Truly excellent thoughts here. I too agree that Twitter has done a poor job of innovating in any particular direction over the last several years. Almost everything seems to be geared towards monetization these days, not towards user satisfaction.

Medium on the other hand, at least so far, seems to have a really solid growth trajectory when it comes to useful features and UX improvements. I fear that may not be the case at some point in the future if the company needs to seek monetization strategies above all else… however, at least for the time being, the execution has been fantastic.

My only question is why Medium seems reluctant to allow any kind of paid access to content, something that they could capitalize on as a revenue stream as well as something that many writers and publications would be extremely favorable towards. If there’s any company anywhere right now that might have a chance at putting together a payments or subscription platform that benefits content creators, it would be Medium!