It happened on Medium: September 2024 roundup
Discussion-sparking subject lines, potent quotables, and new publications to follow.
Howdy, friends! I’ve worked at Medium for over a year now, but I’ve been on the platform since 2012 — and I’ve really loved watching what this company and community have become over that intervening decade plus.
I enjoy Medium because I always feel good after I spend some time perusing my home feed. We’ve heard from a few users that they enjoy Medium because it feels like it’s good for their brains — or that they at least feel better after they spend time here. We love it, and gotta say that feedback like the below are the sorts of things that keeps all of us working happily away.
In recent internal discussions, we’ve talked about how while the story is the core of our platform, the community is the connective tissue, which makes sense, considering the drive for an audience is what defines the difference between a blog post and a diary entry. And it’s true — part of the joy of writing here is knowing that your work will be read by readers and community members outside of your existing network, and that readers are here to deepen their understanding of the world. And that’s pretty cool, if you ask me!
As Tony Stubblebine wrote a couple of months ago, we are trying to build a better internet, one digital brick at a time. And though it’s not always perfect, and there’s an endless amount of work that still needs to be done, we come to our (entirely remote) work every morning hoping we can deepen understanding by building communities around our shared stories. That’s a lot to aspire to, but it sure makes the job fun.
Now, let’s take a look at what happened around the ol’ Medium ranch last month, shall we?
- Amy Widdowson, VP of Communications
Medium by the numbers in September…
- 1.1 million drafts created
- 80,600 stories published in publications
- 212,355 user accounts suspended for violations of the Medium Rules, such as harassment, plagiarism, impersonation, phishing, and spam
BTW, if you encounter accounts or content you feel violates our Rules, please report it the 3-dot menu on every page, or submit a request at help.medium.com Thank you for helping make Medium a better place!
Selections from September’s most highlighted passages
“Hell is something you carry around, not somewhere you go” — Praise Frank in his poem “Ndiya”
“Promise me crimson sunsets
and healing words of poetry
and maybe this ugly world will seem
serenely sacred and something closer to beautiful.”
— Connie Song in ‘Bruised Poetry’
“Creativity is my addiction, bringing me back to what matters: remaining true to my inner voice.” — pockett dessert in “Strange Addiction, Down On The Corner and Uncommon Places”
Subject that sparked the most responses to the Medium Newsletter
Artificial intelligence, to absolutely no one’s surprise. On September 13th, our VP of Content Scott Lamb asked a contentious question in the newsletter subject line — Can AI make art? — and y’all had opinions on both sides. In reading and responding, content lead Harris Sockel told me that he was “surprised by how divergent people’s views on this are: we got a few nos and some yesses, and some people saying it’s not the right question to ask, it depends on what you mean by ‘art.’”
New publications to follow on Medium
Looking for some new pubs to maximize the value of your daily Medium home page reading binge? Check these out:
- Medium staff fav Joan Westenberg launched The Realist, a publication “Cutting through the chaos to bring you sharp, no-bullshit thinking for a messy world.”
- If you’d like to get nerdy, check out Harlan Brothers’s pub Science Spectrum — and they’re taking submissions for writers!
- And executive coach Ally Sprague has started sharing her insights for tech leaders in her new publication Session Notes.
Notable passages from Boosted stories last month
At Medium, we rely on human curators and community editors to help us find and recommend the stories that make Medium worth paying for. When we find those stories, we give them a Boost to help recommend them to more readers. Here are some of my favorite passages from September’s Boosted stories:
“The disparities in benefits between the virtual and real nature experiences raise a big question: why are wellness initiatives investing in these new tech tools rather than hands-on experiences that prioritize sensory immersion?”
— Kelly Baldwin Heid in “Why virtual reality nature can’t provide the same wellness benefits as the real thing”
“Today, though, I consider the habit-building lifestyle a nightmare. It’s not exactly that habit-building has ruined my life, but it has done me more harm than good.”
—Stephan Joppich in “Goodbye, Atomic Habits.”
“Design work is not done when the design is done. That’s because design is never truly done.”
—Michal Malewicz in “Ugly websites sell better.”
“I scour the resumes for some kind of differentiator — anything that sets them apart from their classmates in a meaningful way. Because of how similar internship candidates can appear, even small differentiators can have huge impacts.”
—Jarom Hulet in “I’ve Hired 3 Cohorts of Data Science Interns — Here’s My Advice on Getting an Offer.”
“How in awe all of us were to finally see the system of the asteroid Didymos (with the smaller Dimorphos orbiting around it) and its real shape… This was the first hint of how unpredictable and uncertain the parameters related to these celestial bodies can be.”
— Purdue College of Engineering in “The world’s first successful deflection of an asteroid — an inside view of recent findings and what lies ahead.”
Boosted stories by new writers
Here are a few of our favorite Boosted stories written by writers brand-new to Medium.
“Why Being Ugly and Lonely Makes You Better at Software Engineering” by Eric Ming, a tongue-in-cheek reflection on being a young developer.
“The Art of Tokenization: Breaking Down Text for AI” by Murilo Gustineli, a senior AI software engineer at Intel, for Towards Data Science. This is an in-the-weeds look at what’s running in the background of an LLM.
“Young Love” by American humorist (and creative with whom I was obsessed as a young person watching SNL) Jack Handey for Slackjaw.
And if you want to be super impressed by what the human body can endure, check out “Mogollon Monster 100” by runner Travis Klein.
For more great stories from Medium’s writers and publications, check out our Staff Picks. To learn something new from Medium writers every weekday, subscribe to our newsletter, the Medium Newsletter.
