Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down.
Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant?
That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.
I remember a few years ago I started to realize that if I somehow see the link pointed to "medium.com" I would just... nope. Not willing to take the gamble if I can read the page or not.
Agree, this is surprisingly annoying when you click and it tells you "nope sucker, not today, you're not getting to read something you're interested in". Why should I even bother to get my hopes up in the first place?
same with New York Times... and Wall Street Journal... and Financial Times... and The Economist... and many others.
I've wondered what it would take to pre-emptively edit HN so i don't even see those links.
Medium "won" this market a few years back as well. The reason it sucks now is because investors aren't paying them to make the internet reading experience nice. And in any case, readers aren't willing to pay a subscription fee for 'nice'.
Substack is now the leader because investors haven't pressured them to turn more newsletters into paid products. They will, they just haven't now. And just like Medium, the really good writers will have enough capital to run their own newsletters, and use Substack only for SEO. Sound familiar?
Soon, we'll begin to see "name.substack.com" with the same kind of suspicion that we now see "medium.com".
Substack didn't start doing this until it had pulled significant share from Medium. I suspect it will hurt substack long term too.
In a way this feels like the cycle of image hosts. Everyone moves to the new user friendly one, that one enshittifies the site to make more money, cycle repeats.
I have a newsletter for CTOs, and I try hard not to link to Substack any more, the number of my readers seem to automatically lock the article behind a pay wall - Substack is lost I think as a website (don't know about the newsletter aspect).
I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.
Same here. I have no patience for this type of shameless spamming anymore. One thing I hate about Medium is that it puts a paywall across everything, as if they’re The NY Times. If anything, I care about the author I’m reading, not Medium. With Substack I can subscribe to an individual author and they are the ones deciding what to paywall. Sure Substack gets a cut if I subscribe but that’s in the background.
I'll interrupt this stream of consensus to note I don't have issues following a link to Medium.
Here's how it goes: I open a link, I dismiss a sign-up suggestion screen (if any), I read the stuff, and then I go. If there's a paywall I leave, but I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.
There are low-quality posts but they are plenty on all platforms (dev.to comes to mind). On plus side Medium articles are comfortable to read without distractions.
Point me to where I said "Medium is Economist" or cease.
I can count on my fingers the number of Economist articles I read per year while my history is full of recent Medium visits, mostly related to work so stuff that translates in productivity and earnings. They're not even in the same ballpark.
> I see many more paywalls at links to the Economist or similar sources so what's the big deal? People want to make money.
Of course but it has to be a balance. Medium does all the things I mention.
If they did just one of those to monetize, ok I'd not be happy but I'd give them a pass. A paywall ideally not because I'm really not going to subscribe after reading only 3 articles.
But doing all of those makes me feel like a cash cow. Like they're grasping at straws desperate to get some cash. They don't understand the user-hostility of this and that's important because the users are their resources.
And as far as the NYT and Economist, I avoid those too. If I really think something is worth reading I'll use a paywall bypass tool but generally I don't even bother.
Maybe that's just me or selective geolocation but in my experience Medium almost never hits with a paywall, and because a lot of useful material is there I am not seeing it a problem. Substack links, for example, are significantly more annoying so I actually take a moment and think if I should even bother.
It's even difficult to read a medium post on archive.org because the page seems to reload every couple of seconds. (I was in archive.org because they banned somebody who thinks things that they don't think... Or something, it mentioned breaking rules but didn't say which rule, or link to the rules)
Fundamentally, it's hard to build a profitable blogging platform we'll like, because all you really need to do is render markdown/HTML with a decent stylesheet. Most features on top of that should either be browser extensions or shouldn't exist at all.
Everything else is platforming, which we will also argue should be separated from the blog itself. This is why we have URLs and links. Just as in the restaurant example, I first go to a credit card company, then I go buy dinner.
It’s crazy to me that they seem completely blind to the root problem. When I pick a blogging platform I don’t want popups, paywalls, required logins, or anything other than the content. Medium took off because it had a simple clean UI and good posts, and seemed like the lowest friction way to blog. Now Medium has huge amounts of friction and feels like yet another business trying to pump money out of users, so Substack is the new go-to and someone else takes their place.
I assume the plan from day one was make a very appealing platform at a loss, gain a moat from a huge library of good content, then squeeze the profit out of it.
It's a deceptive business model, and people feel deceived and no longer want to do business with that company (surprise!).
The thing is video hosting at scale is still a pain, I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one, and almost all their content is still free in unlimited amounts. I'm not sure I've ever paid YouTube a dollar directly even though I watch it daily.
There may be some similarities (like when they used to let people upload full movies and TV shows), but it is a big stretch to paint YouTube and Medium with the same brush.
>I have a YouTube account because I have a Google account so they never nagged me to create one
hmm, not sure what you mean. I have a gmail account from early early days, and I've never created a youtube account. I would've accepted it if they forced it on me, but given the choice I've never seen a reason to create one. They nag me to create one if I forget and try to upvote, or comment, and they nag me for subscribing on the regular also.
perhaps if I created a gmail account later on it would come with youtube?
