Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though, the VC's need the promises they've heard during fundraising to be fulfilled. That's when the platforms start with the dark patterns.
Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.
I work for one of those fully bootstrapped successful companies now and it really is fantastic how we can have real business conversations around ecosystem improvement that don’t revolve around money.
Money is good, but not having everything dictated by it is good for the mission.
EDIT: Sure there's still a financial incentive there but it's framed more in the "we need to turn a profit so that we can afford to continue doing these things". We still have salespeople who still have commissions and we still have salaries to pay.
I have the same experience at transloadit. 10 years of slow growth, but likely we can enjoy another 10 of those optimizing for fun/honest work instead of getting someone their 5x roi already.
As a fellow bootstrapper, I loved being a transloadit customer back in the day (old product we ran). Amazing video encoding product and awesome customer support over Skype. Thanks for slogging through the grind!
Is there still a concern about the profit? I'm assuming you're working for a for-profit company, where one of the goals – if not the goal, ultimately – is to make cash. (I don't mean to insinuate any sharply-materialistic outlook on your company: I sincerely don't know how a company thinks about money.)
That will always be a concern, even for a nonprofit. You need to keep the lights on, and people need to be paid. However, the trouble with VC funding is the expectation of scale. A VC won't be happy with a small organization that makes enough to pay its employees and sustain a small amount of growth. Unfortunately, that business requires large successes. So the founders and the investors can easily have very different goals.
VC funding is required if you want to build something massive, but isn't a great idea if the founders just want to build a sustainable but small business.
Companies like MailChimp and Atlassian are great examples of bootstrapped companies that became very successful. There are more.
Money is great to have at any stage of a company, and bootstrapped companies prefer to trade stability and time for the freedom of not having money (and those who only focus on it) control decisions.
You can build a great company with and without investment, but you can fail with either just as well.
And with VCs you have someone breathing down your neck to either grow fast or die fast. With bootstrap, you don’t have that pressure (and instead have the fuck we don’t have money to fund faster growth problem)
Not GP, but in a similar position. No, no concern whatsoever. The owners are not greedy which makes all the difference in the world. Not that the profit is low - it is probably much higher this way, when the whole company pulls toward the goals. I have never worked in an environment with so low amount of office politics.
With the way things look right now for high-tech (or any software development) companies the margins are quite high. But of course, if you are a VC who invests in hundreds of businesses, and expect only a few of them to fly, then those few must fly pretty high to make it worth your while. Which means that being just very profitable is not enough - you need to be extremely profitable. And that comes with compromises (mostly for the workers at such startups).
Platform quality is long term money, platform monetization is short term money.
With VCs who only care that the growth curve is exponential, they go for short term money every time, because yeah you might crash the company, but you've got a 5% chance of becoming a big evil corp.
Yes, exactly this. You have to choose the hand that feeds.
If you start a platform around paying customers you make it one way, if you start it around getting as many users as you can and then monetize the popularity, then you are selling your users, and that's another way entirely.
It's about having a massive exit, the sooner the better. It's absolutely short-term thinking, with an upper bound around 10 years. Less for smaller investors. Nobody cares what happens after the exit.
Indeed, when your reading experienced is interrupted immediately on page load by asking you to sign up I think you can argue its not a good experience at all. I stopped reading articles on Medium as well.
My solution was to use an extension – Make Medium Readable Again – that, as of its features, removes the intro fullscreen ad. It's available for Chrome and Firefox, as far as I'm aware.
I understand there are browser plugins available but when reading text content requires installing extra software to improve the experience my solution is just to go read content somewhere else.
That's fair. My experience with Medium has so far ranged from neutral to highly-positive, with a lot of articles on cutting-edge web design technology or methodology.
If you don't wanna read it, that's fine. I'm just saying that if you do, there's a way.
I’ve been using reader mode for months and love it. I set it to auto open all links in reader mode and now hardly ever look at the styles version. It’s amazing how much more readable websites become with the extension. I’m also a UX designer, hows that for irony.
I don't understand the level of complaints on HN about that sign up overlay. Are they testing multiple nag screens and I got lucky and always get the minimally intrusive one, and the rest of you getting the terrible ones?
Yes, it is slightly annoying, but it is extremely easy to dismiss. Unlike the nag screens at many sites you don't have to find and click an 'x' in some weird location. It goes away if you click anywhere on the page outside the nag screen.
