I'm guessing I read several Medium articles a month. Some of them are really well produced - Transit's engineering post on beautifying their maps, Remix's post about public transportation planning and ILP, and Karpathy's post on backprop come to mind. So I hope Medium sticks around because I get a lot of value out of them. Would I pay for this value? I think I actually would, but maybe only for stories I finish and think are good. For example I would pay a lot for the stories above but I would almost rather Medium pay me for posts which turn out to be thinly veiled marketing that I stop reading halfway through (I realize Transit's and Remix's posts could be construed as such but hey, the technical content was deep). I suppose a flat fee is better for the business but I could be more convinced to plunk down the credit card at the beginning if I was charged based on usage, like time spent reading on the site.
Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...
Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.
Blendle is a solution to a very different problem. Blendle provides unbundling for popular magazines and newspapers, i.e. you can selectively read single articles for < 1€ rather than having to buy a full issue of the paper in question.
It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s.
What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).
I think Blendle's funding model has potential. Of particular importance is how smooth it is to read, and just as easy to say 'nope, not for this one', or not.
I've read good things on Medium, but if anything Sturgeon's Law is too generous regarding overall quality. Considering the nature of the beast, I'm not even sure it is possible to change the quality ratio without potentially breaking what Medium is.
I'd be happy chipping in sub-dollar amounts here and there for the good stuff, but I am not going to pay a flat fee for access to what amounts to a whole lot of tripe and just a few meatballs.
That's what I like about Blendle's model. I'm an infrequent user (< 1 article a month) but I probably spent more on Blendle than the cost of a subscription to any one of Blendle's sources.
Out of all the articles I read, I think I clicked the refund button maybe twice, and that was only because the article was truly terrible.
I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have bothered reading any of these paywalled articles if Blendle didn't exist.
I think it is an analogy (pick whatever you want from whichever supplier you want, without having to sub to them individually) more than an exact duplication.
Well, the point of the analogy was to illustrate the business model.
I think there's room for a spotify model in writing. As a consumer, instead of a centralised platform, I'd like it to be an integration on the various websites I get content from.
I.e. the normal internet with it's various publishing engines, but paywall automatically bypased, ads automatically disabled and producer automatically credited & paid because I'm signed in to my 'servicename' account.
I just don't think there are enough people in America right now with any extra money to spend on articles. The middle class has to worry about paying for food and necessities. Millennials can't afford cable, and people think they will pay for internet articles they are used to getting for free? That business model is doomed from day one.
I'm surrounded by millennials, and most of the pay for Spotify and Netflix, or share an account with family members.
Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite a bit of money already on Blendle articles.
The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10 cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
People made similar arguments about selling MP3's when piracy was free. As soon as Apple was able to remove enough friction from the buying process, the market exploded.
Even people with the most modest of incomes used to regularly pay a quarter to read the daily newspaper. I see no reason why they wouldn't again, if the process was smooth enough.
I'm not sure that's true, I just think the price has to be right. For example, I would gladly pay a penny (UK money) per month to access an ad-free Medium, even though I never consciously visit that site, just because it's such a small amount of money that it's not worth bothering over. Same would go, for example, for Hacker News.
Obviously, a penny is a ridiculous under-exaggeration, but I feel it demonstrates the point well; 60,000,000 times a penny isn't bad money. And clearly a real-world business model would charge at least an order of magnitude more than that.
The real problem here is transferring that money in a cost-effective way. Would it be impossible for a central gateway to manage that task, charging providers a small fee for the service?
Actually, the substance of the article wasn't that bad, but after looking again at the browser title, I realized the title didn't square with the article at all, as usual.
Also, I think I would pay for the site, definitely, as long as it still somewhat pays publishers who contribute freely to the site in some cases.
Have you ever paid for a print magazine that doesn't have ads? They are usually at least $10.
For some reason, I've started receiving a few magazines at my house that I never asked for: Popular Science, Wired, and Cosmopolitan. They show up for six months, then stop coming. A year later they start again.
Medium has to compete with the rest of the blogging ecosystem, where many of their articles are actually cross-posted from personal blogs. The rest of that entire world, content is free or donation-driven, so the value of a Medium post is effectively nil. Arguably negative, for the feel-good garbage and corporate submarine PR.
