The Long Tail of Long Form
I was talking with a friend recently about this. I mentioned that, while I don’t watch much film these days, I know I’ll keep memories of certain moving pictures to my death bed. I couldn’t say the same for a Reddit post or a tweet.
I think many of us have become too accustomed to short-form content that give a quick dopamine hit without an enduring high. Medium aims to remedy this, no doubt formed from a bit of guilt on the part of its creators. These creators, as you probably know, are the creators of Twitter. Twitter itself was formed as a side-project of the larger goal of making blogging more approachable, but has turned into something else entirely. Useful, certainly, but with little to do for writing.
I remember being at a conference back in 2007, when Twitter was just spreading its wings. Adopted by developers and techies first, it was all the rage at that conference. I saw a projector with the list of tweets of the attendees, newest on top, next to the podium. A speaker would come to a boring section of their talk, and you’d see the Twitter board light up with “yawn…” and “meh” and other real-time feedback, most of which I found immature and disrespectful.
“This is awful”, I thought. “What has become of this world, where we pass around the soapbox from person to person to speak their contrived little 140 character misspelled phrase?” “15 minutes of fame? More like 15 seconds” I grumbled.
I was thus, unsurprisingly, late to the Twitter game, foregoing my three-letter username for the decidedly mundane @alariccole. In fact, I only created an account to help provide a support and communication channel for one of my apps. Once I’d found a few interesting people, though, I started to see the value.
This took quite a bit of pruning, mind you. Those interesting tweets that inspired my follow click were inevitably followed themselves by ignorant political posts or boring play-by-plays of a commute, etc. It took a lot of work to get this beautiful garden that is now my timeline. Once I had it, however, I could see why Twitter was important.
But the discussions in @-replies were often too terse and without value to me. I was longing for something longer form. I would find the occasional post on metafilter and so on, but—like finding a good movie on Netflix—it was rare and barely worth the effort.
I’m glad I stumbled upon Medium. I hope it succeeds, slowly and surely, in the coming months and years, as it has provided what I was looking for, both for reading and writing.
