Migrating from Medium to substack
I’m migrating this blog over to substack. I’ll keep this blog around and will write the next posts in both platforms, but I hope to eventually move away from Medium to exclusively substack.
I’ve been blogging for a few years about machine learning, finance or whatever else that captured my imagination at the time. This blog originally started as a sanity check on what I was trying to learn. Using imposter syndrome to my advantage, I figured that if I learn enough about a subject to publicly comment on it, I’m not completely clueless. So my early posts were basically regurgitations about reinforcement learning and refactoring terrible tutorial code to slightly less terrible tutorial code.
Medium was (and still is) a great choice. They have a simple clean UI, and with an ad-blocker, the experience of reading and writing is great.
But over the years, Medium has used subtly deceptive nudges to get you to allow your content behind a paywall. They’ll say things like “Allow others to promote your post”, which sounds great. Why wouldn’t I want to allow others to promote my post? But it moves your content to a soft paywall where a reader can only view N number of articles from articles inside this paywall.
The weird thing is that it bundles all your posts with those of other writers. So it’s not “Allow a reader to only read 5 of my posts without paying”, but instead it inconveniences even the most casual reader. I personally avoid any article hosted on Medium that requires me to be logged in, even though I obviously have an account.
A simpler business model
One of the distinguishing characteristics of an engineer is aversion to complexity. This often caries over to other domains as well. When I read about a piece of legislation that’s 1,000 pages long, code smell comes to mind.
To quote Zen of Python: Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated.
Medium’s monetization model strikes me as complex. From Medium:
How much will I make under the Partner Program?Partner Program writers are paid monthly based on how much time Medium members spend reading their stories. The longer members read, the more writers earn.
In addition, part of each member’s subscription is distributed in proportion to their reading time every month. So if a member spent 10% of their time reading your story, you’d receive 10% of their revenue share.
There’s some “revenue share” taken from people that pay to use Medium, and you get a percentage of that share based on the relative amount of time an individual paid Medium user spends on your blog relative to other peoples blogs.
Compare that to substack:
Publishing is free, forever. We only make money when you do. Once you add paid subscriptions, we charge 10%. There’s also a credit card fee charged by our payments provider.Charge what you want, we take 10%. Or don’t charge anything and the service is free.
The business model drives UX decisions. Consider the placement of older posts on my site:
The main site doesn’t even have a “load more posts” or a calendar view on the top of the page. You can’t even get a list of posts or topics from the “About” page. Even in archive, they’ll show you top stories based on year and force you to click through each month to find less popular posts:
Medium treats your posts as generic content. The business model has units of content that’s generated for free by people like me. They want reader eyeballs and have little interest in you building your personal audience. So their design decisions are based off user eyeballs. Substack wants you to get paid subscribers so they can take their 10%, so they’ll promote you and your content. That’s my impression at least, I’m less familiar with their product and UX, but at least our incentives are aligned.
The customer doesn’t care about your implementation
As an engineer, I’m biased to put value on implementation or a product of feature. It’s part of my job to care. But the customer doesn’t care about your implementation details.
In that sense, Medium is fine. Why should I care about their monetization or dark patterns? That’s true to an extent. But if you knew your favorite saas product was implemented in a single un-versioned php file maintained by a single anonymous developer based in Sealand funded by dogecoin donations, you might have some reservations. So you could say I have misgivings about Medium’s business model. But that’s still not enough for me to seriously consider an alternative. But Medium doesn’t do much for me besides offering a clean UI.
What have you done for me lately?
Consider my most popular post
I posted that article on hacker news where it got 106 points and was on the main page for a few hours.
Now consider a post that I didn’t post on any social media:
Sure, a deep dive on business book from 1949 isn’t very sexy. But the fact remains that Medium isn’t very effective at content discovery. If it does well, it’ll get some “internal” Medium traction. But I’m responsible for promoting.
I have 924 followers on Medium, but I feel like I don’t benefit from them. Why should I? Medium isn’t making any money off of me.
Combine that with the fact that Medium has become of a content farm with low quality programming tutorials and the general hatred of Medium from the tech elite crowd, I decided to try something else. Substack made it easy to migrate all my Medium posts. So if you’re interested in machine learning, finance or Nassim Taleb, subscribe to my substack.
