Medium: When Does Streamlined Become Limited?

Medium is a fairly simple and easy-to-use platform. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the situation. While it is a straightforward website, it’s functionality can be limited. It is quite useful for what it is, but what it is isn’t that diverse or deep. In some ways, it attempts to make itself seem deeper than it is, but in doing so, confuses its own simplicity.

And apparently, only words.

The first example is the ‘clap’ system. While it seems fairly straightforward- claps representing appreciation, much like the ‘like’ system on Facebook- it is strangely arcane. For example, I went to one of my classmate’s blog posts and gave it a clap. I then gave it another, and another; in the end, I gave it well over 30 claps before I got bored and moved on. To my knowledge, there does not appear to be a cap on claps, or if there is one, it is quite high. This feedback system does not give an accurate representation of how many people appreciated a story. It seems more like a system intended to quantify how much the people that do read a story appreciate it, but the claps are too arbitrary to communicate that effectively.

(A/N: I later found the cap to be 50 claps. My point still stands.)

At what point does this become arbitrary?

In terms of being an author, your options are quite limited. Only one font is available and that is only available in three sizes: title, big and small. You can italicize or bold the font, you can embed a link in it and you can apply a quote indent in two ways. The previous two sentences explain the entirety of the customization you can use with text on Medium. Past that, an author can embed images or videos from links or locally, which opens up a wide variety of options on that front, but the images can only be in-line.

Where does ‘simplicity’ end and ‘restricting’ begin?

This is a double-edged sword, as I said earlier. The upside is that anyone can log into Medium and begin typing with no fuss or struggle; it is a simple as hitting ‘new story’ and pressing buttons on a keyboard. An author does not have to worry about choosing a font, a size for that font, any formatting decisions or anything beyond that. Conversely, an author does not get to make those decisions if they wanted to. This system works if the simplicity is desired, but if the simplicity is not desired, and an author wishes to become more creative with their blog visually, they simply do not have the opportunity to do so. This is creatively and intellectually limiting and, while it may benefit the reader or even the author by limiting foolish creative decisions such as unreadable fonts or annoying-to-navigate formatting, its lack of depth will keep more ‘serious’ bloggers from the site. In that way, Medium will likely always remain an entry-level blogging platform that enjoys fringe success. This, combined with their choice to limit views to paid accounts, will prevent any superstar successes on the website.

What does the future of Blogging and Medium hold?

Considering the broad term that we have defined as ‘blogging’, I doubt the blog is going anywhere anytime soon. However, the blog as defined on Medium might have its days numbered. People have been telling their stories since humans could speak; that is not going anywhere anytime soon. The ‘blog’, in the sense that it is a tool used by people to tell stories or share their knowledge, is going to be around as long as the internet is around.

Without ads, Medium needs some way to make money, but is pay-walling content the way to do it?

However, the nature of blogging is changing; it has been changing since the inception of the blog. The 2010s have been marked by the rise of the video blog, or vlog, to a point where most people likely do not even consider the written blog, or perhaps even think it retro or outdated. As discussed within this course, the consumption of media and content seems to be ever increasing in speed and conversely, the attention span of consumers is getting shorter. As more and more information becomes available in easier and easier ways, the amount of time one can dedicate to each bit of information becomes shorter in most circumstances. Unless someone goes out of their way to intentionally consume a particular piece of information or content, it might fall to the wayside.

Medium, in that way, does not seem to have a particularly robust business model. In its simplicity, it is limiting itself. By not supporting video blogs or other forms outside of text blogs supported by small amounts of other media such as pictures or videos, they are cutting themselves off from a particular part of the market and not a small one at that. The writing blog offers some advantages to a video blog- reading is much easier than watching in some ways, such as not needing audio to hear- but in the long term, it just doesn’t have as wide of an audience. A video blog stimulates the visual senses more than just reading does, if a blogger edits the video well, and also stimulates the ears, while reading mostly only engages the mind. In terms of visceral enjoyment, the video blog clearly wins.

Simple video or simple imagery. That’s it.

As for myself personally, I do not see myself blogging on Medium in the future. This is not anything against the website itself, but rather just a comment on my personal tastes and goals. I am a creative person and I enjoy writing, but I use other creative outlets for my writings. Medium is for people who wish to reach a wide audience, but even that is by luck. To blog on Medium alone is like buying a lottery ticket and hoping you win, as it is mostly luck in many ways if you get noticed or make progress. Quality and tenacity will only get you so far in such an inundated market.

To summarize, it’s not bad but it’s not good; it’s Medium.