Ask HN: Why isn't there a Medium killer yet?

toastercat 5 years ago |

I'm not sure what Medium is anymore, to be honest. I want to say it's a blogging platform, but it feels more like a doom-scroll inducing social media platform to me these days.

There are a few alternatives if you just want to blog:

https://write.as https://bearblog.dev

And more dev-focused, but I think it's quite noisy: https://dev.to

Maybe substack is more of a "killer".

deadvoid 5 years ago | |

I just had a flash of epiphany, I think the main reason for Medium's popularity is it's viewed as just another social network, so a perception that if you use it then you'll have much (readily available) bigger audience than using Wordpress/blogspot/etc. It's the reddit of blogging platform. The others like dev.to or hackernoon are only popular to a niche like techies & developers because that's their targets, but Medium aims to general public.

siquick 5 years ago | |

I really tried to like dev.to but the content is mostly low quality blog spam and no better than what is on Medium.

yuppie_scum 5 years ago | |

As far as I can tell, Medium is basically LiveJournal with better fonts and layouts.

LinuxBender 5 years ago |

Do you mean an alternate place to put your blogs/stories? There are plenty. There is Github and Gitlab or if you want something not owned by Microsoft or Gitlab, an alternate could be NeoCities [1]. Neocities is open source so you can even run it yourself if you don't want to use their domains. Venturing into the more manual setup are cheap VPS providers and frameworks for managing blogs. If you are specifically looking for a community, consider setting up a Discord server based on your topics of interest and invite people to it from your blog.

[1] - https://neocities.org/

deadvoid 5 years ago | |

No, I mean killer. An obvious, popular choice for replacing whatever Medium offered.

snypher 5 years ago | | |

It might be telling that no competition has really emerged as it's not clear to me what it was that Medium offered to make it obvious/popular at all?

Edit: Substack is an idea but seems to be the Patreon of writing.

deadvoid 5 years ago | | |

That is what I thought as well, I also have no idea why Medium is so popular still aside from the initial hype of being "a good experience" for writing.

ericb 5 years ago | | |

I haven't used it, but I think the appeal was that by posting to a place with a pre-existing audience, you could catch traffic from an initial audience that you otherwise would not have.

browningstreet 5 years ago | | |

I think Medium was the alternative to posting to Facebook, LinkedIn and Wordpress.com. In that sense, it doesn't need a killer, as it's the one dying under its attempts to kill.

deadvoid 5 years ago | | |

Is it dying? I genuinely don't know.

andrefuchs 5 years ago |

It depends on how you define it. Services like Substack could take a hit on them.

claudiulodro 5 years ago |

Medium was originally supposed to be some sort of WordPress killer, wasn't it?

forgotpwd16 5 years ago |

Medium is a blog-focused social network, basically a "Twitter with no limit posts", with its real advantage being that it has become trendy, probably due to its initial closed phase, to post there.

Finnucane 5 years ago |

Does there need to be? Or do we just need more alternatives?

deadvoid 5 years ago | |

> Does there need to be?

Result from https://hn.algolia.com/?q=medium seems like a _yes_ to me. I also notice that lots of data science people for example is still oblivious that many despises Medium, so they continue to use Medium to build a community. That's a loss considering how hostile Medium has been to readers.

sdevonoes 5 years ago | | |

I wonder what percentage of Medium users are HN user. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Medium but I think HN users are not target users for Medium.

I never heard any non-tech person complaining about Medium.

deadvoid 5 years ago | | |

> Don't get me wrong, I don't like Medium but I think HN users are not target users for Medium.

When it comes to the purpose of understanding why Medium is popular or why it haven't been replaced yet, imho the question that matters is "who uses Medium and why?". So I think whether HN users is a demographic target or not is less important than the measurement of who amplified Medium's usage, or some variation of that. Like if large portion of reddit users are using Medium, then how significant would content traffic from HN would be, comparatively? Especially since there's so many negative sentiments towards Medium in articles/posts shared here over the years.

> I never heard any non-tech person complaining about Medium.

Yeah, that might be a part of the reason on the answer of why there's no Medium killer yet. I also wonder what their users demography is like, or specifically related to your reply, how popular is Medium among non-tech crowds compared to techies? I think it's safe to say some portion of cryptocurrency enthusiasts/amateurs are using Medium to build an audience. Where do they fall into, should they be considered non-tech or tech savvy?

dagw 5 years ago | | |

I never heard any non-tech person complaining about Medium.

I've never heard any non-tech person show any awareness that Medium even exists as a brand.

beckingz 5 years ago | | |

Medium looks good and somewhat credible, so in a job interview you can say respond to fizz buzz questions with "Well, I solved a similar problem in my medium dot com article". It's not really about actual readers, though those are nice.

sethammons 5 years ago |

An idea I had was to encourage discoverabily of self hosted posts/articles by integrating a label or tag system in an easy API that would present articles from others, and this could be dynamically added to the footer of your post/article, and likewise, your post will start to show up on other’s footer. Centralized webring kinda.

dmode 5 years ago |

Isn’t Substack the Medium killer ?

cm2012 5 years ago |

Medium was only special because silicon Valley elite used it at the start, giving it an aura (like clubhouse).

passthejoe 5 years ago |

Substack and free-to-paid newsletter services in general, dev.to for tech.

godot 5 years ago |

To me, I think it's some combination of substack and dev.to.

A couple of months ago I've started to notice how infrequently I ever read an article hosted on Medium anymore. This is a stark contrast to several years ago when it seemed like every article being shared on social was on Medium. Nowadays, that seems to be dev.to for code-related posts, and substack for others; and just personal blogs for the rest.

(Posts about code moving off of Medium is a welcome change. Medium's paywall and style/format itself don't lend itself well to articles containing code, etc.)

cpach 5 years ago |

Netlify? Hugo? AWS Amplify? Wordpress?

is_true 5 years ago |

CollectedNotes and similar services.

lacker 5 years ago |

There is, it's called Substack.

shivenigma 5 years ago |

Hashnode is very close.

prtkgpt 5 years ago |

There are plenty of them.

kofejnik 5 years ago |

substack ?

cmoscoso 5 years ago |

Fecesbook?