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Comment by arnaudsm | Hacker News Reader

Medium was specifically created because of bloated blogs. It has become the very thing it ought to destroy.

It's the cycle of people who want to "do things better".

Step 1: Find a type of website experience that sucks for users. Example: Blogging, image sharing.

Step 2: It's so simple! Just do the same, improve on the UX, don't plaster ads, have a clean site and give it a cool name. Example: Medium, Imgur.

Step 3: As people flock to your site because it's cleaner than the alternatives, have the lightbulb moment: "Oh wow, I could monetize all these users!". So you plaster the site with ads, marketing gimmicks and what not and you don't suffer for it. It's not that it works. It's just that you have a userbase that trusts you and is already used to you. They don't know anyone else.

What are your users gonna do, build their own site that doesn't suck?

It really is a depressing, wasteful cycle.

The problem I see here is the more users you have, the more it costs to keep the hardware running, so at some point you have to monetize in some way or another.

I'm pretty sure Medium at one point was a decent low level solution to the problem they set out to solve - it just doesn't scale to the multi million/billion dollar solution the founders wanted.

> It really is a depressing, wasteful cycle.

I do agree with this, but I believe we can make it at least not-as-bad.

I recently started a new blog & evaluated a load of options, Medium was one. I quickly decided it had become a cesspool of attention engineering and social widgets, and ultimately settled on self-hosting, with no banner adds or social rubbish.

Can the average public do this? I’d argue it’s not trivial nor inexpensive currently, but maybe that’s worth fixing? Encourage people to move off centralized platforms for sharing content, and maintain control.

Since we're talking about blogging platforms I might as well plug Ghost: https://ghost.org/

I recently moved my company's blog to it. This is an open source, self-hostable markdown blog engine with an excellent featureset and some great default themes, and a paid hosted plan.

Official Ghost blog: https://blog.ghost.org

My company's blog: https://articles.hsreplay.net

Exactly. Personally I'm following the same steps with a blogging platform I'm building [0], but avoiding that third step in it and my future products, and it's working out so far.

A lot of it comes down to financial incentives, and I think VC-backed products are going to go head-first into step 3 without thinking, and then we all suffer. If there were more small, grow-slow products (probably bootstrapped) that based success on delivering a nice product that never goes to shit (instead of constantly conquering the world), we might have less of this cycle.

[0] https://write.as

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