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.
Why has substack "won" this market? Or has it really? Is it just due to the newsletter publishing tools and subsidising some big name bloggers?
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.
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".
I have some disdain to link to Medium but it's not as bad.
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.
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.
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.