What Medium Is

For me, thinking writing an article, Medium offers the following: a possible readership/distribution (assuming I get picked up by editors), no long term commitments, no investment in set up (as opposed to a hosted personal blog), and little friction in posting.

As an idea, having a streamlined essay posting & sharing process seems good, however I think that Medium will need to address the following issues going forward:

* Serious authors will eventually want to build their own identity/brand. I think much of posts in HN that criticise Medium comes down to this issue. When you write for Medium, you almost seem to detach yourself from the work. YouTube addresses this problem by offering channels with revenue sharing. This means that the amount of time required to publish a piece of quality output for free can be justified to some degree. For Medium though, I see this limitation as restricting its content to be published by those that do not intent to write regularly and do not already have an outlet for their writing.

* Dealing with signal vs noise. Assuming the above is not addressed, and Medium continues to be a place where semi-serious, or novice, authors essentially practice their craft, then there will be a lot of crap for people to sift through in order to read some content that appeals to them. If Medium editors are tasked with this job, that in itself would be a manual process that would be difficult to scale.

* Curating content when authors have no commitments. When people write a blog, it needs a title, which will usually indicate what the general topic of the blog is about. Although authors can deviate from time to time, I find most successful blogs are generally on-topic as the author develops expertise both in the area of interest and in his/her ability to communicate their ideas surround the topic. However, on Medium, this commitment is no longer required. You can sign in, write, and your output is only loosely linked to you as an author. This means that there is no simple predictor of content category and quality.

Personally, I would very much like to see a platform where people can post, be read, and ideally get some compensation for their writing if they can find an audience; basically YouTube for writers as the article states. However, I think Medium is still a fair way away from that model at this point.

Still unsold: Why is Medium better for individual expression than starting your own blog?

Further: If SEO is doing what it should do, why should I care how my articles are arranged on my own site? What genuine advantage does Medium offer regular, non-hyper-connected authors (especially in it's current, invite-only publishing state)?

(Of course not taking Anil's reputation into account this would actually work much better w/o the offered disclosure allowing someone else to point that out and for Anil to respond to the controversy and create more press and commentary.)