Interesting piece. But I enjoyed reading it very much and “meeting” you through it. What your story leaves out are places like Medium, Twitter and others where we forge new kinds of relationships. Where we consume genuine ideas and content from people we would have never met before.

“Members Only”

As one of the early users of Medium, I have a deep admiration of the company. The folks I’ve known who have worked there over the years have been top notch, and it remains the best UX as a writer and reader of content around.

Writing

Just watched an interview of David Foster Wallace by Charlie Rose.

The Netflix / professional content point is a good one when it comes to video. Maybe that also matters here and in other more lightweight formats. It is hard to draw the lines for sure.

I also hear the tension about having to create a call-to-action / monetization moment in certain publications here and elsewhere.

Your point that advertising has corrupted the system is true. But I disagree about the lack of quality content.

Medium remains a place where good content exists. There are tens if not hundreds of extremely high quality newsletters out there. I personally have an extremely high quality and high signal Twitter experience…