Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay. The thing Hackers can do, as in the OPs article, is to salvage the good ideas that the initial efforts of Capital managed to prove, and leave out the rest.
This won't work for individuals, in general, because writing good software is hard. Even if you rely heavily on 3rd party libraries like Jekyll, you still have to know how to pick those libraries, and how to use them, how to deploy them.
Personally, I think it's cool that Capital is willing to get into the fray, even though it so often ends badly. Often it does contribute something, even if it dies. People get mad at Google for axing projects, like Reader, but why? Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free.
I don't even think it's bad that devs at Medium are, almost by definition, currently working on nothing but anti-features. It's just part of the Capital-driven software lifecycle, and they are feeding their families, and learning a lot. I can't even hate the managers who made unethical product decisions, because it was always going to be that way, and better to participate in the Capital driven software lifecycle and contribute something then to never have participated at all.
There are amazing, sustainable, ethical, Capital-driven software ideas still waiting to be done, and that couldn't be done without Capital's involvement, but clearly that's not Medium and its ilk. But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.
I like to look at it this way: bad ideas, or bad executions of good ideas, or bad fits for VC, that somehow get funding and die before going public, or even better, get purchased by some bloated old company with too much money; the end result is a wealth transfer from the ultra-wealthy to the middle class. Paychecks get paid out. Stock options liquidate for something usually. Services get purchased to support the business even though they may not be worth supporting.
Right now, the VCs behind Medium are doing the world an amazing service. They're going to see almost no return on investment, but why would any of us "normal people" care about that? Its their money they're wasting. They're paying employees, probably a great wage. Probably providing a ton of benefits to attract talent, including lots of options, great insurance, snacks in the office, unlimited PTO. They're producing a product that is actively teaching competitors like write.as and ghost what Not To Do. I'd bet even most of their employees hate the direction they're going, which means they're learning as well.
>Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free.
I have a feeling that their intent wasn't to do it for free. What happened is that they couldn't gather enough information about their users to turn a profit. Yes, that's what capital does, but the end result was not free for any of its users - they gave up personal data to use it.
> But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.
This statement makes me so angry with Medium's corporate communications. It makes total sense to me that you'd think this, but I also think it's dead wrong.
The problem is that Medium is not clear that they've just straight up changed. So it's not that they are the big free open platform they used to be with an annoying "upgrade to pro" ad model on top of that.
Rather, Medium is primarily a subscription service. Even though they aren't saying this, it's best to think of them as an open-platform version of Netflix where anyone could post an episode or show and get paid for it.
That switch came with a switch in their incentive structure. The incentives for posting on Medium used to be that Medium will bring in a lot of traffic from their network. But they now limit that to articles that are published inside their subscription service. So there's not really any reason to post outside of their subscription service.
This is what I think you're experiencing: the free, non-paywalled portions of Medium are dying because the incentives for publishing went away and the aggressiveness at advertising their actual product (subscribe for, they hope, great content) has become more aggressive.
Meanwhile, while the experience that ElementaryOS was using Medium for is dying, there's a new experience that's quite good and I think plays a nice balancing role in the overall Internet ecosystem. Medium is making a place that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate writing for the purpose of marketing, and is pouring money into authors and editors so that they can invest more quality into their articles.
* > Medium is making a place that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate writing for the purpose of marketing, and is pouring money into authors and editors so that they can invest more quality into their articles.*
Can you explain this a little? I don't see much evidence that Medium rewards quality - unless you consider popularity to be a proxy for quality, which we've all learned, painfully, is false. Certainly Medium doesn't offer traditional publisher-style quality improvement services like copy-editing, editing, etc. So I'm curious what you mean.
It's also not clear to me how they dissuade "writing for the purpose of marketing" - plenty of people seem to use Medium as a straight-up content marketing platform, e.g. consultants with newsletters driving people into their funnel, and they want a URL to park their content, for bookmarks, and a place for shared responses.
If Medium actually did these two things, I'd say that they were indeed doing valuable service. But it feels a little like the difference between ideal and real value proposition that the Google Play Store and Apples App Store have: theoretically those walled gardens can enforce higher quality, safer software for end users, and lower friction to revenue for devs, but in reality, devs pay a straight 30% of revenue for that low purchase friction, and whatever illusion of value the platform can plant in users minds with good marketing and PR.
Maybe you are saying that Medium can, rather than improve actual quality, build a reputation for focusing on quality. Then writers can enjoy a similar halo effect as devs on the App Store? It's probably worth trying, from Capital's perspective, but not from mine, because I care more about innovative product design (which Medium has, in abundance) than rehashing a well-worn, slightly devious, business strategy.
