Cheers, Medium!

You turned me into a writer

I just added the word “writer” to my Twitter bio, which is something I really didn’t see coming. When you update your own identity, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect, and on reflection that’s down to a certain website…

Dear Medium,

Two years ago I left the company I co-founded. It was quite a step to take, and the next year was to be about decompressing and seeking a new focus by experimenting and trying new things. One thing I did was to finally get round to writing up and finishing a piece of research I’d been working on.

I realised that I had learnt a lot starting that company, and the ones before it, that I’d never really put down in words. I wrote articles, using a little Dropbox blogging engine that I wrote myself. I was interested in “culture” as well as “hacker culture” and where they overlapped. I wrote from personal experience. I wrote based on spending time on a remote island a “hacker in residence”. I wrote as someone who went to hack days and hackathons. I wrote as as someone who usually writes code, not words.

I found it enjoyable to write, and people enjoyed what I wrote. But it was a similar experience to when I’d tried “blogging” before, and before I started I’d already set my own expectations very low.

A few hundred people would generally read something I wrote, perhaps a handful might comment, and a few more might tweet a reply on the day that I published something. But that was about it, and I assumed that was what writing on the web felt like to most people.

To me, a few hundred people spending the time to read something I’d written was pretty amazing, given that it would most likely be people from Twitter that I respect.

Then, as if by magic, I was back into the startup life with a new company, Makeshift. An exciting business model where we would repeatedly try out new business ideas by, well, just building something quickly. And I’m not quite sure what happened…

It’s like the research and practice came together, and I just felt the need to write. To write about what I knew about. To write about what I’d learnt. To write some pretty intense things about personal motivation, about what drives me, why we do these things, how I think we should behave as people, about my kids, about work, about home, about death and impermanence, about motivation… Gosh, it was broad!

Maybe it’s synchronicity. Maybe Medium was just in the right place at the right time. Maybe it was serendipity. But this sudden acceleration of writing output happened here. On Medium.

This place has got so many things right. A care for typography. A care for experience. A respect for the writing process. A focus on the idea that feedback is important. A minimalist feel. But above all, it just feels like Flickr in the early days. Hitting the home page (and I did a few times, when there was one shared home page) was such a buzz. People responded to my writing, I made new connections with some amazing people. And that’s just online. In “the real world” the effect was more remarkable. I’d meet someone and they’d already have read what I’d said, because of Medium’s reach.

As with all things, your excitement dies down. I quickly realised that actually Medium is all about good writing, but also, and probably more importantly, a ready audience of people who want to read good writing.

And what an audience. Whereas on my old blog I’d only reach a handful of people, Medium magnifies good words, and I’ve found an audience of thousands. And that’s a a serendipity accelerator, because writing here has connected me with so many people around the world.

You see, the internet is full of good writing. But it’s hard to find. And I think that the amazing thing that Medium has pulled off this year has been to create a place where you can expect there to be some excellent ideas contained within the arrangement of the characters of the Freight Text typeface on a page.

Now that the flood-gates are open, sure, that general quality will drop. But for me, it’s job done. I’m now self-describing as a writer. Not a “blogger”, that’s not quite right. I write. I’m not sure I blog.

You know, when you’re building software, occasionally you’ll get an email saying “hey I love your product”, or more likely “there’s a bug”. I’m not sure I’ve ever received a long-form thank you letter before, so I thought that this was the only appropriate way to give a little feedback to the Medium team about what this place has done for me this year.

This year, Medium turned me into a writer.

Cheers folks,

Stef

I write in a few places now, and you can subscribe.