Turns out Evan Williams was right, but much too early.
If he was a true believer, he'd have realized Medium isn't the long-form content he was looking for. He didn't fully commit to Odeo, and that's why he gave up when Apple made its move. I still remember thinking "Fuck!" when I saw that "Try our new thing twttr" banner at the top of Odeo. I liked where they were headed.
Twitter + Podcasts are all you need. No one really wants to read long-form text on a computer.
Medium.com should have been Odeo 2.0
It's just so much richer to listen to a monologue, or socratic debate, in most cases. @ev should pivot Medium into being the biggest podcast publisher in the world, by sponsoring every high quality podcast and building a better version of patreon for podcasters. There's a lot of amazing people that should be podcasting and are not.
LOL I would obviously prefer reading long form text on a book, but do you really prefer audio to digital text? Story telling is one thing, but for most of what I'm reading I think a low-bandwidth, search-free environment (audio) is a bad match.