Why Medium is the new ‘medium’?
Thoughts regarding the future potential of Medium
I don’t have any objective data or survey results but I believe most of the authors and readers of Medium would agree with me: Medium is simple yet powerful and elegant. More importantly it’s working very well for its purposes. I would like to take this positive feedback even one step further and claim that Medium will be the only platform for quality content. Why? Here’s why:
Medium has found the optimal User Experience for writing
User experience on Medium just works as it’s supposed to work. This sounds very simple but all professionals working in the field know very well that it’s very hard to accomplish a simple but elegant user experience. It’s very obvious that Medium creators learned a lot from other platforms and paid lots of attention to the details.
Good UX do not only improve the experience and loyalty of users but also boosts the speed of content creation. It’s not work but joy to write an article on medium.
Medium has a great User Interface
On top the great UX Medium also built a great UI. Most of the other big social networks are suffering severe design problems. This has a lot to do with their history, legacy and marketing strategies but still bad is bad.
I believe Medium was heavily inspired by IA Writer and Svbtle but still they managed to create a beautiful and consistent UI that works on all platforms. No need to install an app no need to do anything, just works consistenly on desktop, mobile or tablet. No Ads, no interruptions for the text, it’s the only website that does not require me to use an extension such as Readability.
Medium managed to bring great writers together
50% of people I enjoy reading is already using Medium. The rest is slowly moving here. I see the transition, it’s happening, day by day, week by week and I don’t see a reason that it’ll stop. At least half of the full articles I read on daily basis are on Medium. Most of them make me think, make me research and dig more about the topic. The content is the real king in here. Here’s a good article on Medium, here’s another one, another, and another…
Medium embraces content creation instead of ‘(re)sharing’
As far as I see Medium set its goals to create good content instead of creating high traffic. Most of sharing options available on other social networks are there for a reason: creating traffic or trying to reroute everyone over their services and eventually taking over the whole internet traffic. There’s no RT, Reblog, Share on Medium. I love this. I hate seeing the same content over and over. I believe this is the right strategy to reduce noise, junk content and over-sharing problem.
Medium does not abuse e-mail notifications
Most of other big social networks are sending too many e-mails. Lots of them are useless and annoying. I always ending up opting-out which is another painful process. In contrast, signal-noise ratio of Medium notifications are just right. I get links to good articles every day and I mostly click on a suggested article in a Medium e-mail — it really works. At least for now.
Medium has enough money Medium raised $25M in January. Money is not much without having a good idea but it’s necessary to move forward in a long-term product development without looking for ads or any other user-annoying money making strategies. I hope they can keep the product as it is for a long time.
It’s a social thing.
Last but not least: We are social creatures. We like to hang out with others and I feel that Medium has the pace and critical mass now. That was the whole story about Facebook, Twitter and others. And now, Medium is breeding another type of community. Hopefully it will be a good one, a community that cares about good content, good products and creativity.
I think the list can be longer but this is good to start. Please share your thoughts and help making this article better. And if you are curious: “No, I don’t work for Medium” I am just a tech and design enthusiast who enjoys using well designed products. Peace.
