paying (corporate branding is their goal), while some others will ask for their share of the fame created and you may want to go the Patreon way for them, i.e. asking readers to pay as an option (?)
Yes, their business model can only be “Let’s shut down all free news aggregators on the Internet, HN and Reddit included, so customers will have to pay for us.”
Why I avoid medium is because of the free post limit. I don’t pay for a subscription and don’t particularly want to- so if the link I clicked on is a low quality article, it just used one of my credits, and I’m SOL.
Maybe I’m misusing or misunderstanding the product somehow?
You seem to be saying that it's okay to put up a metered paywall as long as the articles are good. You are missing the point then. Substack is going to eat you alive. But I guess you got a good salary! Enjoy it while it lasts.
I don't feel like Substack is any less of a nuisance than Medium. Seeing either domain name immediately lowers my expectations; I go in expecting to get a mediocre article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account, and sometimes I'll be pleasantly surprised with a good article annoyingly interrupted with pop-ups begging me to create yet another online account.
Not only do I dislike that enough to not want to use Medium or Substack as a reader, but it also means that I would never want to use Medium or Substack as a writer, either; yeah, I have all of three blog posts to my name, but even my shitty writing deserves better than to have any association whatsoever with such user-hostility.
I like that you posted this here, and I like your humility. I'm also both a paid Medium subscriber and write (once or twice a year) on the platform.
What sets Medium apart to me from Substack, and why I would write in one but not the other, goes back to your original vision, that people should be able to write even when they don't want to write regularly. A newsletter is a continuous commitment; a single article is not.
You talk of experts, and I concur - my value out of Medium is the ML content. Most of it is written either by people who are new to it and are detailing their practice, or by those who really know their stuff. Both types help me get the gist quickly. In that sense, it's a knowledge-gap-plugger. Not Stackoverflow, obviously, but also not unlike it.
But here's where I think you've not thought it through deep enough. Experts also want things in exchange for their effort. You mention audience, and that's nice, but, frankly, it's a vanity metric - the audience isn't specific or useful in any way. It's wide rather than deep, so dopamine hit aside, experts don't really care about that.
Instead, experts care about CREDIBILITY. It's a status game. And that's where the publications come in. The difference between publishing an article just on my LinkedIn vs in a good publication is a signal it was vetted and accepted.
Most publications on Medium are garbage, but some of them, through the diligent work of their editors, are not.
If you want to attract experts to publish on Medium, you have to help them play that status game. And for that what matters more is the publications and their editors. You've kinda tried it before: Medium had previously lured publications onto the platform only to shut them down. And also had its own publications and then fired a whole bunch of reporters.
But if you're serious about attracting experts to post, then just getting a couple of thousand random eyeballs on their content doesn't really help them be better experts? If experts (of any domain) are your target audience, you need to think through how you're helping them be more of what they want to be...
Any good ML post recommendations? I've found 9 out 10 people write the same thing and it is superficial once you start building your own DNN. The Annotated transformer out of Harvard is better.
This could probably be really well done with tensorflow.js
This is why I read HN: someone starts a discussion about a high-profile tech company, and gets a thoughtful reply from none other than the CEO. Thanks for taking the time.
Ironically, this is also why you use HN and not Medium. The Medium CEO himself has just demonstrated that the discussion happens somewhere else than on Medium.
Medium was always a hobby for Ev, it seemed. You guys were in the same building as me for a few years (760 market). I think we may have even subletted from you at one point. But even back then it seemed like you had too many people. You can't get rid of substack, but you can differentiate. I'd suggest going all in on a decentralized platform. It's clear mastodon and others currently on the market will never cross the chasm. You have the network effect to do so while at the same time offering something different.
I am really curious about the thinking behind the “wrong turn”. Was it not obvious that changing the incentives would poison the original intentions and destroy the quality?
I would be shocked if this was not blatantly obvious to the people who created Medium in the first place.
I know the changes and the dates. Each seemed reasonable at the time. But they were often missing a coordinated understanding of the platform dynamics. Then there wasn’t an organizational culture that could spot and change those mistakes. It was on to the next thing.
I appreciate your comment - and I admire your belief in Medium's ability to go back to the right path, but why do you think Medium will be able to get people to its platform, considering Substack is already on the right path?
