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 these are not the main pain points.

The biggest issue for me is that medium makes me feel like a cash cow. The way it wants me to pay every step of the way, the way it hijacks copy/paste to insert its own marketing. The account it wants me to create. The trackers it inserts everywhere. You missed the step of making something great that people actually feel good about paying for. The grassroots "for users by users" community feel that other platforms still manage to tap into. A site you'd be proud to be part of and happy to pay for. The problem with an X-views paywall is: you annoy me so much that even if there's good content behind it I'm long gone before I ever find out because you've already pushed me away. It just has this "all about the money" feel that I deeply hate.

Also, not every author is out to make money. My personal blog is not monetized at all. It's more my way of outreach for my day job in tech. And I'd never want to put my readers through this experience. Free content should be exempt.

The other points like the quality of content dropping because you recommend the wrong stuff, yeah they dropped the value proposition even more. But they weren't the real problem.

This is literally it.

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.

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.

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.

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?