Increase the Importance of User Signals

During the first days of the conversation (and after I followed specific tags), Medium consistently exposed me to relevant posts on the topic. But as the week wore on, fewer posts were shown to me, and the same old design and tech posts dominated my experience — even as the debate should have been building momentum towards the Town Hall. What’s more, what should have been compounding signals to the Medium algorithm never seemed to set in.

For example, despite the fact that I follow think tanks that directly participated in the debate, and even though their content used the assigned tags (which I’m sure were trending given much higher than average use), their posts were never shown to me — instead I had to seek them out myself. For whatever reason, something in Medium’s algorithm didn’t quite click — that’s an opportunity to improve the experience in the future.

Curate Daily Updates

Every single day during the conversation I wished there was a way to see the best of what was discussed on that day. To their credit, Medium did produce one such round up once during the debate, but it wasn’t surfaced to me until after the final Town Hall events had already passed (see problem #1). More frequent (and discoverable) updates would have been helpful in following the conversation.

Deliver Threaded Conversations to my Inbox

I read some great (and surprising) pieces on criminal justice this week. Some of those even had good responses/follow-on conversations. This was particularly true of the Town Hall sponsored by Medium. None of these ever appeared in a structured way in my daily digest email.

If Medium thinks a post is important enough to show as part of that digest, it should also show me responses to that post — and those responses should be grouped together within the digest as a sub to the main article (i.e. threaded conversations in email)

Develop A New Publication for Each New Debate

All of these issues boil down to problems with distribution, and while many of these issues have relevance for Medium’s user experience far beyond this particular project, there is one potential solution that is unique to this project and future “curated conversations.” Each public conversation sponsored by Medium should have its own unique publication that aggregates content and issues a daily newsletter rounding up the best of that conversation.

It seems like this might be the purpose of the Town Hall publication, but I would argue that Town Hall should have a broader purpose.

Town Hall is a place where Medium users find public conversations and debates.

Rather than function as host to all (or many) threads of the most recent conversation — as it does now — it should serve as an entry point to multiple conversations, and a place for Medium to report back on those conversations to the community (see my idea about data analysis in the introduction). The conversations themselves should take place in other rooms (publications) where like (or opposing) minds gather.

Town Hall could still play host to real-time events, but as an entry-point to more evergreen, asynchronous conversations, it could better scale to meet Medium’s ambitions as a platform.

This was a solid first effort from the team at Medium, and I look forward to seeing what they do next time. Before ending, there is one additional observation worth making

Many of the solutions I’ve described above manifest as improvements to Medium’s email letters/digest system. I think that is significant.

In my daily work with nonprofits and foundations, I’ve found time and again that senior staff are extremely reliant on their email to stay up to date with what their colleagues are doing and what is happening in the space. Literally the more senior the person, the more significant email is in their information diet. If Medium wants to be a 21st C Public Sphere, and these stakeholders are the ones driving the conversation, a solid strategy for pulling those stakeholders to the platform via email will be a vital component of future success.