While there definitively _are_ similarities, this example (as far as I’m concerned) is a perfect illustration of a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and that Medium - as opposed to YT - unfortunately did cross.
I’m personally trying to avoid Medium links because of the 3-article-max/month paywall applied to my account, but clicking on a YT link isn’t a problem for me.
Why? Go figure! I’ll have to deal with the ad(s) - more and more so! - and a request to test YT-premium, but the net benefit is felt like positive for me at the end of the day.
And for them too I guess!
Medium should invest in UX study, get to know better their targeted users and implement a paywall that is _just_ painful enough so that it doesn’t cause the customers to associate your brand with a negative concept.
You can trick us into paying, but do it nice and sweet! We want to feel like you deserve it, not that we got forced.
"This video has been removed because of youtube policies".
This is the exact same thing: shitification.
Make a cool product at a loss then make it shitier to use to bring as much money as you can before enough users exit to break your network effect. You can even make it last longer by making it as hard as possible for your users to leave.
If the process is not entirely clear to you, look at Twitter. (Elon Musk is incredibly not-subtle at this). Everyone of those monopolies are "too big too fail" until it does. Yahoo was like this. Tumblr was like this. Facebook and Twitter were considered as indestructible gods yesterday: they look incredibly fragile now (I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"). Youtube is indestructible? Every single creator is complaining about having video removed/unmonetized while every single person I know is baffle and annoyed at the number of advertising they get. Wait for the moment when people will hear about Peertube.
What most people fail to realize is that "failing" is never a big nova disappearance. It’s more subtle, becoming slightly more irrelevant. Yahoo is still there after all. Youtube/Facebook will still be there in 10 years. (while some may even wonder if Twitter will still exist next year). I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.
What few realize that it is all part of the plan when running a VC business. You have the "invest phase" (everything is free, growth at all cost) then the "cashing phase" (aka "shitification"). VC never invest without an horizon. So, sooner or later, money will flew out and the whole thing will fall. People miss it because the brand usually keep a residual value which keep the light on.
That’s why the only long-term sustainable solution is free software. Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades (sometimes without major changes in their architecture, which is awesome when you think about it).
That’s why, all in all, Medium must fail. It’s all part of the plan. I was lured in myself years ago but I painfully exported all my medium content to my own blog. It took me years to realize that any centralized platform is one signature away of being elon-musked.
> That’s why the only long-term sustainable solution is free software. Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades (sometimes without major changes in their architecture, which is awesome when you think about it).
Free software isn't enough though, we need publicly run platforms that are not driven by profit interests. I think the only way this can work long term is if those platforms are sufficiently decentralized that the damage can be "repaired" when individual instances fall.
The alternative would be government- or non-profit-run infrastructure, but I am not confident that that will hold up against money interests. See e.g. ICANN and the increasingly monetized domain name system or the sellout of Freenode how money can corrupt or take over such centralized platforms.
You are framing it as if money is the root of the problem. But it's not the case. It would be cheaper for Youtube to not ban anyone. It would be cheaper not to spend money on algorithms and people that post something they don't like. They don't make money - at least not directly - by controlling the narrative of public discussion and distorting it to their liking. They get something which is very important to somebody who already has the money - power. With power, they can ensure they keep the money, and also enjoy all the benefits of being rich and powerful. If you think getting the government to rule it would be better, you are deluded. Government is concentrated power, so it would only multiply the problems, and since the government can not be replaced by something else (at least not without very much unpleasantness and shooting and other bad things), they would have zero interest in sharing their power with anybody else. And if you think you will be able to control this power by just voting once in two years, you are double deluded.
Censorship is a different issue. It is a political/culture war related, not denying me content because they want money from me, but denying me content because they think this content should not be available to anyone. It is a horrible thing, much worse than paywalling tbh, but completely different thing.
> I’m teaching to CS students and they consider facebook as "the thing used by their grandparents"
Mostly true, but that isn't that bad tbh. Grandparents have income, grandparents have time to spend, and grandparents aren't prone as much to jump to the next new shiny thing. True, they will eventually go away, but it's not going to happen very soon. So if that is true, Facebook has at least a decade, and maybe more because my generation (which would roughly be "parents" to your students) also uses FB, though much less now.
> I keep hearing that "mastodon will never replace Twitter" while it already has: there are now more links to toot on HN homepage than links to tweets.
Is there? I see two tweets links, and none of the "toots" (I will never get over the fact that this word means "fart"). I am no fan of twitter, but I am not sure how Mastodon would be better - all censorship fans are already there. I mean, you could use it as a blog, I guess, but why not just use a blog then?
> Free software are the only software that can stay successful for several decades
I was thinking that too, for a while. Until culture warriors started attacking the free software. Now I am not so sure. I mean, they probably won't be able to take down a huge project like Linux - too many people depend on it being there - but I am pretty sure they could destroy any smaller project. Think about it - how much abuse would a person be willing to take based on something they don't even get paid for?
Youtube has amazing infotainment right now. Its a super cool emergent phenomenon that there are soo many amazing niches filled by content creators putting out information dense 45 minute+ videos. I don't mind the ads in this case (vs some short clip), and they all seem to have sponsors as well.