It also goes away if you hit ESC on the keyboard. (I don't know if other keys also dismiss it too. I've only tried ESC).
Furthermore, also unlike many other sites, it comes up right away rather than waiting for you to get into the article and then interrupting you. So it is click on a Medium link, get shown the nag screen immediately if it is going to be shown at all, and then hit ESC or click somewhere and it goes away.
The "pardon the interruption" modal is the only one that I have ever seen.
And it's not immediate, there's time enough for your eyes to adjust to the content of interest before that modal pops up. It's as if it's designed for maximum obtrusiveness.
The experience is further degraded by a header and footer that not only take up significant screen real estate but also only seem to exist to also prompt me to sign up.
So that's three obtrusive prompts asking me to sign up - the modal, the header and the footer. This is unique in that the annoyance has a depth of redundancy.
Try old.reddit.com - it was originally created for users who want to revert to the old desktop layout but it has an additional, unintended feature: even on mobile, it maintains the desktop layout without switching to the mobile site (note: it is not responsive so you will have to zoom - but personally I prefer zooming compared to the nagware "features" of the mobile site).
I really don't want to live in a dystopia where basic text content from random companies, startups, blogs, etc can't be read without being subjected to a startup's conversion flow.
I can't believe that I could get free cPanel/PHP/wordpress hosting when I was a teenager, and people will live with a fullscreen nag ad for their company blog 17 years later.
As always, silent downvotes for pointing out illogical group-think behavior. Never change. Heh, maybe it's startup hustler types that think intentionally-delayed, fullscreen ads are the pinnacle of innovation and hacker culture. Anything to make a buck.
Can you describe what Quora did? I've heard a few reports that it's not like it used to be, but I've found it useful, and am curious as to what makes it worse than before.
Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content.
Now it's a "modern" ExpertSexChange where "online marketing specialists" ask questions with one account and answer their own questions with another account.
"Disclaimer haha I work for Bullshit.ly as a growth ninja but here's my response..."
"In conclusion I'm not saying you should totally checkout our stuff ... but you totally should. just my 2 cents."
And they are getting more sophisticated so it's not always so easy to spot.
The real question is why does Google still put them on the first page? They've dispatched other nuisance sites but Quora still seems to get special treatment. Quora can't possibly have many inbound links to their content so why the high page rank?
Look at how long pinterest results have ranked highly in image search, even though they're completely useless. I just don't think Google cares to remove them, since surely they have known that pinterest should be excluded from image search results.
Google has some strange preferences. Forbes still dominates SERPs despite one of the worst user-experiences of any mainstream site. It's downright unusable without ad block
IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).
Long ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...
Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office area, so it couldn't be me, asked if they checked it. While they were quickly apologizing, I asked what site they accessed.
www.excite.com
The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....
I remember seeing a news story back in 1995 about how content for the current Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXX) was being blocked by parental filters because it assumed 'XXX' was adult content.
What kind of content could there have been then for the superbowl: Blinking tags and daily updated grey-background text? Are you sure parental filters really were a thing in 1995. I remember 1995. I was using mosaic.
I had a similar experience during school. One real life troll told a substitute teacher I was accessing porn sites. Teaching sub only looked at the website url before kicking me off the computer. Unfortunately there was no follow-up for me to call them out on being lazy/ignorant. Funny thing was the "troll" did get banned later for accessing porn sites on the school network.
I mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)
Knowledge services make for horrible VC businesses.
The exception to that rule is Stack Exchange, because they have a business model that is unique to the space and impossible to replicate for a site like Quora (Genius, Answers.com, wikiHow, et al.).
Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential, to avoid the dreaded down rounds and eventual drift toward forced sale. There's only so much legitimate high quality content for a site like Quora and it's nowhere near enough to validate a $2 billion valuation (much less higher).
Consider for a moment that Yelp - which is a real business in a highly monetizable segment, that is also profitable and will hit an annual billion dollars in sales soon - is worth $3 billion. So if you get a $2 billion valuation as Quora, where are you going from there? It's obvious.
Genius is facing the same exact fundamental problem that Quora is. Take a lot of money from VCs, get a big valuation, find it impossible to live up to it. Turns out normal people don't want to annotate everything and could mostly care less unless it's a more narrow passion segment (music).
