[bdbenton]

A lot of popular web apps seem to decay in this way. The founding developers create an excellent site, it becomes a huge cash cow, then the organization becomes bloated and more focused on extracting more out of existing value than creating new value or building on the original principles.

Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding.

This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links.

In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol

[sjckciodjcr]

none of the companies mentioned were cash cows. medium and quora barely made any money. In general it’s really hard to monetize blogging.

[robocat]

> if it ain't broke don't fix it

It is a difficult line, because sometimes you see a website become commercially irrelevant over time because functionality is not added. And I guess some sites need to follow visual trends to maintain customers.

Also there are long term changes that can force your hand. Mobile friendly required changes or you would lose those customers.

Some usability trends are improvements (and some trends are bad: Apple seems to prefer pretty looks at the expense of usability (Apple used to have a fantastic HIG (human interface guidelines))). https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

[cube00]

They're not adding functionality, they're putting pay walls up in front of old functionality. Look at Quora, certain answers are now pay walled, answers are supposed to be the core of the service.

[Longwelwind]

Medium was broken: it didn't bring enough revenue.

It's not because it was working from a user perspective that the underlying model wasn't broken.

[aintmeit]

And even if it broke, don't (can't) fix it.