As far as I can see, Medium's unique competitive advantage is its recommendations - most of your competitors are individual tools, but do not have Medium-level recommendation and content discovery systems. Substack, though, seems to me to be on the right track - good recommendation system and good content creation tools.
Why do you think Medium will recover to go back to the right path? How do you know it's not too late?
Substack is on the right path for them. Medium needs to get back on the right path for us.
They are doing a great job of unbundling traditional media. They are the most credible threat to the NYT digital subscription powerhouse. But that unbundling only works for some authors, i.e. that's why top Substack authors left and formed their own bundle (every.to).
We are in the job of rebundling. It's one price for everything. And that works for a different set of authors and publications. This fits much more what I want to see in publishing. I want a place that is friendly to subject matter experts. That is most people here and the thing that makes you a subject matter expert is that you are doing interesting work, not trying to build an audience.
* when a non-subscriber click a premium link, don't show the whole content and let the user choose whether to spend the allowance on this article after seeing a snippet.
* Keep an eye on your javascript size. Right now it is grossly out of whack for what it does. It put people on slower network at a huge disadvantage.
Just go back to good old value trade mechanics rather than the predatory ones. People can tell when a transaction does not sound fair, you may think that they should think it is, but if the tactics employed are such as those done by Medium (and others) it’s always a tell that something is not right and transaction is not worth the money. Scammers on the internet employ similar tactics all the time.
I think Substack is clearly and obviously fairer than most competitors to both writers and readers. That’s why it’s succeeding.
Medium need to make one change and they would be back in the game immediately. Remove the forced signup and login. Monetise in a thousand other ways but that bait and switch is so user hostile.
RIght, that is the issue. As it is, Medium is just one of the domains I'm never going to click on. I expect low-quality articles everywhere. That's not the real problem. It's the ridiculous paywall, and it'll continue to die as long as that's in place.
Allow us non-regular domain experts to easily post technical articles with pure Markdown, easy to make Medium one of the outlets I post to automatically along with Dev.to, and private blogs. Make it easier to have embedded code in the articles.
I am certainly not anything close to your ideal contributor, but here’s why I decided to stop using Medium.
WHY DO I WRITE?
Writing is important to me, but I guess for different reasons than for most folks. I do it for myself. I am not interested in making money, or being famous, but I write as if these are my goals. It’s really a personal exercise, and much more inward-facing, than looking out.
I don’t charge (or expect others to pay) for my writing, and am quite aware that most folks find no value at all, in most of my work (including my software development).
WHY MEDIUM?
I liked the fact that Medium provided an SEO-friendly substrate for my writing. I’m a working engineer, and my writing is a side gig. I am glad to have things taken care of for me.
Although I am quite capable of “rolling my own,” wrt creating a Web site, it’s a distraction from what I really want to do, which is create world-class Apple applications. I enjoy writing. It helps me, more than anyone else, and Medium gave me a “one-stop shop.” Before Medium (and after), I have used fairly basic WordPress sites, with minimal customization, as a platform for my writing[0].
There are many frustrations with Medium, wrt to formatting and dashboard/editing stuff, but they aren’t crippling. I work within boundaries all the time. I know that it is not a technical writing platform, and most of what I do is technical writing, so beggars can’t be choosers.
WHY I STOPPED USING MEDIUM.
Because of this story[1].
When Medium arbitrarily slapped a paywall on my free, open, and public writing, I realized that you guys believe that you own the material that I publish using your platform. The fact that I pay (admittedly a fairly token amount) to post this stuff, means nothing. Despite the claims in the silly “congratulations!” email I got, this did not increase the exposure to my article. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can no longer refer to the article, as most folks can’t read it. Good thing I have a non-paywalled variant (the original)[2].
It’s my writing. Not. Yours. PERIOD.
Since you guys have control of the platform, you hold all the cards. I’m a relatively “bit” player, and cannot expect any special treatment. In fact, I consider this very screed to be nothing but a fart in a tornado (I write in the vernacular).
But you did step up, which I appreciate, and I believe that it would be disingenuous to complain privately, if there’s even a chance that I might make a difference.
If Medium ever changes back to something that is useful to me again, I might consider using it. I maintain my subscription, because there’s stuff up there, and I don’t feel like going through the agita of changing all the callouts in my stuff[0], but I don’t plan on adding anything new.