I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX:
- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.
> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area.
That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...
It's even worse when it's a sticky header. In those cases when you hit the "Page Down" key the content is covered by the header and you have to press "Up" a few times to read it.
>> I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts
Blogger does this exceptionally well, or at least used to in its earlier default templates.
It allows monthly archives to be browsed like a tree, this does not require the page to reload and there is no waiting involved. In WordPress blogs if I click on an archive month, it will load a new page with excerpts of the posts. Without giving me a list of post titles I cannot easily decide what to read. As opposed to Medium, in many WordPress blogs, I can at least use URLs (e.g.: /2012/) to see all the posts from particular year or month, but they are paginated excerpts needing multiple clicks if there are more than a couple of posts.
Blogger had this for a long time and I don't see other templates (static sites[1], WordPress) incorporating this useful feature; this is the only feature that I, as a reader, miss in other blog platforms. Medium is the worst for this type of scan-ability. It focus overtly on prettiness[2] and leaves many usability aspects unaddressed. Presentation ugliness I can deal with Readability, Clearly[3] and similar extensions; usable archive browsing needs to be done well at the server side.
Using an iPhone 5S with the latest iOS I have caught a handful of behaviors that are clearly bugs, everything else is just the rumbling of a grumpy person with lots of personal opinions about web stuff. Some complaints are not even mobile related.
- Performance is fine. It's not great, but it's ok.
- Sometimes when I open an article/blog post and can start scrolling already it will push be back to the top. The virtual version of getting tripped up in real life.
- The bottom bar is uncomfortable. It adds zero value and adds bloat. On my iPhone 5S the SMS icon touches the Open in app button. Don't get me started on the desktop version with two bars. By the way, the useless and annoying black box that (probably lets you highlight text appears above the top bar when both are visible. I can only guess what the buttons in the black box do, they don't have tooltips.
- Try zooming in and out. Things start spazzing around with bad performance, text momentarily becomes white/invisible. The bottom bar is zoomed in too, becoming unusable moving around slowly depending on where I have scrolled. I am convinced nobody ever even tried out zooming in and out. A cheer for attention for details!
- If you start scrolling down, the top bar containing topic appears, but without its white background. The white background only appears once you stop your scrolling.
- Sometimes I "catch" the blurry, lazy loading images. I don't want to see that many seconds after I opened an article.
- Confusing navigation: Many articles lead you to other Medium sites with different top menu choices.
- The app shoehorning makes me feel like there is a lack of confidence in the web application.
>>> so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading.
I think you should go one by one. They have their own SPA logic, so when you click new article, only the content will be loaded, other parts will stay same.
Personally, I respect Ev more for his decision to put on the brakes, even when Medium seemed to be a financial success. We already have enough blogging platforms. We really don't need yet another one.
Ev Williams' mission to change the way journalism is funded and operated though, that's a truly noble ideal. Yes, it's likely too ambitious to succeed. Yes, it's a moonshot. But it's exactly the kind of moonshot that Silicon Valley needs to be taking. It's exactly the kind of moonshot that the world could really benefit from. I applaud him for his decision to put his unicorn at risk, in order to build something that could truly change the world.
He could have done that with a lot more tact - informing publishers and employees. He's non-confrontational - ok. Hire someone that isn't. Moonshots carry a risk and it's not all his risk. It's the investors, the users, the employees as well.
Letting employees know they're getting laid off before they read about it somewhere else isn't really one of the great mysteries of life, and doesn't take decades of CEO/executive experience to figure out. It's sort of a basic human decency thing. It shouldn't be that hard to be a decent human being.
From a technical level, no. Absolutely not. I can name at least 5 other free ways to blog, and maybe 15 if we throw in ones that require me to have my own server.
But finding a way to make money on blogs/internet journalism is starting to look pretty difficult. How much money is tumblr making for Yahoo? What about all the traditional media companies that should have this in the bag?
People are too used to "free" that making money on the kind of content Medium wants to be known for is starting to look a lot like a moonshot to me. But instead of the laws of physics or technology, you're going against human nature and culture. Not exactly a fight I'd want to pick.
