Medium, A Love Letter

Medium is the (un-)blogging platform I’ve wanted my entire life. You’re going to change the world, Medium, and here is why.

Medium, the place for beautiful text. The design exists almost outside of time.

Why shouldn’t it? Minor font variants aside, the design of books hasn’t changed since the invention of the printing press; no other design can compare to both the beauty and functionality of this style in extended reading.

Nothing else in Medium is important. The interface is so simple, obvious, and minimal, that it’s almost as if it doesn’t exist. It’s universal. You don’t need to know what a “tag cloud” is, or find an archive link on a page.

Browsing Medium is like browsing a library, and that means my parents can enjoy it as much as I can.

Medium, the place for ideas. Not people. Like the internet’s most famous fake robot dinosaur, I don’t want people to believe ideas because of who presents them.

Heck, I don’t even want people to believe in my ideas. They’re just there for people to consider. Maybe there’s a better way of doing something. Maybe you’re doing something which hurts lots of people. Maybe you’re not alone in feeling something.

On Medium, people don’t subscribe to me, they subscribe to topics. The authors aren’t even really visible, they’re hidden in a tiny box near the top.

Medium is more than the blogging platform redefined. Blogging companies, like most successful consumer-facing internet companies in the last five years, are focused on providing individuals with voices. Bloggers spend years building bastions of subscribers who’ll read their posts. Medium provides the ideas with a voice.

Medium, the place for fresh air. When I write on Medium, I don’t think about what Hacker News is going to think. When I read on Medium, I don’t think about what the Reddit comments are going to say. I didn’t realize how relieving this would be until I’d experienced it. I’ll never go back.

This post would never do well on social news sites. But it doesn’t matter. A small number of people looking for things like it will find it. That matters so much more to me, now.

With how social the web has become, I’d actually forgotten that the web could be used to share knowledge; I was too drawn into the conversation. Medium was the first time in years I’d read online for the sake of reading.