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Medium.com's current CEO shares some thoughts on why the company has floundered / failed

This is a comment on a discussion titled, "Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?"

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:

1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.

Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.

What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.

I think point two is an interesting one. As a publishing site / tool, the better content is better for you, for the author, for the reader. Losing sight on that is the downfall of a publishing site who relies on content which draws readers back, and more importantly, for them to pay.

This does not lessen full time content creators. They have an audience and even have a use for businesses of various kinds. Specifically the ones who make things and need people to market and talk about them.

Regarding medium.com, other comments on the discussion and in direct reply to the CEO's post call out the business model and methods of medium.com as problematic for various reasons. But I wanted to highlight this specific response by the CEO for that second talking point.

Dave Winer explains why he prefers his own site to Facebook

One of the reasons I prefer to write on the open web rather than on Facebook is that if I get an Aha! idea about a feature, on my blog I can implement it. On Facebook I'm just a user.

That was/is one of the great things about the web. Anyone can develop features for it. On Facebook, just their employees can. No wonder it never moves.

Embracing the content queue

I consume a lot of content. Articles, tweets, videos, podcasts, books, etc. As you might have noticed, I have recently dove back into queuing of content, that is utilizing systems designed to allow me to capture interested content for consumption at a later point. Specifically, this is in regards to podcasts, articles and YouTube. The value here is to be better able to capture interesting content as they come across my feed, but also that it improves the quality of what I consume by basically giving me a two pass approach at filtering the content.

The first filter is a measure of immediacy and my mental prioritization of the content. If I don't consume some content immediately upon seeing it, then that says the content failed it's initial test. This content is either not interesting enough for me to prioritize it over whatever I'm doing, or it might be that the content's specifications (length, medium, etc.) are not convenient.

The second test is, if I am not going to consume this content now, am I going to consume it later? And if I think the answer is yes then it gets added to my queues. For articles, that's my Wallabag. For YouTube, that's my "Watch Later." For podcasts, that's my, well, queue.

The third test is if, when I see the content later in my queue, does it get consumed? In many cases, the answer is no. In some cases this is simply due to the interest in that topic being gone. Or perhaps I've already learned about the topic of the content through other means. Or it might be that the immediacy of that content has passed.

Sometimes I'll leave things in my queues for weeks. But I have found that in general, if an item languishes in my queue for three weeks, the odds are very high that that item isn't going to get consumed.