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Inside Medium: an attempt to bring civility to the internet
Dave LeeNorth America technology
reporter bbc.com
3 March 2016
On an internet full of hurried, scruffy ballpoints, Medium is
the web's fountain pen.
We're told our attention spans are short. That we cannot focus
on anything beyond 140 characters, or without lists accentuated by quirky
reaction gifs.
And yet Medium somehow manages to fend off this trend -
encouraging the construction of a coherent argument via, primarily, long-form
writing. The site is not built to reward clicks, but reads - and in doing so
has fostered a different kind of community. It's almost… nice.
Almost entirely organically, Medium has become an outlet for
people who already have the biggest audiences in the world. Think Bill Gates,
Bono and even President Obama, who posted his State of the Union address on
Medium, in full, before he delivered it to Congress.
And when a high-flying Amazon exec wanted to reignite a spat
with the New York Times, he did so on Medium — despite Amazon's owner, Jeff
Bezos, owning the legendary Washington Post. The Times, incidentally, responded
on Medium.
Why?
"What we're trying to do is create the default place to
write and publish anything of substance that you want the world to see,"
says Evan Williams, Medium's founder and chief executive.
Williams' office, just off San Francisco's Market Street,
overlooks a city full of people desperately seeking the next idea that makes it
big.
Williams has had three.
First, Blogger - a platform, eventually bought by Google, that
was largely responsible for bringing us the verb "to blog".
Then came Twitter, which he co-founded in 2006 along with with
Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. It's a site that has become synonymous
with everything that is good, bad, hilarious and miserable on the web. Its
verb: "to tweet".
Medium doesn't have a verb, yet.
But it is going places. At the tail-end of 2015, more than two million posts
had been published - a feat that's only impressive when you consider Medium
posts, on the whole, are long. Some data digging by the company concluded
that a post that takes seven minutes to read gathers the most attention.
On the internet, seven minutes is eons.
"The truth is people still read," Williams tells me.
"All day long."
Getting out of the soundbite
world
two million posts have been
published on Medium since it was launched
Right now, people are reading about politics. Several of the
Presidential candidates have a presence on Medium, seeing it as a way of
sharing policy beyond what they can shout during television debates.
"There's a need for more substantive thought and
commentary, from whoever has to offer it," Williams says.
"We're trying to raise the level of discourse and get out
of the soundbite world, for people who really care about what's going on."
Much of that commentary comes from media organisations, many of
which have flocked to Medium despite having substantial web properties of their
own.
Medium helps this happen: as well as a personal profile, Medium
offers the creation of Publications - curated spaces that resemble homepages
rather than blogs. With these, the news business is finding a captive and
enthusiastic audience on Medium.
Somewhat oddly, companies usually extremely guarded about their
own editorial product are simply giving it away to Medium - though that's about
to change.
p comments polite by
encouraging more considered interactions
"We're building monetisation into the product right
now," says Williams, predicting a roll-out of the features within a month
or so.
"We're not limiting ourselves to advertising," he
says, stressing that Medium won't become a mess of banner ads but instead
"sponsored" content.
"I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or
subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or
membership."
While text will remain the focus, Williams is also thinking
about expanding into other online content - such as video and podcasts.
Williams predicts, and is banking on, a time when it'll be
largely pointless for media companies to build and maintain their own online
spaces.
"I think publishers who are experimenting with Medium are
seeing a world where it's not about having a website.
"There are not going to be tens of millions of websites
that lots of people go to every day.
"If you're a quality journalist or content creator, I think
you can find an audience, I think you can find engagement, and I think you can
find money."
======================= For a great satire on email, please see the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
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