Falling in Love with Medium

“Why is Medium so cool?” — I get this question a lot when I tell people how much I love the product.

On the surface it seems pretty simple. Medium is a blogging platform that aims to make content creation easier. The blog editor is lightweight and minimalist in design, eliminating the complexity of markup and text formatting. The website is just a nice place to read and write blog posts, right?

Appealing to the One-Off Blogger

The value that Medium provides goes far beyond its lovely minimalist surface. By reducing the friction for writing, the site expands its writer base to users who don’t fit the traditional “blogger” definition. For those like me — people who enjoy writing but don’t have interest in creating a strong online presence — there is no incentive to go through the effort of creating a personal blog. Medium offers a way get feedback on my writing and put ideas in front of an audience that appreciates good content.

After I published my first Medium post, I was thrilled when I could see statistics showing how many people viewed and read it. I got a great boost of confidence to continue writing. At the same time, the blog posts are not closely tied to my identity. I don’t feel pressure to immediately write a next post, to capture audiences with absurd numbers of brilliant and illuminating blog posts. Writing for others suddenly becomes authentic and exhilarating.

Being Thoughtful

Medium wants to increase the “depth of understanding” in online content. They are doing incredible technical innovations behind the scenes to provide the best reading experience on the Internet. Beyond attracting a new segment of the writers, Medium’s power comes from the immense thoughtfulness built into the product.

Nowhere else have I seen information about the number of minutes needed to read a post. With that small piece of data, Medium demonstrates mindfulness and consideration towards users. “We know you have busy lives,” the product suggests. “We’ll help you manage your time while you read great content.”

The ranking of posts is also spectacularly managed. This past summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about content quality and ranking while interning on the Google News team. So when I got the chance to meet Medium engineers, I immediately asked how they determine their post ranking. The answer absolutely blew me away.

Rather than asking how often posts are read, Medium asks how well posts are read. The website tracks scroll and mouse movements to understand if people are actually reading on their devices, compared to standard ranking measures like page views or favorites. Users benefit from the careful thought needed to totally re-imagine what counts as a good post.