Ev Williams and his team have shaken things up at Medium, apparently moving away from the long-form publishing model the company has championed, and moving toward becoming more of a social network.
In a post entitled Medium is not a publishing tool – it’s not? – Williams starts by recounting the arc of his life, from Blogger to Twitter and now to Medium, tying them together with a storyline about attracting and retaining users for networks, or publishing platforms, or whatever the hell they are. He seems to be coming down on the network side of the coin today, which is the opposite of what they were pushing over the past months.
He says they’ve made a shift:
In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value.
He then discusses various social affordances on Medium, like the new highlighting feature, and responses. He points at some problematic aspects of these new features, like the way that responses lead to multipart conversations spread out all over the place. He concludes,
But every day we’re seeing growth of this activity and great examples of the network power of Medium being realized.
That’s why I say Medium is not a publishing tool. It’s a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people.
So, it’s a network, I guess, built around longish form writing.
But unmentioned in his post is the news that the company’s investment in its own publications is reportedly being trimmed, and structural changes are being made. As reported by Business Insider, The Message will now be managed by the team at Matter, while the former ‘writers at Matter’ will now just be ‘Medium writers’. War Is Boring – arguably one of the best investigative journalism site on war – is leaving Medium. Re:form – Medium’s design publication – has been closed after no one stepped up to sponsor after BMW dropped out. Likewise, The Archipelago has been shut down, and those writers are out.
As a Medium user most of this is perhaps irrelevant, except to the degree that the turmoil reflects barriers to adoption of the Medium network/platform. As a user, I would like to see interesting stuff to read, smart people to interact with, and an improving user experience. Much of that has been happening, but I fear that the zigging and zagging of the company’s direction will lead others to quit the network/platform.
As a publisher of a Medium publication – Work Futures – this shift is a negative, because to the extent that Medium is deemphasizing its own publications means it will likely invest less in the sorts of tools, traffic, and support publishers are interested in. I have other reasons to reconsider publishing Work Futures at Medium, most obviously the 160K+ followers here on Tumblr for my stoweboyd.com blog, very few of which have followed to Medium where Work Futures has only 1.1K followers, and I have only 5.1K, personally.
As a result, I’m going to wait and see what Williams and Co. pull out of their bag of tricks over the next few weeks and months, and I will repost all the original content from Work Futures – which is just a few dozen posts, actually – over here. Just in case.
If Ev Williams wants to make Medium into a competitor to Twitter and Facebook, I’m not sure I want to build a publication there. And at the same time, I’m not sure there is a platform/network out there that provides what the N-1 era of Medium was supposed to be about.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/120615468337
