Featured
It happened on Medium in 2024
A roundup of the stories and milestones our readers and staff found most meaningful in 2024
“Showing up. Showing up with your whole self, showing up with your values and beliefs, showing up with what makes you unique, but above all — showing up with consistency.”
That is one of the most highlighted lines across all of Medium in 2024, from tech and politics writer JA Westenberg. It’s a story about how, in a world of infinite variables that determine how well you do in life, there’s just one thing you can control: showing up.
Humans tend to aim for big, flashy, goals — think of the classic New Year’s resolutions like “I’ll finally get into shape,” or “I’ll write that novel.” The problem is that those goals, without consistently showing up, don’t amount to much. Your gym membership goes unused and your novel draft stays in the drawer.
This year, Medium’s biggest resolution was to try to build a better internet. That’s a huge goal. It’s daring. It’s lofty. And, like every other goal, it would have fizzled into nothingness without being backed up by people willing to show up and do the work.
I’m not only talking about Medium employees (although the 70-odd of us were dedicated and committed to that!). It’s the writers who share their best work with us. It’s the readers who leave thoughtful responses, no matter if they agree or disagree with the writer. It’s the publication editors who write the clearest, cleanest guidelines to help readers and writers know what to expect from their community. It’s the Medium power users who send us detailed feedback on what we can do better.
We — employees, readers, writers, editors — put in the work, consistently, to try to build a better internet. It’s a big goal, but we’re tackling it one ladder rung at a time, together.
In this post, you’ll get a few different looks into what happened on Medium in 2024 that help illustrate how we all showed up to help build a better internet.
First, we’ll have a look at the numbers — what stories were the most popular, how many responses you left, and other quantitative metrics. But numbers can’t tell the whole story, so we’ll also dive into a more vibes-based look. You’ll find a collection of notable stories as well as some great new publications that found their home on Medium. Finally, we’ll include a few Medium-specific updates, like features we launched and milestones we achieved.
Heads up — this is on the longer side, so settle in for a nice, long read.
Medium by the numbers
Let’s start at the top with a few headline stats. In 2024, writers and readers on Medium:
- Started close to 8 million drafts
- Responded over 11 million times
- Created 11k new publications
- Curated 46k Lists
- Came to Medium over 100,000,000 times through recommendations in the Daily or Weekly Digest emails
Most read, responded-to, and clapped-for stories
These were the stories that our readers found most valuable this year, getting the most reads, responses, and claps.
- “My Statement on President Biden’s Announcement” by Former President Barack Obama
- “Common side effects of not drinking” by cultural anthropologist Karolina Kozmana
- “50 Completely True Things” by Palestinian-American creative mo husseini
- “The secret life of people with high self-control (it’s easier than you think)” by user researcher Riikka Iivanainen
- “We’ve added 77 countries to the Medium Partner Program” by Medium Senior Operations Associate Elvina Fan in The Medium Blog
- “the art of disappearing” by writer remi ;༊
- “How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode” by Senior Software Engineer at Semantive Maciej Pocwierz
- “This must be the place” by writer Jennifer Pahlka
- “The Dramatic Shift of the 2024 Paris Olympic Pictograms” by game designer and programmer Elijah Cobb
- “Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too” by trans non-fiction writer Max Masure (they/them)
- “The Beauty of Trying” by writer thekidultwriter
- “10 Seconds That Ended My 20 Year Marriage” by former military wife Unbecoming
- “Words and Phrases that Make it Obvious You Used ChatGPT” by Business and Analytics Masters candidate Margaret Efron in Learning Data
Most highlighted lines
When I looked at the most highlighted lines across Medium in 2024 — those words that most resonated and stood out to our readers — they grouped into a few common themes: self-improvement, understanding others, and understanding yourself. Here are the ideas and words our readers found most worth highlighting this year.
Self-improvement
- “People with high levels of trait self-control are good at avoiding temptation — not resisting it.” — user researcher Riikka Iivanainen in her story, “The secret life of people with high self-control (it’s easier than you think)”
- “There’s a fine line between taking on a worthwhile challenge, and taking on unnecessary stress.” — brand builder John Gorman in his story “Stop Wasting Your Time”
- “The problem with good habits, in other words, is that they sacrifice intentionality for efficiency.” — engineer and philosophy student Stephan Joppich, in Pragmatic Wisdom, in his story, “Goodbye, Atomic Habits”
- “Showing up. Showing up with your whole self, showing up with your values and beliefs, showing up with what makes you unique, but above all — showing up with consistency.” — writer JA Westenberg in Westenberg, in her story, “Just Show Up.”
Understanding others
- “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.” — Devon Price, social psychologist, in Human Parts, in his story “Laziness Does Not Exist.” (This story was published in 2018, but continues to find its readers even now, six years later!)