A feature like Facebook stars (or whatever it’s called) is one way to pay publishers without paywalls. I default block medium posts on my search engine now. Until I see on HN how Medium has improved, this will remain.
^ this. It’s too easy to create your blog, and there isn’t much that you can bring to a writer besides a promise of an audience. I don’t think any of these products will ever win.
It’s also sort of uncool to write for these platforms, sort of how uncool wordpress was in its early days.
Writing for Substack isn't uncool. In fact if anything, it is extremely in vogue right now. But I agree with GP that eventually it will go the way of Medium, and a new "cooler" platform will take its place.
Maybe I'm in a different bubble, but most of the writers I see on Substack are individuals, not people writing on behalf of companies. If anything, companies using Medium is still more popular. Substack is also quite popular in the literary and arts circles, not just tech.
The thing with writing is that the smallest distraction can make you not want to write. Like, sure, I could go and set up a blog right now on my domain, but I'd have to find a blogging service (GitHub pages? I don't necessarily want to fiddle with markup though), log into my domain, potentially fiddle with HTTPS, and after all that I won't want to write my blog post anymore. And after I've written my blog post, I'm not going to fiddle with setting up my own blog because I don't have anything to write anymore. And next time I have something to write, I'm not going to want to fiddle with setting up a blog.
It's easier than ever to set up a blog. If you aren't interested in figuring out how to host your own, there are paid solutions like Ghost and Wordpress. You can always use one of those and migrate to a self-hosted one in the future if desired.
Ghost is $300/year just to show up and not have extreme limitations on customization. You can't even increase the size of the tiny fonts on the few available themes to something accessible on the base plan.
Wordpress.com recently completely revamped its pricing, pissing everyone off, then walked it back. And it's unclear what motivated it, or what's to come. This is the kind of omen that preceded Patreon's fall from obvious choice to reluctant best option of a bunch of bad or incomplete solutions. Automattic's pricing is more reasonable now, but the single $180/year plan they tried and walked back from hangs over it. It tells me they wanted to shift away from casual bloggers (like someone who doesn't want to worry about maintaining a .org install) to people who are willing and able to pay triple digits for all the features for business or personal PR purposes.
Interesting, I didn't realize either option were so expensive now! As an alternative, maybe something like Dreamhost's $10/yr plan and one-click wordpress installer?
DigitalOcean also has one-click installers/images available for ghost and wordpress, but would still be at least $5/mo.
Both of these options start to go back towards the burden of having to maintain them though.
I don't know if it exists, but maybe there's room for something like a desktop version of Ghost that allows you to write posts/etc locally and then publish to a static github-pages (or s3/etc) site.
To me the question is why use substack? Wordpress has been around forever, is free, doesn't have ads, and allows you to do customize everything you'd want.
Many of Substack’s content creators have paid tiers that bring in substantial revenue. For example, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald both have thousands of paid subscribers. It seems like the company should just keep cultivating this kind of subscription base, and they’ll get plenty of revenue without resorting to intrusive monetization.
I think there is a huge gap between "substantial revenue" and unicorn. I have no doubt that these platform can be great businesses, bringing in tens of millions of revenue or profit per year. But when you take on $100M in investor money you are forced to either go big or go home. And going BIG seems really hard with a newsletter or Medium-like business that has little defensibility. Of course, for the founders this may still end up being a great deal and the right choice, even if the company eventually fails.
Hm, Substack seems to be monetized differently though.
Medium was very much in the freemium camp: you go there to read articles, but if you read too many, you get stuck by the paywall. So on the user side there was this constant friction that was obnoxious. But on the author side, the incentive was to make your content as broad as possible because (if I understand correctly) everything got paid by the view out of one big bucket, a la Spotify. This is horrible for premium content (which almost by definition has a more niche audience) so not much of a surprise that type of content suffers in this model.
Substack seems to be more like Shopify: individual authors pick whether to monize, and if so how. This makes it much more viable to make true premium content, in the sense of "a thousand fans". I think this enables is creators who are very good at what they do, because their compensation is directly related to (number of readers times price each reader is willing to pay). In Medium that second term was basically fixed and the only way to increase revenue as an author was to write more click-baity articles. Substack optimizes the other direction.
