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.
Quora is a shithole too. I remember 5-6 years ago I hung out in Quora because it high quality content from real experts. It was really interesting. Now it's nothing.
Websites (forums, mostly) have figured out they'll actually drive more traffic if they didn't have a sign-up wall.
The signup requirement is myopic, some PM looking into the data and doing some math they can make more $$$ per unique visit if they make them sign up, not realizing the long-term harm it creates because it drives the unique visits way down.
No argument. But how do they make money without these measures? Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker, the vast majority of their labor—moderators—work for nothing.
I have known dozens of people who would gladly pay $20 a month to have a platform where they can freely share their writings and discuss with like-minded people -- small clubs, if you will.
Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.
Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.
The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.
Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.
But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.
I was going to say that $20/mo sounds a bit high but then I remembered that I still have a $20/mo VPS for pretty much that purpose (email, small websites) and I can't can't really be bothered to downsize the server even though there is plenty of room (except disk space).
People only view $20/mo as high because many other subs are less but when you point out to them how much money they spend on several $5/mo subs and they come over to your side.
Frankly I'd gladly pay $20 for privacy-preserving focused online service that does exactly what I want. And I believe many people would as well.
The problem as usual are others poisoning the well e.g. Netflix et. al. because they are kinda commoditized for many people at this point and they perceive them as impossible to live without.
> But how do they make money without these measures?
By inserting ads every few posts in the feeds, letting users pay for bonus features and letting users pay for bonus features for others as a show of approval.
People don't generally go to Reddit to read one single thing that was linked from another site, so the kind of "engagement" platforms like Medium are struggling to achieve through incessant nagging happens a little more naturally. It doesn't have to dedicate a third of the screen area to links and thumbnails of totally unrelated articles, because I'm already in e.g. /r/StarWars where people voluntarily organize exactly what I was interested in reading about when I went there.
You also don't have to be as wary of the hustle because unlike Medium, as there's really no straight forward way to make money off of "engagement" with your Reddit posts and replies. You aren't there arguing about some detail in Star Trek TNG S03E14 with /u/dickmonger in order to boost your LinkedIn profile either. Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled—it has a sense of honesty and realness that you don't get when people are deliberately trying to culture profitable personas and turning every semblance of original thought into revenue streams.
> Also Reddit has never been a huge moneymaker,
Is Medium? I don't know that either of these companies make their profit public, but I have a hard time believing that Reddit performs worse than Medium. As someone who ends up reading an article here and there on Medium very occasionally, the changes I see between the visits tell of a company desperately struggling to keep investors happy.
> Even at its worst—a bunch of idiots dropping vulgar and/or trite oneliners in response to some banal news article experienced entirely through the headline because the article itself is paywalled
A lot of communities are not like this though. There's a lot of good ones too.
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?
Or I don't use the site. I make exceptions for e-mail, Hacker News, and sometimes GitHub. But not for newpapers, Google, or Facebook. And definitely not for Medium.
The point where once-enjoyable services start turning to shit to make a buck is inevitable; it was the VCs footing the bill, but now it's the user's turn. The illusion of 'startup disruption' collapses once it reaches what I call the "somebody has to pay for all this shit" phase.
yes but it can be more complicated than that. A site might run in the black and make small money being a sleepy, friendly site, but still succumb to the lure of taking a gamble to make more money.
Somebody could enjoy building a site for awhile, but not ultimately enjoy running it, so they sell it, because included in the value of that ongoing concern is the option to shoot for the stars.