I'm not going to argue with you about hero worship, though; it's pretty ridiculous.
This doesn't surprise me, based mostly on the occasional conversations I've had with Medium employees (all of whom raved about their jobs, by the way).
Medium seems to fall into a growing group of companies that are more interested in innovating on their management/internal politics than actually creating innovative products. (Buffer, which also had layoffs and management departures, is another example.) They're very invested in trying new management frameworks like holacracy and signaling a commitment to things like transparency or diversity. This is all well and good (plenty of very successful companies have innovated on internal structures as well).
The problem is when it becomes the entire emphasis of the company. If you look at what people's priorities are, it seems like they're more interested in the company than the product. You can't have two P0s and until you have a successful and profitable product, that needs to be your P0. [0]
[0] Unless you can fund things indefinitely off your personal brand and net worth.
I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to improve their business by improving journalism.
Don't forget classified ads either. Historically the rule of thumb is that subscriptions and newsstand sales would more-or-less cover the cost of ink and paper. Ads (and especially classified ads, which were an enormous money spinner) paid for the actual journalism.
The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable.
As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make money either; it was just there to get eyeballs onto the ads.
I would disagree somehow. You are right that classified makes money. However; news was not freely available as it is today and thus I would say that news was actually something people used to pay for. It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know what was going on.
> It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know what was going on.
Yes, absolutely. But the point is that while maybe people wouldn't have bought a newspaper that didn't have news, they still weren't willing to pay for the news component. When offered a choice between not having news and paying the actual cost if providing it, people have always opted against paying for it.
An obvious analogy is search engines. It's a useful and valuable service, but so far, users have not been willing to pay for the cost of providing one. Every search engine exists either as a loss making venture or is used as traffic/data generation for something profitable which cross-subsidises it. (Even DDG is profitable only due to their ads.)
Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.
Agree but it was the distribution of news which was valuable. I.e. that not everyone could delivery you news only the newspapers who also did most of the vetting and curation process for you.
Exactly. And hence the giant shift: the valuable distribution (aka classifieds) went to specialized sites, and no longer to newspapers. Newspaper business models were screwed online from the onset.
If they are going to a subscription or patronage model, they will need to cut way more jobs and costs. That type of model can work but you have to run very lean, and you might end up replacing those ad banners with ones begging for money. Organizations like NPR and Wikipedia are some of the largest to use such a model, they have the benefit of goodwill and tax breaks due to their non-profit status, and their cost structure and business model looks very different from most valley startups. You can kiss that valuation goodbye.
The model here isn't NPR or Wikipedia, it's Patreon and Twitch.
The former is traditional philanthropy, but the latter is an interactive way to support content creation. I'm not saying that those models will necessarily translate to Medium, but that certainly seems to be the idea.
I urge anyone that's curious to go give Twitch a quick look. Spend a good half hour in a few different channels. It's really interesting. Some of the streams are what you would expect: skilled gamers playing at a high level. But many of them are very creative in how the develop a community, how they interact with viewers and chat, and what sort of entertainment experience they provide. I think that most people will 'get it' if they watch for a bit. It's compelling entertainment, and lots of people are willing to throw a lot of money at it.
The point is that it's just an entirely different phenomenon from philanthropy. NPR and Wikipedia really have no place in this discussion because they are so different.
The usual sensationalistic headline, but the gist of the story is crystal clear: ads and writing is an inherent and probably impossible-to-solve conflict of interest.
The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait.
(And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not the answer. Hopefully this will fall to the wayside as more people learn critical thinking and sourcing [I don't see much evidence for this yet but I'm very hopeful ;) ])
But, the risk of losing the cadre of serious journalists at the large outlets that today are struggling, and who rightfully demand a good salary for their critical work (as members of the fourth estate), is a real one which needs to be solved. If Medium can be a part of forging a new way ahead, then more power to Ev. Haters always gonna hate, often without much thought, self-reflection, or humility.
Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the only option.
The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history.
I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.
The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm no longer interested in buying A Certain Thing. The ads are useless for the advertiser, because they're paying for nothing. And the ads themselves are usually animated and irritating anyway.
Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
The online ad industry has never understood the difference between adding value to readers and repeatedly smacking them around the head in a misguided attempt to force them to click the BUY NOW button.
Medium missed the point of all this. The content varies from outstanding to not so good, the design is great. But it's a bit late to be thinking about monetisation, because now it's just replaying the mistakes made by every other media platform over the last decade and a half.
> I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing.
Yeah Google ads are awful now. The best bang for your bank, ads wise? Facebook and Super Bowl commercials.
> Print ads, especially in the glossy predecessors of what Medium would like to be, were often professional, creative, and at least potentially interesting.
When was the last time you purchased a product with print ads? I used to subscribe to a ton of magazines a little over a decade ago but cancelled them all because for every 1-2 articles of content there were 3-4 ads. It got to the point where I could finish a magazine, cover to cover, in minutes because of how many ads were in there.
Amazon ads are no better, and for the exact same reason. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon first appeared, everyone was talking about how they were going to be able to make magic suggestions. Turns out, all the magic is just telling you to buy again what you JUST BOUGHT.
Netflix recommendation engine isn't amazing either -- except that, in the case of Netflix, I often like to watch a show a second time.
Lots of people on /r/juststart think Facebook ads are no good. On firms with lots of brand equity I've foudn both FB and Google to be good. Display ads - not so much
You miss the point. Adds are not to make you buy product. They primary focus is building brand and product awareness.
When you next time buy Certain Thing you will subconsciously pick product from the brand you received 6 months of adds. Just check your shopping basket next time in supermarket, most products will be branded well advertised and pretty packaged. Humans are really shallow...
Medium is failing because they are overspending and do not have really a product. Medium should have light adds and option for add-free subscription. It should share some profit with best writers to create more high quality content. Medium should have also agreements with mainstream media to republish some articles. And finally they should have enough machine learning and with twitter that they should own PR.
What actually happened to the ideal of rewarding content based on 'attention minutes'?
My experience of Medium is that the content that gets surfaced is from people who are already 'notable' in some other way (think that Medium allowing you to import your Twitter followers and have then auto follow you on Medium doesn't help this), and low value Steve Jobs self-help bullshit.
I can buy into curating 'hidden gems' using data in the way Spotify does, I can get behind breaking unheard voices, but I can't see how the current model of giving famous people a megaphone was ever going to upend journalism.
I've really enjoyed some of the articles I've read on Medium and would love to support the authors. However, one of the hardest things is finding other similar or interesting articles. I'd pay a monthly fee for a list of daily/weekly articles that ML or user like me recommend. I love to learn but the hard thing is sometimes finding the new thing to learn about.
> I mean what Medium is beside a glorified Wordpress
Wordpress (well Automattic) is a >1 bil company, operates about 1/5th of the websites on the internet, spawned a massive industry (and depending on how you slice it, also a subindustry) that provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of web developers and designers, and greatly shifted the nature of blogging and websites on the internet. So yeah, I'd say if there's a company that claims to displace Wordpress it's not unthinkable for it to raise hundreds of millions.
You're conflating two very different things. WordPress.org is open source software that runs a substantial portion of the modern web and do all those things you say. WordPress.com is a hosted blogging SaaS like Blogger. Medium is a WordPress.com competitor, a very important distinction.
The point remains; given the size of Automattic/Wordpress.com, it is very understandable how a wordpress.com competitor founded by the creator of blogger could raise large sums of money.
Probably more accurate to say that Medium is a glorified Blogger. I'd argue that the two are better at different things and I sometimes cross-post from Blogger to Medium.
But what I find a bit silly is that Medium often gets held up as a journalistic enterprise when it's just a publishing platform, albeit a nice one.
The linked article answers why Medium sometimes gets held up as a journalistic enterprise--at some points, as they've flailed around for business models, they've directly paid writers and editors for content, and at other points they've courted other publications to either move to Medium wholesale or provide exclusive content for them. WordPress sees their technology platform as the core of their business. Medium seems to see their technology platform as a means to an end; they just can't figure out what that end is.
And Medium doesn't charge anything to let you put a domain over your writing. Automattic's services are a poor deal for everyone except the very few people who make significant money through their writing and need a lot of customization, but don't want the headache of running their own WordPress.org install.