As someone who has interacted with a lot of authors, I think this has a lot of value. On HN it's easy to forget that the vast majority of authors are not technical (and I mean this kindly, but really, really not technical). These are people for whom setting up any sort of a blog at all is challenging. Having a way to directly put up content, and charge for it, and be in control seems like a huge win for authors, and if it's a win for authors I think those authors will bring their audiences along to the platform, and the platform wins.
It’s almost like we’re doomed to watch platform after platform get corrupted by VC money - starting with the intention to provide a useful service, and inevitably being destroyed by the intention to profit at the cost of all else.
A lot of popular web apps seem to decay in this way. The founding developers create an excellent site, it becomes a huge cash cow, then the organization becomes bloated and more focused on extracting more out of existing value than creating new value or building on the original principles.
Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding.
This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links.
In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol
It is a difficult line, because sometimes you see a website become commercially irrelevant over time because functionality is not added. And I guess some sites need to follow visual trends to maintain customers.
Also there are long term changes that can force your hand. Mobile friendly required changes or you would lose those customers.
Some usability trends are improvements (and some trends are bad: Apple seems to prefer pretty looks at the expense of usability (Apple used to have a fantastic HIG (human interface guidelines))). https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
They're not adding functionality, they're putting pay walls up in front of old functionality. Look at Quora, certain answers are now pay walled, answers are supposed to be the core of the service.
Substack might be the new medium, and I think that's a good thing. Substack has a way for writers to get paid. I do pay for a few writers on substack, I don't even know if that is a thing at medium. Best thing about Substack over Medium, is that Medium was the most annoying blogging platform, it didn't like that I highlighted as I read. And it was really bad at finding more from an author.
Yeah, Substack is something new and seems to be gaining traction. I wonder if its success has contributed at all to Reddit's CEO saying he wants users to earn money,
> Spez - I want our users, user-users and moderator users, to make money on reddit. Specifically, I want them to make money from other users. And so we need to have business models where users are paying money to other users or to subreddits. I would like subreddits to have the ability to be businesses. We have a lot of subreddits that are kind of trying to do this, but the platform just doesn't support it.
I read your quote and I thought "nah, it's probably just Spez pushing crypto again". Then I click your link and he goes on to suggest Reddit NFT have been a community success. Then he talks about making people's lives better. The more I read, the more I felt that initial suggestion was correct. I do acknowledge noone else in that thread seemed to jump on that point.
I'm not sure how big of an issue writer pay is because there seems to be an infinite supply of people who will write for free trying to make a name for themselves.
the problem of writer pay is if you don't pay writers the supply of writers who can afford to put in the time to produce quality writing without pay dwindles down to those who have some other source of free money.
But not everyone who has access to the free money can produce quality writing, the supply goes even further down.
But there's a continuous supply of writers with wealthy parents and degrees from mediocre boutique liberal arts schools who are "following their dreams."
I didn't say there wasn't, but your comment seems rather disparaging of those writers, almost as if you think a good deal of them might not be worth reading? If so we are back to my argument that there is in fact not an infinite supply of writers worth reading who have the time to produce quality writing without compensation.
on edit: fixed you have the time to who have the time, writing on 2-3 hours of sleep does strange things at times.
> almost as if you think a good deal of them might not be worth reading
It's not that, but I was going for a cold, hard truth tone. Some of them absolutely are worth reading, it's just that supply outstrips demand. It's the same with musicians. There's an endless supply of good enough musicians in their 20's that are marketable. Or aspiring actors in waiting tables in LA.
It seems to me that once you are an established writer you can go to substack and get something worthwhile out of it, but otherwise - let's read this suggestion on how to grow your audience
I guess this is useful if there is no difference between your professional and non-professional personas, then you can get a lot of people reading you from linkedIn that are your professional connections and interested in what you write because you write about your professional interests.
Or if you are a naturally convivial person who has done nothing but expanded their supply of friends from high school on.
Or who has the free time to go to social events and socialize.
