Power to the People of Medium
Ever since the early days of BBS, I’ve been fascinated by online communities and social networks. I’ve seen all sorts of communities pop up, increase in popularity, and then die in all too familiar patterns. They all go through a period of rapid growth during which users and creators alike are ecstatic about the potential of the platform and are loving all that the platform already has to offer, but before long these platforms reach a state of early maturity, and this is where they usually begin their slow — or not too slow — decent into irrelevance and closure.
It’s at this turning point that the expectations of the platform’s users begin to diverge from the vision of the platform’s creators, and users start complaining about features they want not being implemented or about changes that have been made not being the “right” direction for the platform. Activity on the platform becomes dominated by debate about that platform, and users start leaving in droves, either because they no longer believe in the developers’ vision or because they’re not interested in where the bulk of the conversation has headed.
We’ve begun seeing signs of this here on Medium. Prominent users have announced their departure or have just stopped writing as much as they once did, and popular publications have shut down, but I’m not interested in discussing the dynamics of this in detail here. I merely wanted to point out that this sort of churn in users is all too common, but it may or may not be a sign that we’ve reached “peak Medium”.
M y point here is that Medium is at something of a watershed moment in its development. It has both grown so much that quality content is no longer easy to find and is faced with the daunting challenge of taking the platform out to a more global audience. Stories are already being written in many different languages, but the user experience is still very much geared to English speakers.
Enter Pomqa. About three months ago, Vikram Babu, one of those prominent users who has recently stepped back from Medium and also shuttered Absurdist, a highly popular independent publication here, had the excellent idea to create a Slack group for “People of Medium” (POM).
Naturally enough, this first Pomqa group was created for English-speaking users of Medium, but it wasn’t long before one of Pomqa’s members, Cristina Juesas, helped create a Pomqa for Spanish speakers, too.
This was then followed almost immediately by similar Slack groups for both the Italian and French-speaking communities on Medium, and groups for German and Portuguese are in the works.
So far, these “non-English” communities of Medium users have all essentially gravitated around official Medium publications providing original and translated content in their native languages. These publications were a good first step in catering to other cultures, but sooner or later Medium will need to localize the whole platform for these cultures in order to provide a comparable user experience to the one currently designed for the English-speaking world. All of these Slack groups for People of Medium can be an excellent way for users to play a part in this localization process while also helping each other figure out how to take best advantage of what Medium has to offer in the meantime.
Medium isn’t a great place for conversation, but I think that actually bodes well for the future of the platform since, as mentioned above, most of the platforms I’ve seen come and go have collapsed under the weight of too much conversation on the platform about the platform itself. I think groups like Pomqa, though, have the potential to provide valuable, productive user-to-user interaction without promoting a false sense that users have a direct stake in determining the direction in which Medium evolves. At the same time, Medium can (and does) keep an eye on these groups to get a feel for what users want and can make development decisions without feeling direct pressure to compromise their overall vision for the platform.
So get involved in a Pomqa group today and be part of a vibrant community of writers who just happen to be taking advantage of the Medium platform as an outlet for our craft. Medium is a great place to post stories, but it probably won’t be around forever. The relationships you build in a Pomqa group, though, could very well outlast it.