There are only two paths for knowledge services. Stay small and very lean, aggressively limit costs, and use an ad model - that's wikiHow. Or go the Wikipedia route. Anything involving VCs will end in disaster and or forced sales. Knowledge services properly have to think very, very long-term (if they're actually trying to fulfill a knowledge mission and aren't just traffic fronts), they need a decade outlook or more. VCs think short-term, they look at ~5-10 year type exit outcomes. High quality, long-lived knowledge services are fundamentally opposed to a focus on exits in any manner, as they have a higher calling than looking for an exit for a VC - and any deviation from that must inherently destroy the community.
There's definitely value to be created, but the catch is focusing. Someone will pay for the best data on their problem. Very few people are interested in buying 100 dumpsters full of random text: I can't see general services like Quora ever being worth much.
Metaweb is an example of the forced liquidation problem with knowledge services that take serious VC.
Freebase had no business model and Metaweb took $57 million in VC. Then Google took the public service, which had been built up by a large community, and effectively buried it.
As with most of the other cases, their only possible path that involved sustainability and long-term knowledge value, was to not take VC, stay lean, and either API their system for a fee (not a huge business), or run an ad model. Either way, their business case was small, and they took a lot of VC. The end result, another dead, formerly promising, knowledge service in an increasingly long list.
> Quora has to allow low quality content on their service in order to keep the volume up, to drive traffic & clicks, to drive ad potential
How does flooding my feed with dozens of questions about what the probabilities of different subsets of the faces are when rolling a die (e.g. what's the probability of getting an even number or greater than 5 when rolling a die?) help drive traffic, clicks, and ad potential?
Because each of those is probably a homework problem in Stats 101, and every college kid is going to be googling for the answer to the variation from their edition of the textbook.
I went to college in the USA, and I understand that undergrads are often put into classes far outside of their expertise. Still, I expect college students to be able to count to 6 and understand fractions. Even the remedial algebra students I helped in high school weren't that bad.
There are still people that think that buying multiple lottery tickets actually lowers your chances of winning.
I tried to argue against someone with this. I even tried scaling the problem down to being two balls drawn from a pool of four, and showing how if you buy multiple tickets, your chances of winning greatly increased. And they accepted what I was saying, but just insisted that the math "doesn't scale" and it doesn't work the same when it's 5 balls drawn from a pool of 69.
Even worse, she tried to say something like "You're really good at math. You should know this!"
They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.
I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.
But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.
Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.
My 16-year old son has a classmate who has made about $50 or
so writing spam questions for Quora. Some of these questions were astonishingly stupid, the kind of writing that I would have fired a spam writer back in the day that I hired spam writers.
It wasn't clear if he was working for Quora or working for somebody who wanted to spam Quora, but the damage is done.
Honestly, if you 'incentivise' someone to post on a community site (whether via money, exchanges or free stuff in general), the quality of their work will usually be terrible. What do you expect when you ask non experts to post reams of topics about things they haven't got the slightest clue about?
I always wonder who's doing that and why. Quora does pay people to write questions, but the pay is supposed to be tied somehow to the quality of the answers. Maybe it's more a quantity thing, as dozens of people jump in to give answers to the basic arithmetic questions in my feed.
Easy to say that right now, but Microsoft hasn't owned it long enough to have any negative impact on the service. For all we know 5 years from now they'll pull a Sourceforge and start bundling malware into your downloads.
I know there's an awful lot of legacy hatred for Microsoft around HN, and I'm not claiming they'll never be a bad actor in any regard ever again -- but I'd expect if that happens for it to be a lot more subtle than "hey, let's make desperate deals with sleazy third-party companies to stuff shady crap in your downloads until we're inevitably caught at it."
Sure, it was just a convenient comparison to something that's already happened with what was effectively the previous github.
Github made it through the "We need to deliver 1000x gains for our investors" phase of their history, but all that means is they've moved into "We paid $7,500,000,000 for this, are we getting as much value as possible?"
I am cautiously optimistic about this one. Partly because of promising recent decisions from them, and partly because if there's one thing Microsoft knows how to do well, it's business software.
A few years ago I'd have told you "Surely Microsoft won't start automatically installing Candy Crush games on my licensed copy of Windows Professional" but here we are.
