As an old professor always said, “People want the hole, not the drill”.

The tool, by definition, exists to fulfill some function or help create some greater value. In this case, the greater value is expressing an idea and (hopefully) reaching an audience.

But the other critical piece is how much labor or effort is required. This, for me at least, was the real barrier to using Medium. The ‘tool’ itself was simple, free and easy to use, but it felt like I needed to produce a lengthy, formal piece and that requires a lot of labor.

It is nice to see new, more effortless ways of using the tool, like highlights and responses. It feels like a better return on effort and makes for easier engagement. This higher level of engagement is what turns a network into a community, and communities have inherent value.

But back to the greater value and original purpose: expressing an idea and reaching an audience. Medium-the-tool helps me express an idea, no doubt, but Medium-the-network should help me reach an audience, and that value is harder to realize. Harder because you either need to build it from scratch, or piggyback existing social graphs, in which case I’m not really reaching a new audience, I’m just finding my old audience on a new platform.

That being said, I would love to see more development around helping authors find audiences. While building new networks is hard, there is also great promise in that anyone has the potential to become a pioneer on the new platform.