Hello! I’m Elizabeth and I’m the head of community engagement at Medium. It’s a new position (this is week four for me, actually) but you are speaking my language with this post, making me want to stop by and say not only “hi” but “tell me more.”

We started Talkback recently as a hub specifically designed to have a dialogue between people who use Medium and people who make Medium. While that’s all well and good, it’s one place and most of these conversations happen in the wilds of Medium (like your post).

So here’s how I’m thinking about communities at Medium. First off, you’re right: they are communities. The Medium Community isn’t really a thing: Medium is a platform, a tool, and that’s what binds us together — but it’s not really why we are here. We’re here for each other: for what we read, what we write, how we interact with each other.

I have taken to calling these sub-communities tribes (because saying “community” over and over makes the word sound weird and because it really is what I think we’re aiming for — different tribes for all different sorts of things). Tags and publications are and will be tools to help people find their tribes — but they aren’t perfect and they don’t, on their own, make a complete toolkit.

In the short term, the best way to take control of your Medium experience and see more relevant content to the tribes you want is to be more active: highlight, recommend, carefully and selectively follow what you want to see.

In the long term (and more topical to your post) we’re working on ways, through tools and the platform itself, to help surface more diverse content and allow people to find the people they want to read their stuff as well as for readers to find more of what they want to read.

And then, there’s my team: the communities team. In addition to making sure that dialogue between the makers and the users of Medium happens and keeps happening, we’re going to be building programs to help cultivate those tribes and create an ecosystem where they can flourish on their own.

Is growth or monetization a thing we care about as a company? Of course — it would be probably be more troubling if those weren’t items we cared about— but those things won’t succeed unless we nail the underlying point of why people come to Medium and use Medium. And that’s literally my job: to think about you, the users, and make sure we give you what you need. It’s self-serving and altruistic at the same time. I’ll never sign a business deal that brings in a literal check but my work is absolutely crucial to our success because our success cannot happen without your success.