Writing on Medium
Thoughts on the platform/ publisher/ platisher/ platypus/ after a year of posting stories.
Kate Losse once called Medium the “inter-office bulletin for the tech industry,” and that’s still what I think of this website. While it most obviously appears to carry on in the tradition of blogs, it always seemed to me as something more nostalgic — like the newsletter trend — an attempt to modernize early internet communities like the The Well, message boards, Usenet, and before that, pamphlets and zines. These were venues to announce new projects (most notably, Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, on comp.sys.next.announce, posting “WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available”), debate, exchange ideas, share recipes, post open letters, give advice, and tell stories.
There was great writing on Usenet. I spent a lot of time composing the missives I posted to various groups. But I never considered my participation as a form of publishing. I was communicating and engaging within a community.
It is now over a year since I began contributing regularly to this publishing/social network start-up experiment. I am sort of paid to write but I am definitely paid to use Medium. I can’t imagine this amount of creative freedom secured through a more traditional editorial contract. The challenge is the challenge of any blank page but in this case, whatever I write has the potential to stretch one’s perception of what this platform is for.
Because people want to know what Medium is for, just like they wanted to know what Twitter was for (and still wonder).
It signals a particular form of independence, when a professional writer bypasses media outlets to post material on their blog instead. The post is not representative of the purview of a publishing institution, no editor had a hand in shaping it, the text is yours and not by the benevolence of gatekeepers. A journalist would make a similar decision to post 2,000 words on Italian horror and giallo history to rec.arts.movies rather than pitch it to a magazine. (And yes, with both examples I’m teetering toward the hornet’s nest that is how to properly compensate writers, artists, and musicians for their labor rather conflate it with “doing what you love.” Let me get back to you on that in a future post.)
A successful social network for writing will look like a diversity of communities exceeding the wide range of places to participate on Usenet in the 90s. Communities have formed here and may continue to take shape. Remember much of the feminist organizing in tech began with cogent, necessary writing that was posted on Medium the summer after its launch. Today many white male tech publication editors laugh along with your mansplaining jokes and may even tweet links to things like http://allmalepanels.tumblr.com/, but it was just about impossible to pitch stories about sexism in the industry to these same editors in 2013. The sheer number of women sharing their stories, and the number of people linking to and directing attention to these stories, proved the urgency of this issue.
I assess many a new social network or app by thinking “if I were welcome here, then people like me would already be here.” I never would have posted this story on gender, pay, and conference organizing (written before I joined the Message), if it were not for the existing feminist writing on the site and my expectation that I could find a receptive audience.
It is trickier to form a community like that on Medium now. Interface elements do not encourage discovery. I know there is great stuff published on Medium but I have no idea how to find it. Tagging will help, but the burden is still on the writer to find readers. This disincentivizes potential writers. Why spend an evening composing a thoughtful essay if that post will just be more hay rather than the needle someone is looking to find?
There is no community around takes.
The worst thing that could happen to Medium is it becomes the final destination in the world of hot takes. All the takes that no one took might be taken up by the place that takes everything.
Takes are long-winded, dispassionate, needless opinion pieces commissioned by content sites so there is fresh content. Takes don’t spark conversations, but they can result in comments. (The “don’t read the comments” jokes of recent years breaks my heart as someone who always loved the responses and community that emerged from writing online.) There is no community around takes, although there might be something of a community of people who write takes. Takes can, by the way, be automated thanks to Darius Kazemi’s Content, Forever.
There typically isn’t any financial incentive to writing takes, rather it is a way to stake a claim of expertise in some area.
A Silicon Valley thought leader with a take telling you how to live your best life might access tens of thousands more eyes, than the next Nobel laureate in literature. That’s the consequence of a hierarchy of attention determined by follower count. It is a problem for Medium rather than the least worst solution.
First readers and writers need to find each other.
Usenet was porous. Someone who lived in the middle of nowhere, who was a stranger to the other people in various newsgroups, could post thoughts and engage with the community as an equal. Spam and online harassment make it difficult to create communities that open today. Perhaps collections could play a role in filtering content like “rec.arts” or “soc.culture,” but the process of submitting a piece to a collection is still opaque to the average user. And users still have to find appropriate collections, which brings us back to the problem of discovery.
A broad, diverse community benefits everyone. One post “Why my opinion on abortion/religion/the election/etc is the only one that matters” might get 100,000 views, but if twenty thoughtful posts on knitting, drag performance, figure skating, birdwatching, the anti-austerity left, and other subjects each receive about 5,000 views — well, then you have the network effect. Medium needs activism and queerness and eccentric hobbies, it should be a place where chefs exchange recipes and teenagers collaborate on slash-fic. It should be a place lots and lots of people feel welcome and might find likeminded people. But first they have to find each other.
This is a very long way — a take, sure, okay, maybe I just wrote a take in my attempt to take down takes — to say that if you are writing great stuff here, I want to see it! My hope for this site is some method of content curation that isn’t based on follower count and filter bubbles or as crass as swipe left or swipe right.
And by the way, I am surprised “writing on Medium” isn’t yet a cliche by now. Just wait. We will know Medium is on to something when there are a lot more people writing posts like this one explaining how they use it, what they want from it, and how else to shape it to our purposes.
