What Most Writers Here Don’t Understand About Medium
It’s a social network, stupid.
It took me a while to get this. But duh, the founder very clearly stated that Medium was supposed to be Twitter with longer stories. But I didn’t pay attention to that.
According to me, five years ago when I started writing on Medium, I was a staff writer and this was my own personal New Yorker magazine.
I used to get mad about this one little quirk of Medium. Sometimes when I commented to another writer’s story, “Nice Job, Bill, I liked it”, Medium would “publish” the comment as a story. And other people would get it in their feed. Christine has published a story. My readers would then read the following fascinating “story” — “Nice job Bill, I liked it.”
And I imagine they would be confused. Has Christine Stevens lost it? Or is she going for that Hemingway six-word novel thing? If so, it doesn’t work.
I used to think that Medium was wrong to treat my comments as “stories”
They were not stories. That was a dumb idea to call comments stories. They are comments!
But gradually I understood I had it backwards — on Medium, my actual stories are really comments. Because the social network comes first. The only meaning my stories have is as a means of…
