I'm building something that's not very far from how you describe (and how I also used to see) Medium.
replyWhat do you think could have prevented its downfall?
The initial appeal of Medium and Svbtle, which was the other one I was thinking of, was that almost any time you saw an article from them it was usually high-quality. With their simplistic dark-on-light themes they looked visually distinct (especially Svbtle) from the popular blogging platforms at the time. There were no ads, no calls to action, no fucking modal "you need an account to keep reading" popups, etc. I seem to recall that Svbtle and Medium both began as invite-only, so the set of authors was highly curated.
replyThus, the reading experience was fantastic.
As soon as they opened up to everyone, almost right away the quality dropped. All of a sudden Medium in particular was chock full of shallow "man page disguised as a blog post" posts and "tutorials" from people trying to build their own personal brands. It became a firehose of mediocrity.
Substack is currently experiencing the same cycle.
Ultimately I think, if you want to preserve the elite/luxury/exclusivity reputation, you need to impose artificial scarcity and resist the urge to "hyperscale" or whatever.
I hate how medium articles keep showing up at top of my search results. I googled a coding problem. First link was a medium tutorial. I click and mid way, it's asking me to sign up to read more. Ugh. I sign up and then it wants me to go through a few pages of topics I'd like to choose and what not. Then I finally end up at the tutorial I was trying to read and it's blocked behind a pay wall. Wtf.
replyKagi search filters. I've had medium blocked since I first signed up. Occasionally I search from other peoples machines and realize how much crap on Medium I've just forgotten about. There are a lot of things to like about Kagi but the ease of removing junk sites from search results is near the top.
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