I deliberately avoid using ambitious publishing platforms. I don't think this is an industry where you can grow your revenue without defeating the purpose of the product. This is an industry where you have to survive on tight margins, and figure out how to reliably provide the service longer than your users live without losing your wife. It's not glamorous, but there is no other way to offer a platform worth publishing on.
If your business is going to fail after less than a decade of hubris and greed, then why not use any other blog platform?
From the article, "industry insiders have growing doubts about Williams' business judgment and are starting to say the company is his vanity project"
This is the co-founder of Twitter which is still losing money despite being post-IPO and having a huge user base. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is still a vanity project.
While the scale is different I don't see that the underlying issue is.
What you are suggesting about making Twitter profitable (which I happen to agree with) seems to be what they are attempting to do at Medium with these layoffs.
An aside on the Twitter front though; at this point I'm not sure cost slashing is going to help their stock prices at this point even if they turn a profit as they are already showing declining revenues.
It's a personal guess, based on knowledge of the ad market, inferences from their firing decisions, and gossip from some friends who know people there.
As a blogging platform I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a month, but no more. I look at other platforms like Ghost, who want $20/mo, and I wonder who in their right mind signs up for it. You can host your own site for far less.
That rather depends how you value your time w.r.t the opportunity cost of doing other things. Valuing my marginal time with a purely internal cost metric of $500ph, that $20 equates to a tipping point of 2.5 minutes a month on the complete hosting setup & management. Since it will invariably take more than that even amortized over a year it's a no-brainer: I'm okay with paying for blog hosting, assuming it's a service offering the same capabilities and quality level I'd build for myself.
NB: I receive no additional value clawed back from DIY since I do not desire any additional experience with building, configuring, securing, managing, monitoring and maintaining web servers and/or content management systems.
I view Medium not like a news or blog, but at its best - like the OpEd page of a major newspaper. Medium destroys the average newspaper website experience - ad crazy garbage everywhere.
They should lock down public figures who are writing important articles.
For instance, why not put someone like a Colin Powell on a retainer, to write regular articles, and he writes exclusively for Medium. There are some powerful figures like that - retired, out of political offce. Meanwhile they should be also finding the young important voices of the future, who can be had cheap at this point.
What you describe is basically running an online magazine or media organization. You hire writers to write pieces, and users pay a subscription fee. This is what the NYT times. The article mentioned that this was their original business plan but it was scrapped.
As it is, I never go directly to Medium, I only read their articles when an aggregator like HN links to it. If Powell wrote for them, then some percentage of those random visits I'd go "huh. Colin Powell."
I'm going to disagree. I think exclusive blogging content is kind of fundamentally opposed to "how the written internet works" (imo). Building yet another paywall strikes me as a bad idea. I much prefer "soft exclusive" where your site is the preferred one because you make it easy for the writer and the consumer. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'd rather build a "Twitch for journalism" than a "Netflix for journalism" because you compete with free content and a culture of free (Twitch vs. private websites/Youtube etc.) and not vs. other premium content (Netflix vs. TV). Or put yet another way...you don't compete with the Washington Post, you compete with insightful forum discussions and quality private blogs.
Building a good way to monetize good writing is a very hard problem.
It would if they then syndicated the posts to publications around the world. German newspapers and magazines, for example, could have their pick of prominent writers they otherwise would not have access to and couldn't afford.
No sharing. Prominent people's opinions in Medium articles would make news and drive people to Medium content. "Colin Powell calls Trumps immigration policy misguided". That's a global headline. Traffic rules.
Everyone tries to think like a VC. Medium will never be the biggest money. What they can do is be the next '60 Minutes', not the biggest, but prestigous and elevating.
Having Powells weekly column is more valuable and provides something you can plan around and build a business model around. You can't do that with social media snippets.
You seem to be equating prominent writers with more revenue. But the real question is how do you get enough revenue even with prominent writers. It just' doesn't scale.
No, its not the quality of the content which makes it a business, this is exactly the misunderstanding of the whole mission to save journalism. Its never been a business to begin with.