I'm already less likely to click Youtube links than a (usually Fediverse-hosted) webm/mp4. I think innertia will keep them going for quite a while though but hopefully more sites will start hosting their own videos. And hopefully browsers will pull their head out of their collective behinds and fix the <video> tag so you can do statically hosted adaptive streaming without bringing your own HLS/DASH implementation.
And Substack's already starting to feel the same way; the incessant prompts to create an account and subscribe to something are the telltale first red flags heralding an intention to put monetization first and utility second.
I cant think of a single platform thats doesn't ultimately lose relevance and get replaced that does this.
A few days ago people here said their Google trick is appending 'Reddit' to the query. Not Quora. Not other dedicated Q&A sites that have been around as long. Reddit the free (minus the dumbass mobile app prompt.)
Same for log-ins. Pinterest? Forget it. Twitter? Just missing a replacement.
I don't know what analytics compel these guys to put a gate in front the platform. Just accept what people are willing to give you. I guess they wake up one day and realize everyone just moved on.
Quora is a shithole too. I remember 5-6 years ago I hung out in Quora because it high quality content from real experts. It was really interesting. Now it's nothing.
Websites (forums, mostly) have figured out they'll actually drive more traffic if they didn't have a sign-up wall.
The signup requirement is myopic, some PM looking into the data and doing some math they can make more $$$ per unique visit if they make them sign up, not realizing the long-term harm it creates because it drives the unique visits way down.
No argument. But how do they make money without these measures? Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker, the vast majority of their labor—moderators—work for nothing.
I have known dozens of people who would gladly pay $20 a month to have a platform where they can freely share their writings and discuss with like-minded people -- small clubs, if you will.
Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.
Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.
The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.
Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.
But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.
I was going to say that $20/mo sounds a bit high but then I remembered that I still have a $20/mo VPS for pretty much that purpose (email, small websites) and I can't can't really be bothered to downsize the server even though there is plenty of room (except disk space).
People only view $20/mo as high because many other subs are less but when you point out to them how much money they spend on several $5/mo subs and they come over to your side.
Frankly I'd gladly pay $20 for privacy-preserving focused online service that does exactly what I want. And I believe many people would as well.
The problem as usual are others poisoning the well e.g. Netflix et. al. because they are kinda commoditized for many people at this point and they perceive them as impossible to live without.
> But how do they make money without these measures?
By inserting ads every few posts in the feeds, letting users pay for bonus features and letting users pay for bonus features for others as a show of approval.
People don't generally go to Reddit to read one single thing that was linked from another site, so the kind of "engagement" platforms like Medium are struggling to achieve through incessant nagging happens a little more naturally. It doesn't have to dedicate a third of the screen area to links and thumbnails of totally unrelated articles, because I'm already in e.g. /r/StarWars where people voluntarily organize exactly what I was interested in reading about when I went there.
You also don't have to be as wary of the hustle because unlike Medium, as there's really no straight forward way to make money off of "engagement" with your Reddit posts and replies. You aren't there arguing about some detail in Star Trek TNG S03E14 with /u/dickmonger in order to boost your LinkedIn profile either. Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled—it has a sense of honesty and realness that you don't get when people are deliberately trying to culture profitable personas and turning every semblance of original thought into revenue streams.
> Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker,
Is Medium? I don't know that either of these companies make their profit public, but I have a hard time believing that Reddit performs worse than Medium. As someone who ends up reading an article here and there on Medium very occasionally, the changes I see between the visits tell of a company desperately struggling to keep investors happy.
> Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled
A lot of communities are not like this though. There's a lot of good ones too.
For me the bar is that a site has to work in incognito. That's how I open all links, so login is out of the question. Medium actually works very well that way, I didn't even know they still have the paywall -- or I might have disabled some scripts?
Or I don't use the site. I make exceptions for e-mail, Hacker News, and sometimes GitHub. But not for newpapers, Google, or Facebook. And definitely not for Medium.
The point where once-enjoyable services start turning to shit to make a buck is inevitable; it was the VCs footing the bill, but now it's the user's turn. The illusion of 'startup disruption' collapses once it reaches what I call the "somebody has to pay for all this shit" phase.
yes but it can be more complicated than that. A site might run in the black and make small money being a sleepy, friendly site, but still succumb to the lure of taking a gamble to make more money.
Somebody could enjoy building a site for awhile, but not ultimately enjoy running it, so they sell it, because included in the value of that ongoing concern is the option to shoot for the stars.
I've never used these commercial blogging platforms, so the answer to this question may be obvious.
Do these platforms provide something useful compared to something like write.as which is based on an open source solution? Is their tools so much better than the open source alternatives?
It honestly seems like a lowest common denominator play. I currently subscribe to a substack and they are allergic to using a computer beyond the most rudimentary interactions - launching a web browser. (Blocked and Reported specifically)
Especially hijacking copy/paste, or text highlighting. It just brings the entire feeling of the place down.
Imagine walking into a nice high end restaurant, and the server tries to sell you a credit card before taking your order. Would you continue going to that restaurant?
That's what this sort of garbage does to my sentiment around websites that do it.