Medium (website)

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Medium
Medium logo Wordmark Black.svg
Medium Screenshot.png
Top: The current logo for Medium as of May 2016. Bottom: The homepage for Medium as of May 2016.
Web address medium.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site
Registration Mostly free access to articles written by registered accounts, but required for publishing and writing articles.
Owner A Medium Corporation
Launched August 2012 (2012-08)
Alexa rank
 Decrease 404 (May 2016)[1]
Current status Active

Medium is a socially liberal or progressive online publishing platform developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams that started in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation.[2] Widely described as having a significant left-wing bias similar to that of Twitter itself, the platform is an example of evolved social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, with exclusive blogs and publishers,[3]and is regularly regarded as a blog host.

The site has banned right-wing and alt-right writers like Robert Stacy McCain,[4][5] Mike Cernovich, and Jack Posobiec. The latter two were partially banned for accusing alleged suspects in the Pizzagate child abuse investigations.[6] Conservative writer Laura Loomer was banned for critiquing the social implications of Muslim immigration into the West (though not on Medium itself). Such speech may be illegal in Europe, though Medium has not attempted to justify the bans on legal grounds. Cernovich then announced he was suing Medium for violating his civil rights based on his race and gender.[7]

Background

Williams developed Medium as a way to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character maximum. It eventually grew into a separate platform independent of Twitter's brand. Since then Medium has increasingly focused on its own publications, including the online music magazine Cuepoint, edited by Jonathan Shecter, NewCo Shift led by entrepreneur, author and journalist John Battelle, and the technology publication Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.

Williams designed Medium from the ground up, with the idea of encouraging users to create longer and more densely reasoned posts than would be practical on Twitter, even with image posts or tweet chains. Williams stated, "There's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced."[8] By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform,[9] including a vacancy for a "Storyteller" role,[10] and that it was taking "98 percent" of his time.[9] By August, Williams reported that the site was still small, though he was still optimistic about it, saying "We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who have thoughtful things to say".[11] Users can create a new account using an email address or a Twitter, Facebook, or Google account.[12]

Medium maintained an editorial department staffed by professional editors and writers, had several others signed on as contractors and served as a publisher for several publications. Matter operated from Medium Headquarters in San Francisco and was nominated for a 2015 National Magazine Award.[13] In May 2015, Medium made deep cuts to its editorial budget forcing layoffs at dozens of publications hosted on the platform.[14] Several publications left the platform.

In 2016, Medium introduced advertising and gained several new publishers as customers to host their content on the platform.[15]

In January 2017, Williams announced that Medium was cutting its staff by 50 employees (around one third, "mostly in sales, support, and other business functions"), and closing its offices in New York and Washington, D.C.[16]

User information and features

Platform

Writing

The platform software provides a full WYSIWYG user interface when editing online, with various options for formatting provided as the user edits over rich text format.

Sharing

Once an entry is posted, it can be recommended and shared by other people, in a similar manner to Twitter.[10] Posts can be upvoted in a similar manner to Reddit, and content can be assigned a specific theme, in the same way as Tumblr.

Tag System

A specific difference from Williams' earlier service Blogger is that posts are sorted by topic rather than writer.[17] The platform uses the system of recommendations, similar to "likes" on Facebook, to up vote the best articles and stories, called the Tag system, and divides the stories into different categories to let the audiences choose.

Publications

Publications on Medium are distributing hosts that carry articles and blog posts like a newspaper or magazine. The articles published or saved on can be assigned editors, and can be saved as drafts.

Cuepoint, Medium's music publication, is edited by Jonathan Shecter, a music industry entrepreneur and co-founder of The Source magazine. It publishes essays on artists, trends, and releases, written by Medium community contributors, major record executives, and music journalists,[18] including Robert Christgau, who contributed his "Expert Witness" capsule review column.[19] Medium also publishes a technology publication called Backchannel, edited by Steven Levy.[20]

On February 23rd 2016 it was announced that Medium had reached a deal to host the new Bill Simmons website "The Ringer".[21]

Reception

Reviewing the service, The Guardian enjoyed some of the collections that had been created, particularly a collection of nostalgic photographs created by Williams.[22] TechCrunch's Drew Olanoff suggested the platform might have taken its name from being a "medium" sized platform in between Twitter and full-scale blogging platforms such as Blogger.[10]

Criticism of Medium

However, the service has suffered criticism from writers, with some confused about exactly what it is expected to provide.[23] Lawrence Lessig welcomed the platform's affordance of Creative Commons licensing for user content,[24] a feature demonstrated in a Medium project with The Public Domain Review — an interactive online edition of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, annotated by a dozen Carroll scholars, allowing free remixes of the public domain and Creative Commons licensed text and art resources with reader-supplied commentaries and artwork.[25][26]

Controversy

Censorship

Political bias

Medium generally supports politically progressive, left-wing, and far-left writers, and imposes various restrictions on right-wing and far-right writers. Center-right writers, such as mainstream conservative and neoconservative authors, are allowed to publish on the platform, provided they support culturally expected consensus views on equality and minority rights. Politically neutral or non-political writers are also allowed.

Malaysia

In January 2016, Medium received a take down notice from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission for one of the articles published by the Sarawak Report. The Sarawak Report had been hosting its articles on Medium since July 2015, when its own website was blocked by the Malaysian government.[27]

Medium's legal team responded to the commission's request with a demand for further information, and declined to take the content down.[28] In response, as of January 27, 2016, all content on Medium has been unavailable for Malaysian Internet users.

Egypt

In June 2017, Medium was blocked in Egypt along with more than 60 online media websites in a crackdown by the Egyptian government.[29] The list of blocked sites also includes Al Jazeera, the Huffington Post's Arabic website and Mada Masr.

Site software

Medium's initial technology stack relied on various AWS services including EC2, S3, and CloudFront. Originally, it was written in Node.js and the text editor that Medium users wrote blog posts with, was based on TinyMCE.[30] As of 2017, the blogging platform's technology stack included AWS services, including EBS, RDS for Aurora, and Route 53, its image server was written in Go and the main app servers were still written in Node.[31]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ (Feb 22, 2018) https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2018/02/22/spread-the-word/
  5. ↑ (Feb 22, 2018) http://theothermccain.com/2018/02/22/suspended-by-medium-another-platform-is-banishing-conservatives/
  6. ↑ http://thehill.com/policy/technology/374903-far-right-figures-suspended-from-medium
  7. ↑ https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/21/medium-suspends-trolls-following-rules-change/
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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