> "It comes down to how dysfunctional the place was,"
I'm not an insider by any means, but right from the early days of Twitter, I'd heard this word - dysfunctional - to describe Twitter a lot too. All those "fail whales" and strange and sometimes sheer dickish moves (like pulling API access to developers) were just inexplicable.
I feel medium would have a chance if they allowed video and audio content to be published there. They already have the users that produce such content. Imagine it like a youtube/soundcloud for adults (I don't mean pornographic content). They could then sell many products and services around it.
First, I'd love for Youtube to see more competition.
But, honestly what Youtube are you using? Despite the glut of kid-oriented content on the site, I see almost none of it. The hobby scene alone is a huge segment of the site and caters more to the 30-60 bracket than any other.
"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was ditching."
This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller, and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew Winer personally.
First of all, thoughts go out to everyone laid off. If there are any SRE/SWE looking to work on ops problems in the Washington/New York areas hit me up.
I really really wanted medium to be successful. Over the past several years I have tried several different places to write/host my blog and medium by far was my favorite. I loved the design, editor and most of all draft/sharing for in-progress posts. I hope they can find a better business model that still keeps same spirit.
>They were shocked. Their adored boss, billionaire CEO Ev Williams, best known as the cofounder of Twitter, seemed to care so deeply for each of them.
LOL, as if CEOs (with the exception of some outliers in small businesses) ever care for their employees at the personal level. As soon as the company is in danger, it's off they go. And when the company does well, they aren't going to share the loot that much either.
Past a certain size, it's impossible to care for all employees on a personal level. It's nothing malicious. You just physically cannot connect with them any more.
I personally think the cutoff point is somewhere between 30-50 employees.
Yeah, but you tell the employees about layoffs at least a day ahead of plublishing a blog piece. Only a complete turd would announce mass layoffs on a blog post before telling employees directly through their manager.
I've worked at a few small to medium sized businesses that went through layoffs. At that scale, you can corner the CEO and ask them about it (i only asked years after the event).
There's no easy way out. I'm sure the big guys are all run by sociopaths, but the few i talked to really struggled with it. It really boils down to, some people are out of a job today, or everyone is out of a job in 6 months.
This also includes the early detection of impending doom where everybody takes a 10% paycut - executives take a lot more (for a while anyway). So you can get away without a layoff. That guy felt the business would have been better if he let 10% go. The one time event can start healing immediately. That twice a month reminder of how much less you're making keeps the wound open a lot longer.
I've never met one who didn't (effectively) say "I failed and those folks paid the price"
If you build a restaurant, fail to get customers, and sell it to somebody else who wants to run it for more money than you paid to create it, would you say the same?
It's not money losing as far as Williams is concerned -- somebody paid him mucho dinero for it.
I guess this is one aspect of academia that seems to be more humane than corporations. Faculty advisers and universities have interests that are aligned with their graduate students. When the students do great research and win awards, the adviser and university gets credit. While there are of course horror stories when they don't get along, academia at least still believes in investing in people, and not just using them for the product of their work.
A corporation would never take a new grad, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of 1:1 time to teach and mentor them, put that person's name front and center on all the products they've worked on, and celebrate when that person moves up to another company.
Academia relies on students to exist, the students are the customer not the workers - so the power is a lot more in favor of the grad student, not that academia itself is any more noble or humane.
I doubt academia is inherently any more humane than corporations - the drive is pride and recognition instead of money but they compete just like businesses do.
I'm not sure how you're making the distinction between customer and workers. I'm talking about graduate students here, particularly research-producing Ph.D. students.
I think we both agree that academia and businesses compete, but by humane I mean that the people producing the work are invested in by the faculty and universities. That the graduate student's life-long success is the university's success, and that the output is the scholar as much as the work they produced.
My point is simply that a corporation doesn't care for a person besides the work they do for them, which is a different culture from academia.
I like Medium for browsing front end dev articles in the morning.
But I think there is a big UX and design issue that should be questioned : the "feed".
This concept has been overused and it doesn't serve users. When I read on Medium, I'm in the mood for reading programming stuff, or design stuff, or other stories. But I'm rarely in the mood for reading a completely random feed of all those topics intermingled. That makes no sense to me.
