Facebook to Medium. Hello, world!
The reasons why I started Medium
Recently, I have thought that I could not take the time to face the fuzzy thoughts in my head.
Facebook as Twitter.
Have you ever seen Facebook without realizing it? Me? Most of a day. After waking up, while waiting for my breakfast in front of the microwave, and while boarding a train which is heavily crowded…
Recently, Facebook has been a kind of information-gathering tool for me. It has taken a long time to read articles posted by news media I followed, or shared by my friends. Then, my reactions to these articles have been only two things which are;
- sharing my impression in a few lines of a post on my timeline, and
- forwarding to my mail address for work.
As seen above, my output became ad-hoc due to consuming/reacting to contents in a quite short time on Facebook. In other words, Facebook is very much like Twitter for me. Additionally, Facebook is a closed network. Therefore, people outside of my network on Facebook have few chances to see my opinions.
Where is my place to deeply dialogue with myself?
However, I realized that consuming/reacting to contents deprived me of the enough time to integrate knowledge into my head and come up with new ideas. Thus, I started thinking how to carefully create contents, having a dialogue with myself.
Also, I thought how to directly get feedback and empathy from people who have common interests. Therefore, I was looking for a new platform to start my blog outside of Facebook.
Then, I met Medium. I believed that this new-era platform would make me possible to increase the amount of time spent on creating my contents and share my thought with people who I have not seen yet in the world.
As my first story, I will share my thoughts why I decided to start Medium even though I am a beginner of writing articles.
Reason 1: Easy to Start.
First, Medium’s concept which is “Easy to start for everyone” made me relieved. We can also see it in this story written by Ev Williams.
It was the fact that you could easily write and share a story without the setup, overhead, or commitment level of starting a blog.
Initially, registering or establishing my blog were on my scope. However, I concerned about taking the time to brush up appearances on my blog. Additionally, I was not very interested in monetizing or appealing my track record by blog. That’s why I needed a simple platform to easily share my ideas for people in the world.
While writing this article, I realized that Medium was designed by facing user behavior of translating their thoughts into word, and also considering user experience to easily start writing. I was strongly impressed by Medium’s attitude as one of UX designers.
Reason 2: Unnecessary to focus on one theme
When I considered starting my blog, I could not decide which theme I should write for. Then, I found the following word in this story which title is “about.medium.com” published by Medium.
Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications.
I was really impressed by this sentence. It is important for readers with a specific interest to have sympathy and a helpful suggestion from each story on Medium. Then, I realized it makes no difference to readers whether I set one theme on my blog or not.
This change of my awareness made me easy to publish my opinions. I will use Medium to focus on weaving my stories as below.
- Writing a story when I came up with a specific theme.
- Publishing it with tags according to the theme.
- Integrating stories into a Publication when a specific themes increasing.
Reason 3: Networking with common interests
On Facebook, my friend’s interests do not always match mine. Then, users usually see their timeline. The user interface on Facebook does not lead users to search posts by their interests.
On the other hand, on Medium, users can follow tags at their first step. This feature is quite important for me to share each story according to my interest at that time. Tags will easily lead readers who I have not met yet to my stories.
Additionally, following each other who has common interests will help me to make new network beyond my real friend. Fortunately (Unfortunately for Medium?), most of my friends have not start Medium yet. This is the good opportunity for me to expand my network.
Reason 4: Opportunity to learn English
I have been interested in learning English from my experiences that I worked for a global product with members in an overseas branch. Especially, I have felt that it was important to increase the time to speak or write in English.
However, writing in English on Facebook will reduce the sympathy from my friends most of all is Japanese.My friends on Facebook is almost Japanese. Therefore, I concerned that writing in English on Facebook will reduce their sympathy.
On Medium, (fortunately for me) almost users are English speakers, and almost stories on the timeline are written in English. Following each other or highlighting on the story creates the comfortable environment to easily communicate with strangers in the world.
Therefore, I decided to publish a story in both English and Japanese. This is an experimentation for me to compare reader’s feedback between the English version and Japanese version. Actually, this attempt will take the time more than writing only in my native language. However, I will carefully try to write a timeless story and publish to the world through Medium.
Summary: Medium is the best platform for me (for now)
Medium which platform has the following features fit me for now.
- Easy to start even though blog-beginner.
- Not need to focus on one theme.
- Networking with people who has common interests beyond real friends.
- Opportunity to learn English through publishing own ideas.
I hope this story can encourage someone (like me) would like to share own ideas to people has common interests and create a new network around the world, not just consume and react to contents on the timeline.
Thank you for reading! :)
