The trouble with Medium
In its current form Medium.com is an attractive place to read and write. It’s attractive for reading because it’s got all the right line heights and fonts and colors and stuff; because most of the pieces you’ll find are crafted by pro or semipro writers; because most of those pieces are short and juicy (“3 min read”), like TED talks.
Writing here is great for similar reasons. The editor I’m tapping this in is awfully easy on the eyes. In fact it looks exactly like what you’re reading. Do you see how big this text is? It’s so giant on the screen, font-wise, that when you’re writing you hesitate to make paragraphs more than like fifty words apiece. Which has a way of making the whole enterprise seem low-stakes & airy & fun.
In fact a lot of these UI choices—the character limit on comments, the jumbo text, the reading-time projections, the collections you’re invited to when you sign up (“I.M.H.O.”)—seem to encourage a weird kind of nugget-y writing. So that instead of the fact-filled writeups you find on blogs like Language Log or Marginal Revolution, where the topic is the author’s beat and life; or the heavily reported stories you might find on a magazine’s website, where the topic becomes the author’s life, at least for a while; on Medium you find a ton of what I want to call… “insight” writing: writing that’s voicy and fluffy and un-full of facts and aiming to convince you of something just interesting enough to be worth saying, but not so interesting to be worth studying.
And I don’t quite understand why you’d want to do that kind of writing on a website that doesn’t bear your name; that, shortly, will be accessible to anyone; and that doesn’t, in general, pay you. Is it because Medium, in its current form, has just enough selectivity and editorial attention and visibility, a savvy enough and socially-connected enough user base, so that a post here clears the activation energy of “getting noticed” more reliably than on a personal blog?
That effect can’t possibly last, if Medium becomes what it wants to be.