- “The value of research doesn’t come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation.” — problem designer at AWS Pavel Samsonov in UX Collective, in his story “Nike’s $25B blunder shows us the limits of ‘data-driven’”
- “Honesty is direct, whereas dishonesty tends to be indirect.” — former detective Joshua Mason in Curated Newsletters, in his story, “I’m an (Actual) Detective: Here are 7 Signs That Someone Is Lying to You”
- “We throw our children to the wolves by pretending they will not drink or have sex, which means they have to figure it all out for themselves.” — former newspaper editor Michelle Teheux in Minds Without Borders, in her story, “We Could Learn a Lot About Sex From the Dutch”
Understanding yourself
- “We are the dark secrets we conceal and the mistakes that we make. We are the love left unexpressed and the unnoticed kindness.” — writer pahal writes in her story, “who are you when nobody is watching?”
- “Always remember, whatever flows, flows. What goes away, let go. What comes, comes. What’s lost, let go. And what happens, accept. Better things come when you wait for what’s truly meant for you. Accepting things is better than forcing them. Never lose yourself trying to fit into someone else’s life.” — lynwrites in her story, “if it’s meant to be, it will be”
- “There’s the risk of true vulnerability: uncertainty. True vulnerability requires that you don’t know. You don’t know how your share will be received; you don’t know how others will perceive you for sharing it; you don’t know if there’s a happy ending yet.” — executive coach Ally Sprague in Session Notes, in her story, “Fake Vulnerability is Keeping You Stuck”
Most shared across the internet
When you read a great story, it’s not enough to keep it to yourself. In 2024, these were the stories that made you think that someone else needed to hear these words, too.
- “Roadmap to Learn AI in 2024” by data scientist Benedict Neo in bitgrit Data Science Publication
- “The Beauty of Trying” by writer thekidultwriter
- “How to *really* know you’re in love” by writer Kris Gage (another older story that continues to find readers today!)
- “These Words Make it Obvious That Your Text is Written By AI” by content writer James Presbitero Jr. in Practice in Public
- “How I Am Using a Lifetime 100% Free Server” by full-stack web developer Harendra
- “the art of disappearing” by writer remi ;༊
- “Life Lessons I Know at 40 (That I Wish I Knew at 20)” by New York Times bestseller Mark Manson
- “What Actually Matters in Your 20s” by writer smoul in Practice in Public
- “The Art of Not Making a Decision” by writer Emilie
- “Ultimate Python Cheat Sheet: Practical Python For Everyday Tasks” by software engineer Jason Roell in Stackademic
- “Suicide is About Wanting to Live” by mental health writer odawni in Speaking Bipolar
- “Understanding LLMs from Scratch Using Middle School Math” by Data Science Director and GenAI at Meta Rohit Patel in Towards Data Science
Medium beyond the numbers
Beyond specific “most” lists, I also wanted to highlight a few stories we were especially proud to be home to in 2024. Here’s a look at those, including ones from current events and some more timeless stories:
- When Crowdstrike went down in July, cybersecurity professional and CrowdStrike customer Kevin Beaumont unpacked the market forces that drove the outage.
- There are too many incredible stories about generative AI to count, but one of my favorites was professor Mary Rose’s discussion of how she discovered a third of her online college students were actually AI-powered spambots.
- In a similar vein, award-winning writer and poet Sierra Elman tried to figure out how well AI could write poetry, recruiting AI experts and English professors to weigh in.
- Successful, talented, 31-year-old screenwriter David Mandell moved back home with his parents and wrote a beautiful essay about how that move helped him stop putting on a show about who he was to himself and the people he loved.
- Asheville resident and author Doug Brown wrote about how he handled the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the deadliest hurricane to strike the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
- Former President Barack Obama shared his annual summer reading and music lists, as well as his statement on President Biden’s decision to step down as Democratic nominee.
- Photographer William Sidnam went to the Paris 2024 Olympics and shared deep, immersive photographs of what was happening in Paris — outside the games.
- When the U.S. Supreme Court decided to grant President-elect Donald Trump immunity for official acts, law professor Lessig dived deep to explain that decision in the context of one of the footnotes.
- Across the pond, the United Kingdom elected the first Labour majority government in over a decade. Retired trade union and pensions campaigner Nigel Stanley analyzed how it happened.
- Writer and designer Erin Anne spent five months job-hunting and wrote about the 11 things she wished she’d known.
- When President-elect Trump was on trial for charges he falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal while serving as president, New Yorker artist Liza Donnelly entertained us with her artistic depictions of the trial.
