Congrats! Thanks for sharing your story. I was using Missive in my last job between 2018-2021. Thanks for always being responsive with customer support and adding features. My team was genuinely thrilled to read the "What’s new in Missive?" email.
The advertising part of the model may have been removed, but I think there's still value in enabling publishers with tools to sell their content directly to readers.
Sounds like they want to be a curator. I agree on the idea to create a subscription feature and take a cut. Medium has such a big audience that I think publishers would gladly sell there for a % fee. If they can't do that, then they'll stick with selling exclusively on their websites.
Can't see what the advantage is to "paying the curator" though - why give up control of who my support goes to by letting them split it up amongst their 'elites', when I can just support the content creator(s) I like directly? Which these days, most people already have avenues for or can set up easily. It seems in Medium's (or any middlemen in this arena)'s best interest to avoid that truly 'frictionless' alternative and present themselves as a good compromise.
As others have pointed out here I don't see how empowering some specific group to decide is any different from a traditional publisher model, or indeed how picking a group steeped in a specific culture bubble will 'fix media'. (Though hey, I invite them to prove me wrong... Any fix would be a welcome fix these days)
I think this could turn away a big majority of writers who have great content but aren't well known. Kinda like Spotify dollars are all going to the top pop singers but not many of the indie bands that people really love. And if Medium was really going to pay all the writers, how much would they end up with? Couldn't be more than pennies. As a writer, I'd rather have the ability to sell my own subscription on Medium, and get paid by my loyal readers.
There are services for people to do online research for you (e.g. https://wonderlib.com/), so I think it's fair to pay for a search engine that directly gives you highly relevant (and as you suggest, human-curated) results.
I would say that https://getmagicnow.com/ could also be considered as a kind of paid natural language search engine (limited to paid product or services).
Yeah, totally. I thought that Magic is on demand search engine for human intelligence as well. Not sure that it would easily scale though. Seems like database would be better than on-demand. Thanks for the insight.