I'm writing on Medium https://medium.com/luminasticity because it seems to have an understandable way of building an audience that does not require you to do much other than write (although there is a detestable social aspect to it as well), it certainly isn't going great and it has taken 3 months to build 97 followers, most days I get only 4 or 5 views with every now and then a large amount for no discernible reason (by large I tend to mean 70 views), pretty much everything I write gets less than 100 views - whether a short funny piece about how suggestions by computers tend to be useless if you are actually competent [Suggestions from Idiots](https://medium.com/p/6b023acc30ae ) to a multi-story time travel narrative https://medium.com/p/adb84f467d8a with a recurring character.
I have however had one article that got 4.500 views - [To Speak Meaningfully About Art](https://medium.com/p/329093dbce7f) - why? Not sure, the Medium stats don't really tell you much.
As disheartening as it all is, looking at substack and I can't help but think I would probably be much less than that. Maybe I should have put both up and posted to both to see which got more traction instead of relying on my personal sense that Substack is for people who have an audience, and while Medium might be a ghetto you can maybe build something there.
They aim at different markets. Substack is for writers that already have a following, it is more like a SaaS. Medium is for upstarts trying to gain a following through the platform, it is more like a social network.
Is this really true? I thought that Substack allowed for discovery because you could see what other publications someone followed. So if you saw a smart comment on a popular substack, you could then click on the author and discover what else she was reading. They obviously also promote rising stars, but IDK what it takes to become a rising star in the first place.
it's basically true. Yes Substack has discovery mechanisms but given that most successful people on the platform are former social media personalities I doubt this cross pollination matters much.
It's effectively a blog generator with a built in payment button. A lot of the success of Substack hinges on the fact that Twitter exists. It's the social media funnel to the site where most of the actual value is.
Now that Substack is on the offense they are trying to branch into the social network market. Time will tell how successful they can be. Or there will be another SaaS encroach into their stronghold should Substack become too social-ly and antagonize the writers.
I think of the average substacker as a serious writer, often they have a background doing journalism. I think the average Medium writer doesn’t have much to say other than maybe ‘me too’.
There are quite a few right-wing sub stacks that I don’t agree with but they tend to be well written by people who treat it as a job. And that’s the thing, Medium is mostly a way to express or promote yourself, but some people really make a living writing a substack.
It's the right wing writers, or more specifically, the medically controversial writers that got me onto the site in the first place, mostly because certain authors are deplatformed everywhere else, or they can't write about certain topics.
I'm glad that they're leveraging this- but I also hope that this doesn't become the entire site. Seems like it's a very diverse range of writers so far, and I hope it stays that way.
If you mean the people who think they know more about trans people than actual trans people and the entire credible medical establishment, here you go: (this first episode of the new season is free) https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/the-war-over-gender/umc.cmc....
Of course, there's plenty of existing media and documentation, but he covers a lot of recent developments in anti-trans misinformation and even had on religious, conservative parents who were initially skeptical of their kids' trans identities in the panel portion. Jon Stewart is also way more liberal than the usual person who covers this, so he carries weight with the sort of people who fall prey to this sort of propaganda.
The interview portion reminds me of his bits on Crossfire and Mad Money. He doesn't get mad, he gets aggressively disappointed. He likes to like people regardless of politics, and doesn't like when someone makes that hard, and it shows here.
I was actually commenting on the vaccine stuff, which I believe is right now much more heavily censored than the trans stuff.
Either way, I'm not a fan of censoring "misinformation" in general, bad ideas should be countered with good ideas. I'll check out that episode, thanks for sharing.
Nothing is more infuriating than being blocked from reading an article on Medium when the original author clearly had the goal of freely educating as many people as possible.
The author can set the visibility status. If the author wants it to be freely available, that's an option. The downside is that the article then cannot be pulled into publications.
This is true, but the author is strongly incentivized to allow monetization because the question is posed in terms of "do you want publications to be able to republish this article" (paraphrasing). If you want this to be possible, then the article is put behind the paywall.
At one point I thought that Substack did what Medium should have done. Then I realized they launched many years apart, and probably if Medium had tried the Substack approach, it wouldn't have succeeded.
I also find it interesting that Substack is now migrating toward an app approach ("read all your articles in this app!"), which is basically what Medium was from the beginning. I have wondered how much the Substack team intended this from the beginning, and if the newsletter angle was largely for differentiation ("what makes you guys different from Medium?").
Also, in case anyone was not aware, Medium's founder/CEO (Ev William) departed this summer. [1] I wonder what the circumstances were, who owned what share, etc.
