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Georgia Patrick's avatar

Simon, Thank you for your coverage and analysis. Thank you for context. Medium captured my attention in 2017. Like you and others who have years of experience as a journalist and editor, I want to learn rapidly where the readers are going for truth and trustworthy coverage. Substack captured my attention in 2018. That business seemed to prefer working with full-time writers while encouraging more professionalism among side-project writers. Plus, you are on Substack and you take your reputation seriously.

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Pablo Andreu's avatar

I'm a longtime Medium user and Substack noob. I can already spot a major difference: How engaged and helpful the Substack team is. They listen and implement good feedback from its userbase. They are a part of the community, which appears to have a trickle-down cultural effect: Most Substack users I've encountered adopt a give-to-get approach. Substack users also seem generally optimistic. Medium users, by contrast, are always pissing and moaning and yearning for the good ole days.

Medium had a lot of potential, and I'm still rooting for them, though, like you, I'm skeptical. I've gotten on this train many times. I agree with a lot of what you wrote, to which I'd like to add that I think it was a mistake to forgo rewarding writers for bringing in external views. I understand that it made sense from a Medium-centric financial perspective: "We have a limited pool of funds from our members, and we can't over-extend by paying for the eyeballs of non-members."

Unfortunately, this encouraged Medium users to cater to other Medium users, which created this weird, incestuous, Sisyphean culture in which we all marketing to each other while writing about marketing to each other. Ev Williams decried the ad-based model, but he never came up with a viable alternative.

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