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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's that sites initially provide valuable services for free, at a loss. Users love them, and so they grow. But loving something and being willing to pay for it are very different.

The site expects, eventually, to stop losing money and even maybe earn a little profit. So after they've become popular and everybody seems to love them, they start trying to charge a little money here and there, or otherwise find some way to monetize.

Then the site realizes that all those users that love them so much, don't really love them enough to pay or to tolerate other irritating forms of monetization.

So then the site has a choice: A. Continue losing money forever B. Keep up the monetization efforts, despite knowingly irritating and losing your customers, partners, content producers, etc.

And most reasonably choose option B, even though they know it's the death knell.

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I'm Medium's CEO and I left a longer answer down below about what I think went wrong. But I also think your summary is about right. Every startup needs to choose a business model eventually and we botched the rollout of ours.

The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us. But we didn't roll it out in a way that's congruent with anything else we were doing.

Most notably, the subscription implies that we have some premium content to share. But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles. Of course, that's not what we set out to do. But it's effectively what happened. I'm partly through reversing it.

> But instead of incentivizing premium content we spent the subscription revenue to pay people to flood us with low quality click bait and content mill articles.

I suspect these things, but I seldom get confirmation. My view is that Medium articles are low-effort crap that are not even worth the effort to click the link (I stopped clicking those links entirely quite a while back). I wish they'd put half the effort into the article content as they put into getting me to click.

I hope you get it turned around; this is largely a market that isn't served. Subscribing to newsletters is pretty dang expensive with anything less than a FAANG salary.

Instead of a subscription, would you pay per article? Like maybe 5 cents or 25 cents or something? Assume it's frictionless. No account with the site, no login, etc. You read the article and magically X cents is removed from your bank account. Would you do it?

That’s the opposite of what I want.

It’s directly incentivizing clickbait headline crap based on views. If I click on something and hate it I’d be annoyed I paid them anything.

Substack’s model is better. I pay for quality writing I like that deserves my attention.

Absolutely not. I finish probably 15% of the articles I encounter. I click links all the time. If that’s what I’ll pay, I’ll expect much more expertise than some random dude writing “Vue vs X” or whatever.

I’d rather pay for convenience. Like you can read all the articles but to subscribe to someone you have to be a premium user.

Basically like Spotify did it.

Like with...cryptocurrency?

Seems to me that a certain cost should be impressed against the publishers of the content as well, to help prevent that content mill of garbage as well as offset the potential costs to regular readers.

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

>>The subscription actually does work and could (will?) be enough to sustain us.

You're touching on an Option C or perhaps option B2 here, where the supply and demand curves intersect, but much farther to the left than the current user base. Meaning there ARE enough users who are willing to pay you enough to keep going - but it's many fewer than you currently have. So you settle into a much smaller, but sustainable business. Not necessarily a bad outcome!

Question for you: Suppose that users can pay you $X (say, 5 cents) per article they read, but you are not allowed to know who they are or anything about them, they don't login at all, and you can't show them any ads. That is, it's a "pure" transaction similar to anonymously purchasing a hamburger. Is there some value of X high enough for this to be worthwhile for you? Do you think enough of your users would go for this to make it work?

I like your honest answers here. It's refreshing to hear in the tech space after a decade of wanna-be Jobs copycats. Good luck with the business.

There’s a ton of other things you need to fix.

As a writer, seeing random people (bots?) highlight my article to death, making it essentially illegible, was a show-stopper for me.

Edit: this is such a good take that it's posted as a top-level comment slightly further down! That's what I get for not reading more responses before commenting.

Original:

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

from TikTok's Enshittification[0] by Cory Doctorow

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Wow that article is a great example of how long-form content really shines. Very well written.

As a reader i perceive Option B, keep up the mobilization efforts, as corrosive, like rust, or mold. There is no limit, and so you feel you’re always getting tricked. I’m not saying this of Medium specifically. I’m just react to this Option B idea.

This irks me because scammers are always trying to trick me. Legit companies are trying to trick me with dark patterns to spend micro amounts of money (Square is my current nemesis). For me there is always a level of opposition to these efforts.

Mentioned here was the New York Times. It’s always a subscription. You may be able to find a discount, or a special deal, but it’s always a subscription.

We lived through kind of a strange time thanks to low interest rates. For awhile you basically could get free lunch on these VC companies dime because they were willing to do everything at a loss. As soon as they tightened the purse strings, you just moved on to the next party. But hopefully things get more sane going forward...

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