I think you're proving my point that Medium needs to clarify their brand. They are actually doing all the things you mentioned.
Here's what I can see them doing.
1. You can't get distributed by their algorithm if your article has blatant sales or a call to action.
This removes the incentives for a lot of content marketers. Medium literally has a human read and filter every article behind their paywall. That's thousands of articles every day. It's not very sophisticated, but it's good enough to push back on most of the marketing pieces.
2. Medium's promotion algorithm relies heavily on their Topic feature and topics are all manually curated by editors.
Topics, i.e. Programming, Data Science, etc, trigger most of Medium's distribution paths. They get an article promoted to people in the app and they get the article in the mix to be promoted over email.
3. Medium's Owned & Operated pubs (their term for their internally run ones) do very heavy story edits.
A copy edit is when you do light grammar and spelling and occasionally wording changes. But a story edit goes much deeper often taking several hours. Many of these articles are original commissioned pieces, but I know Medium often "elevates" (their term) an article from the general platform. Here's an example of how deeply an elevated article gets edited:
https://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/status/11533445070871633...
4. Medium is increasingly paying for copy editing
I run two publications that do copy edits. They are my copy editors, but are paid for by Medium. These pubs are community aggregators, i.e. they publish a lot. I think there's some value in this even though I know the highest quality articles require a lot more time and editing. Anyway, we copy edit about 500 articles a month.
5. Medium is experimenting with paying for external story editors.
I think my original pub, Better Humans, is the only partner publication they have that gets paid to do a story editor. We have someone with subject matter expertise spend 4-5 hours on each piece reading each sentence for "is this true?" and "could someone follow this advice?" And we do all the normal editing things like sending a piece back for revisions.
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In sum, I think Medium is trying to have it both ways.
One way is a high volume of "better than the rest of the internet" content. That's how my two new pubs operate. We just want to clean them up and filter out the worst ulterior marketing motives. But we are definitely volume first.
And then in a different dimension, they want to have prestige publications that feel must-read. I think this dimension is much harder, but it looks like they'll get there. (And I know they want to).
> Medium is making a place that rewards quality writing, tries to eliminate writing for the purpose of marketing, and is pouring money into authors and editors so that they can invest more quality into their articles.
As someone who by principle wont ever pay that subscription, my experience is quite the contrary having all those metrics you say, going to the shit, starting from quality content...
Maybe some great articles get hidden behind the paywall but mostly to me it seems all low-quality click-bait shit now, and on top of it they put the modals and stuff...
We made the transition from just publishing anything that got submitted to doing much deeper editing. Maybe not the topic you care about but here's an example of what we were able to do with an editorial budget:
https://link.medium.com/uMM1k1cgjZ
> Well, the fundamental problem is that Capital comes in and builds a really great Thing, a Thing that may not have been built without Capital, but then Capital wants a Return, which causes the Thing to decay.
I feel like most of the examples of this are the other way around: Great Thing is built without a lot of capital (other than a bit to get started, if even that), then gets a bit of traction, and then Captial comes in and the demands for increased ever revenue starts, even if it might not lead to profits.
We really need to have a concept of a sustainable startup, not just "hyper-scale or bust". That is what normal people call a "business".
I have to politely disagree about Reader, it was already proven and working well, what they did was a bit of a scorched earth tactic, other companies couldn't compete with free and died. Then they pulled out and left a vacuum which has lead to a significant decline in in the usage of RSS in the modern web.
This won't work for individuals, in general, because writing good software is hard. Even if you rely heavily on 3rd party libraries like Jekyll, you still have to know how to pick those libraries, and how to use them, how to deploy them.
Personally, I think it's cool that Capital is willing to get into the fray, even though it so often ends badly. Often it does contribute something, even if it dies. People get mad at Google for axing projects, like Reader, but why? Consider all the market validation they did, for you, for me, for free. Consider all the product design work they did, for all of us, for free.
I don't even think it's bad that devs at Medium are, almost by definition, currently working on nothing but anti-features. It's just part of the Capital-driven software lifecycle, and they are feeding their families, and learning a lot. I can't even hate the managers who made unethical product decisions, because it was always going to be that way, and better to participate in the Capital driven software lifecycle and contribute something then to never have participated at all.
There are amazing, sustainable, ethical, Capital-driven software ideas still waiting to be done, and that couldn't be done without Capital's involvement, but clearly that's not Medium and its ilk. But as Medium declines and eventually dies, remember that this is the fate that waits for every project, no matter how successful, and they leave behind valuable information for us.