The tricky business of social platform development

by Grey Drane

First of all, I think we have to keep in mind that Medium is being developed by some of the same people who created Twitter, so I get the sense that they intentionally make it difficult for actual multi-user “discussion” to thrive. That said, I do think that Twitter-like direct messaging could work just fine here on Medium.

What I would be very cautious of, though, is developing responses and notes into something overly blog- or forum-like, especially if there is an expectation that the site devs are (or should be) involved. Over the years, I’ve seen far too many new social platforms I’ve used collapse under the weight of the “navel-gazing debate” of users. We’re seeing the same sort of thing happening right now on Reddit, for example. With the best of intentions, users start discussing all sorts of ideas for the service and, for whatever reason, have some expectation that their ideas will be implemented, and when they aren’t, they become disillusioned with the service and start complaining. At this point, either the devs give in to their users and compromise their vision (to the ultimate detriment of the service), or they continue to ignore them, and the users eventually give up and leave. Either way, the site is usually doomed.

The other all-too-frequent — and equally serious — hazard to promoting open, multi-user discussion is the rise of trolling and just general bickering and pissing contests. If a conversation quickly gets dispersive (like it does here or on Twitter), this sort of thing can’t thrive and propogate, so it’s easy to just ignore and let it go away naturally. This sort of user-only infighting can be just as dangerous for a platform in that it can ruin the user experience, and users end up leaving or just not joining in the first place.

When we compete, we aim to take from others what’s already been created instead of creating something ourselves. (see: Don’t compete. Create.)

Intense, concentrated discussion also more frequently becomes more about competing than either cooperating or creating. There’s a natural tendency to want to “one-up” the person you’re replying to, to have the “last word”. When conversation is more free-flowing in a (virtual) space that is not well defined and you have no expectation that what you say can ever be the “last word” on a given topic, the sense is more that you’re just contributing another idea to the neverending stream.

If anything, I could see the Medium team trying to do something to further de-emphasize the idea of the “response” to stories. I’m not sure what other word they could use off the top of my head. Maybe “reaction”? Something like that. Or they could better encourage using the full-page interface for writing responses with titles and stuff that look more like full-fledged stories and also make the responses below a story look less like comments — make it look even more like a stream of stories than a traditional article/comment structure.

I’m not saying that Medium is already perfect. I’ve just grown very wary of becoming overly “invested” in how a specific service evolves. If I like a service as is, I use it. As it evolves, I assess whether I still like the service and either continue using it or not. I may even very occasionally muse about how I’d like to see the service evolve, but I no longer have any attachment to those ideas (or to the service itself) like I have in the past on other platforms.

You might also enjoy some of these related stories of mine:

Medium is about stories, not (so much) about conversation
Feeling the need for feed management