Is Substack the new Medium?
I came across this Hacker News thread in my RSS feed this morning. I thought that it is worth posting here since Medium’s CEO Tony Stubblebine weighed in. Here’s the link to the complete thread: Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium? | Hacker News
These things seem to come and go in cycles. In a few years Substack will probably end up just like Medium as they try to “cross the chasm” — Typical VC-funded company incentives. There is already a lot of low-quality spam on the platform.
You don’t need $50–100M in funding and (soon) hundreds of employees to run a simple newsletter site. This only forces the company to over-engineer and push intrusive monetization to make meaningful investor returns. Just like Medium, Quora, etc. These were great simple products, until the pressure to justify their valuation and return money to investors ruined them.
I am Medium’s new CEO and was a major publisher there before that. I’m reading a lot of “go the way of Medium” type comments. Completely fair.
Medium was going in a good direction and then made a wrong turn. Call it a lesson learned maybe. But there isn’t anything preventing us from reversing back to that decision point and going down the right path.
The right path is making sure we surface the good stuff. It’s there. We just made incentive and distribution decisions that swamped a lot of expert level writing with derivative content mill stuff.
We like being an open platform and that means plenty of less good stuff. But we have plenty of tools to select the posts that actually provide value. Turning those on is most of my focus.
In practice we overlap competitively with all the publishing options. That’s Substack and ConvertKit, Wordpress, Ghost, LinkedIn. Others.
The biggest philosophical difference is that I want to hear from people that don’t have time to build an audience. You don’t learn programming, design, marketing or entrepreneurship from a journalist. You want to learn those things from other experts. At least I do. By definition, experts are too busy being experts to be full time writers and audience builders.
A person with one great thing to say should be able to show up on Medium with no following and get that thing read by thousands of readers.
Nobody has to tell me we aren’t delivering. But I know the system well enough to know we can reverse course. And I know the results so far well enough to know that being useful is enough to overcome our history.
So that’s the state of Medium.