He’s still the majority shareholder and effectively in control. I am the new CEO and he is my boss through his role as chairman. I talk to him a couple times a week.
Thanks for sharing. Is there a way to get in touch? I had chatted with Ev about a collaboration a few years back and would be interested to find out if our tech (which increases reader engagement) would be a fit for the direction you're taking Medium.
My contact info is in my profile. Either way, good luck! I will look forward to seeing what you have in store.
If he's still in control, how does being the CEO work? Isn't he still basically the chief executive decision maker at the end of the day even though you are named CEO?
This is board dynamics. The CEO runs the company but the board decides whether the CEO keeps their job. Since Ev controls the board he is effectively the decision maker on my job. Thus he is my boss. I talk to him because he knows a lot and we had a prior working relationship. It ends up that he is my sounding board and advisor. But he doesn’t make decisions or plans or lead the teams.
This is my first time ever using the phrase “signal-to-noise ratio”, but I think that Substack’s is starting to lean on the side of noise. There is something about consciously writing and publishing with a subscriber count and monetization model looming over you that may make writing poor or attract poorer writers in general. I reckon it’s 6 months away from officially becoming “Diet Medium”.
My overly cynical interpretation: All signs point to 'eventually' don't they? Look at the history of everything, it's inevitable. Either you get big enough to become garbage, or you stay small and fade out.
The single exception to this is Bandcamp. <-- evidently I jinxed it. So maybe Bandcamp is not the exception.
Epic wants to nurture creatives, so I strongly doubt they'd try to squeeze it. Especially not before the full plan comes into fruition.
The game plan is this:
1. Draw capital from Fortnite and investments (Tencent, Sony, etc.)
2. Build up creative tools (Unreal Engine, Metahuman), marketplace ecosystems (Bandcamp, ArtStation), and platforms (Epic Games Store) to build the movies and games of tomorrow. Make them more compelling and synergistic than peer competitors.
Tim Sweeney is gambling he can turn anyone creative into a filmmaker or game designer. The long term game is to then take 10-15%.
It'll be interesting to see if Godot develops at a fast enough clip to become compelling to the next generation of game developers and eventually companies that want full IP rights.
It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe and other media companies can stop Epic from eating their Hollywood lunch.
That's great for them to realize their efforts, but unfortunate to hear personally. I really miss their dev blogs. Really cool stuff, with a classic flair.
Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.
Yes, from the demand side, it is the new Medium because that's where readers that didn't have a curated set of blog/column subscriptions or bookmarks are going for breath-of-fresh-air articles and technical analysis.
On the supply side, it's a different business and discovery model, as many others have noted. But you are asking about the demand side, i.e., what people are reading and sharing.
Was Medium paying people to write? Substack’s current growth hack seems to be paying certain writers as a way to subsidize subscription support. So I don’t think Substack’s goal is as clear as some might think. They aren’t a picks and shovels newsletter company. That was just a way to get people writing for them. It seems their real goal is to become a genuine publishing company.
There are a great number of people who write just for the love of writing. I wish more of these people would forego the “centralized blogging” platforms and publish using independent systems. When Covid hit I set out to write one article a day using my own self hosted site. Over time it organically started to become more popular. A few of posts are now first page search results.
As pointed out by a number of people already, money will end up corrupting what was once a great and easy outlet for people to share original ideas. A better alternative is to continue building systems that make it easier to publish independently AND create search engines that are not optimized to return SEO optimized click bait garbage for profits. I want blogs from real people who write because they want to teach me something.
Let’s get back to writing good content, share it freely, and change the world.
I could not agree more. My daily updates did stop. Writing something that is not complete shit for an entire year was hard. However, writing is also a personal experience. This again, is why I say write for the joy of writing. My goals were 1) become a better writer 2) focus on something that takes more then a few days, and see it through 3) document as much as I could about things I've learned over my career 4) write about things I love, which is something I think other nerdy people enjoy. In this example, my blog became more of a conscious stream. The articles that resinated with "my people" organically became popular. No SEO. No clickbait. No search-engine/spam shenanigans. Real writing from a real person with a real goal.
