A Less Long, More Connected Medium
I love a professionally reported 17-minute article about an important and surprising topic. Or a 10-minute technical mystery by a professional designer. And who doesn’t enjoy a 91-minute interview between a media entrepreneur and a journalist?
High-production value, lengthy stories are what Medium is best known for. And I’m glad we’ve provided a home to so many great ones. It was always our intention to create a platform that provides a superior creation and reading experience for meaty stuff (or non-meaty stuff, as the case may be).
It was not our intention, however, to create a platform just for “long-form” content or where people feel intimidated to publish if they’re not a professional writer or a famous person (something we’ve heard many times).
We know that length is not a measure of thoughtfulness. The quality of an idea is not determined by the polish of the writing. And production value does not determine worthiness of time investment on the web any more than it does at the movie theater.
We also know that sometimes you need to get a thought out in an incomplete form in order for it to grow — by bumping into other brains and breathing in fresh air.
That’s why, today, we’re making some pretty big changes to how Medium works and feels. There are three main parts:
Inline Editor
We wanted to make it easier to start writing whenever you have an idea — and also to make it feel like less of a big deal to do so. So we added a way to post right on the homepage of Medium. Start writing instantly. If you get inspired to turn it into something bigger, click over to the full-screen editor. Otherwise, keep it simple and publish it straight from there.
The Stream
To complement the inline editor and make reading a more seamless experience, we redesigned post listings. Now you can start reading a post and get a better sense of what it’s about without having to click through (and, if the post is short enough, even recommend it right there).
Read more about these changes here.
Tags
Lastly, we’re introducing tags to help posts written by anyone be more easily connected and discovered. Tags are just what they sound like: Metadata applied to posts, added by the author, that connect them to related posts.
While we’re not exactly breaking new Internet ground with this one, we think tags will provide a highly effective form of connective tissue that makes Medium an even better place to share your perspective and find inspiration.
More about tags here. (To explore them, just look under the Recommend button on this post.)
These changes, together, will help fulfill the vision we have of Medium as the place for anyone to find stories that matter to them and leave lasting impressions on others.
We hope you enjoy. Let us know what you think by writing us or writing everyone with a response to this post.