A few years from now, some brilliant manager realizes they can "add value for customers" by helpfully including third party software offers with github release downloads, just like Sourceforge did. Who knows?
> Quora also started out as an awesome service just like Medium. Eventually though...
That's the pure growth first strategy. At first it's all roses. Completely free, even ad-free. So there's none of the friction that comes with monetization. But eventually it comes into the picture.
Either a service is monetized from the start or it comes later.
There is nothing wrong in making money, if you want to attract good content writers and curate content, provide additional services like digital magazine, you have to make money to pay your writers, curators and staff.
I don't write for Medium, but I think rather than trashing Medium, maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers. There is enough garbage out in the internet, maybe Medium can help clean it up.
I'm sure there's other like me here, but I don't even click on articles published in Medium anymore because I don't want to deal with their gigantic popup that interferes with me getting to the content.
I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content. I don't think the discoverability of these content hubs is worth it, I personally do more discovery other ways and usually only end up on the site after a recommendation, etc...
Not just Facebook. Any site without attention paid to on-site SEO is basically impossible to find since Google gave up fighting the spammers and (effectively) stopped trying to provide access to a bunch of the web. That was back in, like, '08 or '09.
The other day I was trying to find a Russian world-traveller photo blog I used to read but lost track of, and it was plain from the results that Google's 1) heavily penalizing low-traffic sites to the point of giving me top results that contain almost none of my keywords when there 100% for sure had to be sites that contained all of them, and 2) barely paying attention to text linking to a site anymore. I'm not even upset I couldn't find the site I wanted using my search terms so much as that part of their surrender to the spammers meant that most of the top results were "legitimate" content-mill spammers-by-another-name. I don't think I could have found anything like what I was looking for. Any similarly-obscure sites are just invisible now.
DDG wasn't much better. The spammers won and "web search" doesn't really search the whole web anymore, or even close to it.
Oh, that's what's going on. If I search, for example, "proton transfer balalaika" I get search results where the first few results are "Missing: balalaika | Must include: balalaika" but a result after these has all three search terms.
I've been wondering what Google now thinks the word "must" means and why they're putting pages that don't include words that I've used above pages that do.
That's frustrating. Low-volume sites represent a significant portion of the web results I need.
You know, it's obvious it's a link, and I'm pretty sure I clicked on it and noted it adds the quotes then immediately forgot.
I'm sitting here looking at it now and I still can't believe that's the function. It looks like a link to a search of just that term.
Of course, even when I click on it, I get ads for hotels that are missing "proton" and "transfer" first, then random word dictionaries, both well above perfectly valid results talking about chemists who played the balalaika or research done in the city of Balalaika.
Which means that it's a link to getting a different wrong set of results and it's there as a kind of fig leaf on the sin of distorting searches so heavily.
There are whole topics I can no longer search for on any engine because the results are so bad. The example I can think of is product reviews for just about anything - the results are almost always shitty "top ten" Amazon affiliate sites. If I want to find a legitimate opinion about certain kinds of products, it's nearly impossible to find via Google.
Car repair is another. I drive a 20+ year old vehicle. You'd think that there would be tons of articles about repair since the world has had 20+ years to reverse engineer it, right? The first two pages of Google results are almost always SEO spamfests. It was almost impossible to find out how to change the burnt out lights in my car's gauge cluster since every link took me to a bad copy of Quora with each answer recommending the automotive equivalent of essential oils.
Yeah, and the EU is basically taking legal action against Google right now to force them to do an even worse job of removing that kind of spam, under the pretense that it hurts competition.
Facebook+Reddit+stack exchange I think is a more comprehensive group to blame. I think a lot of people who use facebook for hobby groups maybe never would have discovered forums but Reddit definitely could have. And stack exchange kind of absorbed basically all technical forums
That's true, I forgot about Reddit. I check some sub-reddits that I'm interested but in general the format and quality of discussion is much lower than that of the now-dead forums that I used to check for similar content. The internet is like a barren wasteland to me now.
You know, I'd completely forgotten about forums? I used to be active on two. Doing a quick search now: one seems to have disappeared, but I managed to log in to the other one for the first time in nine years! (Those were the days before I used a password manager.) And it's actually still semi-active...