- In Baltimore, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a container ship, causing the deaths of six construction workers. Baltimore resident Ryan Fan wrote a reflection and a tribute to those six men, all immigrants.
- Jennifer Pahlka’s home was broken into by a repeat offender — at least, that’s one way to see the story. She explores a range of different narratives of the same situation — a failure of the police? an indictment of mental health services? crime run wild in Oakland? — all of them true.
- In a beautiful ode to libraries, creative writer Steph Lawson spent 100 days in the library and wrote one hundred Medium stories about her experiences. Here’s the first, and here’s the last.
- America enjoyed its first total solar eclipse since 2017. Astronomy science writer Rebecca Jean T. wrote an explainer to everything eclipse enthusiasts needed to know for the big event.
- The World Wide Web turned 35, and its creator Tim Berners-Lee wrote a retrospective on the origins of the Web, an explanation as to how it had deviated from those original goals, and a call to action to reform and improve it.
- Smash tournament organizer pidgezero_one read every single one of @dril’s 10k+ tweets and weighed in on the theory that he sold his account
- In 1989, photographer Tom Zimberoff picked up the phone, called Skywalker Ranch, and asked George Lucas if he could photograph him. Lucas said yes. In 2024, Zimberoff wrote about it.
There were so, so many more stories we loved on Medium this year. If you finish this list and are hungry for more amazing stories, take a scroll down our Staff Picks list.
New publication spotlight
This year, we became the home of over 11,000 new publications. There are so many standout ones I loved (and check out previous iterations of It Happened on Medium to see a few!). Here are three that resonated particularly with our readers:
- The Quantastic Journal, a publication about humanity, science, and technology. My personal favorite story: “What is a Particle, Really?” by Selena Routley
- The Parenting Portal, a publication about — what else? — being a parent. One particularly moving story was pedeatrician Ayne’s “Pregnancy Feels Different With Grief”
- Iberospherical, a publication that focuses on stories of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands and culture. One to recommend: writer Mario López-Goicoechea’s “My Name, My Home.”
It happened at Medium
Medium is a huge platform filled with literally millions of stories told by thousands of writers and read by hundreds of millions of readers.
But Medium is also a company of around 70 folks who work hard to make Medium (and the internet) a better place. Here are some of the highlights we’re most proud of.
Medium milestones
Like the stories on our platform, it’s possible to break down notable Medium highlights both by numbers and by vibes. Here’s the numbers portion first:
- Opened the Partner Program to 77 new countries means we’re able to pay writers from those countries for their stories
- Reached 2.2 million subscribers on The Medium Newsletter — its primary writer, Harris Sockel, picked this issue as his favorite: “A better way of thinking about attention”
- Paid 34% more writers than we did last year through our Partner Program
- Removed 1.8 million users for violating the Medium Rules, including spam, fraud, plagiarism, and more.
- Became profitable for the first time in our 12-year history
- Reached one million Medium members
- Ran our second annual Medium Day 2024
- Ran our first Pub Crawl 2024
Those milestones couldn’t have happened without you, our readers, writers, editors, and members.
A peek behind the Median curtain:
And now the vibes portion. This year at Medium, we celebrated the following:
- Our two offsites, one in Portland, Oregon, and one in Scotland.
- New babies born to Medium employees — one of which was my own!
- Bringing home many new pets.
- Medians published Medium stories about doing photography with old equipment (Eduardo), buying a treadmill (Sophie Aguado), making haste, but slowly (Scott Lamb), the intersection of programming and parenting (Zouhair Mahieddine), how a journalism background taught her how to a great engineering leader (Melissa DePuydt), the performance of corporate cosplay (Amy Widdowson) and many, many more. Just like our writers, we were also proud to get our stories accepted by our favorite publications and even sometimes Boosted!
All in all, it was a year of all of us doing our best to show up with consistency, both at our jobs here at Medium and in our personal lives, too.
What’s coming up in 2025?
In December, we shipped eleven projects, all of which get us ready for a big 2025:
- Continuing to fight spam: You’ve seen it, we’ve seen it, and we all want it gone. More than a third of this month’s projects were dedicated to getting rid of inauthentic accounts, making it harder to sign up unless you’re a real person, and identifying and reducing spammy content on Medium.
- Prioritizing community: reader responses now appear at the bottom of story pages; editors can Feature stories to share them more widely with their publication’s followers.
- Focusing on membership: We ran our holiday gift campaign, emailed old members about coming back to Medium, and set up abandoned cart campaigns.
All of these projects, big and small, aim to build a better internet and a Medium that’s going to be around tomorrow. In December, we worked hard to make Medium the best home for readers, writers, and publication editors as it can be — and 2025 will bring more of the same.
Happy 2024! And may 2025 bring even more stories you find meaningful.