The main (only?) value of Medium from my perspective was that I occasionally cross-posted there when I had something of general interest that 1.) I wanted some broader discovery and/or 2.) It seemed to suggest (however incorrectly) a greater gravitas than a personal blog for linking from another site.
Maybe substack is similar. And maybe it's better at monetization though I don't really care and I suspect serious monetization is a real power law thing anyway. I'm not convinced personally about posting to substack rather than keeping on an independent blog.
I’m a fan of Substack, was never a fan of Medium, but I do worry that Substack will gradually get better and better for writers, and then gradually worse and worse until it becomes unusable.
The one thing I don't like about Substack's design is the popup trying to get an email address. Its annoying to always have to click "let me read it first" instead of just being able to read the post.
Because of that particular dark pattern to trick people into giving Substack their email addresses, I wouldn't call their design unobtrusive but it is nonetheless still better than most of the modern web.
If they styled the "let me read first" to be more `democratic' (i.e. easier to scan for) I'd have 0 complaints. Maybe also as a button with an hr to separate it from the email form.
I think this is a byproduct of being email first. PMs love to hate on email because they can’t add a bunch of noise, animations, videos. But so far as I’m concerned, that’s not a limitation, it’s a feature.
I never paid for a single article or author on medium and I have no idea if I even can?
On Substack, I have been a paid subscriber to 6 pages and wish I could pay subscribe to even more if I could afford it.
I think the real question is why didn't Medium do what Substack does? Seems like the logical business move (although maybe it wasn't as obvious when Substack started)
Medium tried to cater to specific writers and promoting specific publications even before Substack was a thing, but like most of Medium's initiatives it died due to neglect.
I wrote several Medium articles. But then trying to read other people's articles I hit the free-limit and couldn't read them. I had hoped that even if my articles don't make we money at least they could let me read articles written by others on the same "medium". But it didn't. So I stopped publishing on Medium.
My takeaway from this entire thread is this: We need a publishing platform that is owned by the writers based on their paid subscriber counts, time on platform and number of posts.
It's really the only way to create a platform with staying power and maintainable core values.
Yes, maybe the next Substack article will be the blog that saves you. Maybe it'll tell you how to free yourself from the checkmate that fate has you in.
I liked Medium from the beginning, when it launched, it was one of my favorite platforms to read, lots of great articles, always found something new to read in the tech or crypto space, but as the time has passed articles became worse and worse, lots of paywalls, some interesting authors stopped posting and I left it. I can't even remember when I last logged in there.
I was thinking that the other day, but for a different reason. In the beginning, quora, medium, substack, etc, they succeed due to good content. Once they build a reputation, they open the floodgates and throw it away. For the past few years, I skip over medium links -- not because paywalls but because it's probably low quality garbage. HN substack links have generally been good quality. But the last couple I've seen here were trending downwards.
I wrote a post about writing on Substack on my (tech-focused) Substack a few weeks ago [1]. TLDR it's helped cure my procrastination.
Two further observations:
- The fact that it is a newsletter service and articles land in people's inboxes makes me much more cautious about trying to ensure that the work is of sufficient quality than I suspect would be the case for a blog / medium. I don't want to be embarrassed and I don't want readers to unsubscribe. This seems quite different to Medium.
- Substack's recommendation system does provide a very meaningful boost in subscriber numbers. There is quite a bit of concern though about whether this is reduces incentives for writers to attract new readers to Substack and so will ultimately harm the platform.
It takes an herculean amount of effort to counter misinformation.
Deep state, conspiracy, Dr. Who is paid by Pfizer. Heads you lose; tails you lose. All of that crap. It's a losing game that keeps you on the defensive. You can cite facts and evidence but your up against memes essentially to reduce the sound bite to its essence. They will make shit up and have fake experts to support their positions and publish it in second tier places including substack. It drives clicks. Mainstream news orgs cite twitter of all places.
All you can do is encourage critical thinking which means asking people to explain their positions and being genuinely curious about their answers.
I bet you could study this on hacker news of all places. Take posts on specific subject matter and have experts rate the comments. Then have a random set of people rate them. See what you get. I bet most of us are wrong in our opinions.
There's that weird effect when you read a newspaper article about something you are expert in and notice everything they get wrong... then read the next article and take it all in verbatim. Not sure what the psychologists call it.. if it doesn't have a name it needs one.
You don't need $50-100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.