And you can follow "Publications" but it doens't help very much, you still get a "feed" in the homepage. And the publications don't really work as a magazine rack.
That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.
How would I solve that? First off stop "feeding" people. I mean just the term is wrong. Why do we need to be "fed"? The assumption for this design I assume, is that a feed makes it easy to discover content and for the initial experience. But why should it remain the central piece of focus everytime you start the app?
I think it would make more sense to add the concept of magazines. That is why I think Flipboard works so well (at least for me). The problem with Flipboard is that it also treats every magazine as a feed, and is designed primarily as a RSS kind of consumption where old content is to be forgotten while only new content is relevant. Thus it also doesn't work as a repository of valuable articles. A lot of things are written that are timeless and both the Flipboard and Medium approach and insistence on "current day" writing/ stories reduces the value of these tools.
What I would suggest is to add the concept of magazines at the very least. Let people create "baskets" of interests, and let them drag and drop tags into these baskets. Then present those "smart magazines" with tags showing where there are updates?
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As an aside my experience with Medium last month could be summed up in two words: "feminist rants".
Ever since I started using Medium, I thought.. I already use Flipboard and Feedly. So let's focus. There are some pretty cool CSS/Javascript articles on here so I decided to follow exclusively programming and design topics. I would read Medium in the morning to catch up on front end dev lang.
But.. Medium had another idea. My feed kept getting ridiculous feminist rants and other political B.S. I don't want to read. No matter how many times I pick "Show fewer stories like this" I couldn't get rid of them. This happened for several weeks.
I contacted them because I thought my account was the perfect example of something wrong with their recommendation algorithm. Why on earth did Medium keep saying I am interested in feminism when I NEVER recommended any such articles (they tend to have obnoxious click bait titles and terrible writing)?
I looked through every person that I may have followed or recommended. I could'nt find anything. The closest to a meaningful connection I could see is one female journalist who "liked" on of my responsoes. Mind you Medium considers a simple comment to someone else's story as a "story". As if a comment had the same value as writing an articile in the first place. But I digress...
So I blocked a couple people. First off, they don't disappear from the notifications pane. This is WRONG imho.
Secondly, it didn't change squat.
Eventually I became sick and tired of seeing feminist rants in the middle of my programming / design feed; so I deleted my account and started anew. Hey at least Medium got this right : you can delete your account entirely and it was easy.
So here is my tips for people who still want to use Medium:
- NEVER EVER follow anybody whom you aren't sure that they share your interests 100%.
- NEVER EVER recommend any articles unless you reviewed the tags and all the tags are specific enough to your interests. (Medium loves to make all kind of tangential connections and also recommend you stuff based on extremely lose tags like "Journalism" or "Essay"... follow these and soon enough raging feminists will entertain your feed every day).
Funny enough even with these rules in place. When I created my new account I still got an influx of feminist/political rants (bad writing) but they were gone after a few days.
And I realize that I use Medium in a way they probably didn't mean to: I really focus my feed on an area of interest. But then again they designed this completely wrong putting things backwards. When I go into a newspaper shop, I browse the rack for magazeines I'm interested in. I don't go to the owner and say, "hey you got something from me to read?" And even if I did, he'd probably look at me weird for a moment, then he'd be like "well, what do you like to read?"
Presumably this is what the tags system is supposed to do. Many online sites lets you pick your "interests" whne you creat a new account. But the analogy stops herE. Because in a newspaper shop, I'd tell the guy "well, videogames, and uh.. science". And he 'd point me to magazines. He wouldn't print a "feed" to me of random crap from different sources.
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PS: Also please stop writing "stories" in your iOS updates and tell your users what you changed or fixed, even if it's minor thing. Yeah, we get it you're all about "stories". Jesus. Stick to medium if you want to entertain people, and serve your users by describing what yo uactually changed or updated, even if it has to be the usual "misc performance fixes".
Also, let me just take a moment to once again rage against Business Insider for writing a pretty bad article. The whole thing seemed purposefully antagonistic and full of sarcastic language. Maybe it's because BI is the exact type of operation Medium is trying to kill, but I think those MAU numbers actually warrant some optimism! To be fair, Medium probably should have provided some people to counterbalance all those angry publishers...