Facebook content is now such low-quality that it might as well be spam (my opinion). Also, pointless, toxic conversations. It seems to bring out the worst in people. I know some people like it for keeping in touch. I refuse to use it anymore, not worth it for me.
When I looked at facebook it was virtually all memes. I'm sure someone is about to tell me that I need better friends but these people are fine to talk to and interact with on other platforms but it seems facebook has become a meme graveyard.
No one posts actual quality content because stuff I want to read doesn't have a general appeal, its specialized to the things I am interested in. Facebook only allows for general appeal stuff so you end up with memes that everyone can understand.
I find Facebook to be quite useful, and the content to be of moderately high quality for the type of content it is intended for: social updates from friends and family.
The conversations on FB range from informative to toxic, and depend, like the internet forums of old, on the moderators. As FB does not actively moderate discussions, toxic conversations are the fault of the participants and the moderators, not on FB.
I legitimately want to read the articles--they have a lot of interesting ones.
The curious thing is that often enough you can't even click through--they insist that it's "Medium Exclusive" content and you can only view 3 a month. (Browser Private mode helps, but is not a panacea) But... If I search the 'net for the title of the supposed Exclusive article, I can frequently find it elsewhere with no nagging or paywall.
I don't really believe Medium has the exclusive content that gives it an advantage over anything else, but it's useful as curated, indexed content that you can find elsewhere. This is probably not what they are going for, though.
>>I think we're eventually going to see a resurgence in open platforms where content creators better control their content.
Sure, but as those platforms grow, they will run into the same problem: having to pay for infrastructure. That shit ain’t cheap once you get past a certain size.
> maybe we should help make it as a better platform for publishers
This affinity both for caping up for corporate entities who'd sell you for your component atoms were it feasible to do so, and then for doing free work for them, is so weird. They're the ones making the money. Why isn't it incumbent upon them to do so?
Nobody said there is anything wrong with making money, that’s a straw man. The reality is that taking venture funding has forced these companies to compromise what made them useful in order to chase revenue for investors.
The venture funding doesn't really have anything to do with it, does it? Even if they were entirely self funded, they still need to generate enough revenue to cover their costs.
Sure it does, venture funding comes with investors seeking to make a large return in a specific timeframe. If they were entirely self-funded, they could slowly ramp revenue streams and build on a sustainable base.
Getting a large influx of funding forces a company to search for faster growth to justify the valuation and deliver projected future growth. In 2017, Medium laid-off 1/3 of their workforce because their advertising model wasn't working [1]. The implication is that they hired a bunch of people to sell something that nobody wanted. A self-funded company, would have likely never hired those people in the first place. That company would be on firmer footing now, but would have gotten less HN/TechCrunch coverage in the process.
So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes?
I would bet many of the investors were making a bet on Ev Williams as much as they were on Medium. Medium's business model has always felt a bit exploitative. If they truly are focusing on quality rather than quantity, maybe that will change.
> So the venture funding is just giving them more rope to hang themselves with? It's letting them make bigger, more costly mistakes?
Think of it more as forcing them to make a high variance bet.
The VC business model assumes that about 1/3 of the companies invested in will go to zero, and another 1/3 will make a below market return on investment. They need the Googles and Microsofts to pay for everyone else, so they just push all of their portfolio into trying to become billion dollar businesses.
To clarify, my point was specific to businesses like Quora and Medium that rely on high-quality content and engagement. These companies would have likely been better off as niche businesses with $10m-$50m annual revenue. Taking a large VC investment basically closes off that avenue.
Not every idea is a take-over-the-world multi billion dollar business. Something might be completely sustainable as a medium sized business but it will never have a large enough target audience to be able to scale (as the product was originally envisioned) to a multi billion dollar company.
The problem is this is what VC needs, and if your idea isn't one you're still stuck chasing that goalpost. So rather than be happy with your product you start making distortions to increase your mass appeal to help reach the unreasonably high (for your idea) goalposts set by VC funding.
I don't understand this mindset. In my worldview people deserve investment. VC funded corporations don't deserve any of my time to "make it as a better platform".
Companies should live or die by the market and if they piss customers off and lose marketshare, that's the market working for once.
Non-VC companies are a longer and less glamorous slog to get off the ground but also don't come under pressure to compromise on their morals.