Medium, Publication, and Letters
A few days ago I wrote about the decision to stop the cross-posting madness, and concentrate on writing in one place (here). I confidently predicted at the time that within days a new platform would come along to force a re-evaluation.
That new platform just came along.
Mediumannounced a new feature yesterday called “Letters”, that turns traditional blogging on it's head somewhat. Before we get to that, it's probably best to back-track a little and look at Medium itself.
Medium was launched in 2012 by the founders of Twitter, and began life with the lofty goal of re-thinking how we publish content online, and how we interact around published content. To do so it provided great web based editing tools, wonderful typography, and a very minimalist approach.
I played with Medium at launch, and posted a few forgettable articles, one of which gained traction because it was about a trending topic at the time (the “Raspberry Pi” computer). The over-riding feeling at the time was that discovery was too difficultthere was no easy way of finding interesting things to read, other than looking for established writers and/or sifting through hundreds of posts tagged to a particular subject.
That story hasn't really changed, but the feature-set of Medium hasin the form of Publications, and in the kinds of discussion that can happen around content. Publications allow an author at Medium to collect a number of posts together under a particular banner (and more importantly, one URLI have created, for example, a “Publication” called “Life and Times”apeing this blog). A Publication can have multiple editors and multiple writers.
Here's where it gets interesting. Yesterday Medium launched a new feature called “Letters”. It's a clever re-imagining of the way bloggers have traditionally allowed users to subscribe to their content, while actually being no different at all.
You start out by writing a new “Letter” for a publication, and you think of the content in terms of it being an email to all the subscribers of that publication (because that's exactly what it becomes). The catch is that the email contains a link at the end of the body inviting the reader to feedback their thoughts. The link leads to the published post within the publication on the web.
It feels like “The Emperor's New Clothes” in a way. Medium has re-packaged the traditional post/subscribe/email notification model as a feature. By inviting the authoring of a “Letter”, it allows the interface to restrict itself to only allow layout choices that will work in an email, and puts the writer in the mindset of writing to people, rather than to nobody in particular. There is nothing really “new” here at all.
Medium still suffers from the same problems that all platforms sufferit's essentially a walled garden. Subscribing, commenting, and providing feedback all require an account at Medium. Most casual readers are not going to sign upthey will simply walk (in the same way that I invariably leave a video within seconds if it forces a half-minute pre-roll advert).
Publishing content within walled gardens leads to an insular, incestuous network of authors all reading and commenting on each other's posts in the hope of garnering attention, and drawing others to their own posts. I've seen it all beforeat both Tumblr and WordPress.