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I discovered Medium around a year ago. Medium was developed by a co-founder of Twitter with the aim of complementing Twitter’s microblogging model with a platform that would support the publishing of more long-form articles and content.
When we first met, what appealed to me most about Medium was the UX (that’s techie speak for: “it looks nice and it works well”). The writing interface was clean and intuitive, and it was easy to insert images into the content without destroying the layout of the text (a common problem among the less mature blogging platforms).
As I dug a little deeper, I found other hidden gems. For starters, Medium limits the number of tags for each article to five. (It was originally three.) But why would a tag limit be beneficial? One word: spam. By limiting the number of tags per article, authors are made to choose their tags carefully. Tags have historically been a meaningless jumble of nonsensical words and phrases, failing to be a reliable way of classifying or discovering content. Medium seems to have curbed this problem with a simple tag limit.
What else? Well, Medium provides you with stats on every article that you publish. This doesn’t just cover how many people view your article, but it tells you how many people have actually read it too.
So the platform is a nice place to write on. That’s all well and good, but what about getting your words seen? The community on Medium isn’t massive, but those who use Medium are typically pretty engaged. There are opportunities to forge connections with other writers by recommending their posts, or highlighting parts of their writing that you appreciate. I particularly like the highlighting feature. Medium is built for writers and readers!
As time went by, I discovered opportunities to improve my writing skills by submitting articles or short stories to various Medium publications. Some publications like The Weekly Knob (hat tip to the name) offer a weekly writing prompt. This is great because it means you have to develop an idea from conception to submission within five days. This certainly gets you into a productive mode.
If your piece is accepted by one of the publications that have a high readership (i.e. number of followers), you’ll get immediate exposure to potentially hundreds of readers. What more does a writer want than to be read?
About J M Jackson
Dad first, etc second. Prefers writing about life instead of facing it. Occupied by unruly Nabokovian irritation & irrepressible Kafkaesque positivity. Working on his first novel.
