Medium is pursuing a different idea of what online publishing could be like. Joshua Benton made some great observations about the implicit messages of Medium and similar sites:

“Medium wants you to read something because of what it’s about. And because of the implicit promise that Medium = quality.”

“What each of these sites argues, implicitly, is that the web norms that we’ve evolved over the past decade err toward crassness and ugliness.”

I feel like these sites aim high and mean well, but unconsciously create pockets of elitism about content. They don’t try to improve quality; they create new places “only for quality” that start invite-only.

Is “lead by example” a good enough answer to solve online publishing’s monetization problem?

Disclaimer: I don’t have publishing access in Medium, I’m not part of their invite-only club. I have seen only what is public for everyone: screenshots of their editor interface, and the output.

My curiosity about this stems from how I don’t see what Medium offers to make content creators become better content creators, but I do see how it celebrates quality content creators (who were, at this time at least, invited because they were known quality content creators in the first place).

Perhaps I should extrapolate: if Medium delivers on its implicit promise that “Medium = quality” and, as a result, attracts more and more and more users, in what way is Medium protecting itself from ending up being filled with low-quality content creators?

That is, without becoming (or rather, _staying_) selective about who it lets in through its doors, which essentially is a form of elitism about the content.

Another thought: with the value-focus shifted from author to topic, elitism is still only reduced if the barrier to entry (=contributing) is equal to everyone. But the launching premise of these sites *is* that not everyone produces equally great content (which is true), thus they rely on a sort of “crowd-sourced curation” — but isn’t that exactly what sites like Reddit and Digg are offering?

Is Medium perhaps Auteur Theory meets crowd-curation*? If so, how will that help make online publishing sustainable?

* This is a nice thought to me, but I’m a privileged guy who is on the beneficiary end of the society scales.

Good quality by nature is elitist, since mediocrity is ubiquitous. The invite-only part is one possible solution to preventing an entry by the unwashed masses. The other option, as app.net is trying, is paid access. Free and Open is all around us anyway. You do have a point that as more people join, the "quality stuff" will get diluted and the site will become like any other property on the web.

I'm inferring that both you and Benton doubt it (that Content Elitism is the answer), and I would agree. First we have to identify the woes, though. Here's my take; the problems with online publishing today:

1. Signal vs. noise — it's not that we lack quality, is that the quality is buried (right?)
2. Money (or return) — original authors/creators aren't getting the fair share
3. Standards (authority/governance) — without which practices fall in to natural entropy

Based on what I can see, I'm not sure Medium is the answer to these problems. As a single silo of content it might prove very effective -- and very cool -- but outside the .com is another story.

By way of record, here's some solutions we've been trying (off the top of my head):

For signal vs. noise: curation(!); voting; exclusivity; cleaner, simpler aesthetics; A.I.

For money: pay walls/subscriptions; Readability; Flattr; ads, ads, ads; rev-share.

For standards: Web Standards; Microformats; Open Graph; App.net; a few suggestions from bloggers on how to properly cite; pingbacks (lol, remember?).

One problem that a service like Medium is endemic of is what my colleagues and I refer to as "The Fancy Web". Essentially, a group of elite early adopters who drift from services as the perceived quality degrades from a flood of public access, which we have seen in the support for App.net.

Services like Medium may be intended initially to be focused on curation of quality content, but they are leveraged by these kinds of people to act as a sort of clubhouse where they can do as they please in peace. When the general public is allowed in, the party is over.

This only serves to act as a temporary bandaid on what are very real problems surrounding content creation and curation of content.

It's obviously easier to be heard if you're only one of 20-30 people allowed to blog on something. But that doesn't solve the problem of how to eliminate noise in a system containing millions of voices.

We need to think a lot bigger if we want to make blogging better.

Anil nails the concerns about elitism with his post from this morning: medium.com.

I'll add to that by saying that elitism is uncomfortable in this context if it translates to the status quo; if by "quality" we mean "content from the same people who we already consider to be good, and who are for the most part white and wealthy and male." But if we can accept a more diverse understanding of quality — one that can be challenged and evolve in response — then we are in a much more exciting place.

Put another way: we can and should be elite with our content — we want good stuff, there's nothing wrong with that. But we have to recognize that "what's good" is not a singular thing.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Creating exclusive silos is not the way. Building better tools for creating and viewing content is. We need to empower the individual to see what they choose to and make anything they can imagine.

“But we have to recognize that "what's good" is not a singular thing.”

Yes, this! The perception of quality is personal and subjective first and foremost, and only objective once everyone’s votes are included—but if the early adopters consist of a very homogeneous group, the options to choose from are limited by the pre-screened filter of that group.

Heather Armstrong might not have bubbled up to the top on a site like Medium back before she was the widely-known person she is today. But back then her content was easily on par with many other pieces being put on Medium today, it’s just that “mommy blogging” might not have registered as interesting to enough of the in-crowd to be given its fair share of attention.

To continue Anil’s old-boys-club metaphor of “You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club”:

You start the revolution by bringing everyone else to the country club door and creating a better party right outside.

What I'm wondering is what Medium actually is — a tool for writers, a tool for readers, or some mix of the two?

If it's a high-profile place for writers to place their content for the masses to consume, then it's little better than what we have now – and potentially significantly worse, as its success would draw attention to 'Medium' rather than online authorship in general, creating the distinctly elitist divide that seems to be the topic of discussion lately, assuming they work to maintain that level of quality by excluding writers who don't provide quality (and if so, by whose definition? based on past writing? based on popularity?).

The other possibility is that it's meant to be a tool for content consumers to locate good content, regardless of the author. The question then becomes, how on earth are they going to do that? Content discovery is a difficult enough problem if you don't have enough information about the author and the consumer. You can start applying algorithms, but without a good history of content preferences, it's still the same old discovery. Perhaps by seeing what sort of (established, quality) writing people prefer during the starting phase, they can determine a baseline for readers and take advantage of 'You liked X and Bob liked X and Bob liked Y so maybe you'll like Y' social discovery.

Couldn't one argue that these silos, elitist or not, are still pushing publishing forward? People want be part of these and if they aren't, they're talking about them, possibly even starting their own.

It may not be the right way to do it, but the effects are still evident.

I'm not sure I'd use the term "silo" to call what Medium is doing. They just launched, and invite-only is practical for any service to start with, and we clearly haven't seen all of what they are planning yet.

That said, the nice thing about silos (at least the ones with doors, which allow people to enter and leave as they please) is that they let people with different values of "what's good" find each other and congregate together.

I wonder what publishers or content creators would do if we weren't trying to make new tools. Would they hack solutions? Or would they just give up?

And what about content consumers? Are they content to keep sifting through the noise, or would they figure out some way to filter for signal?

To Sean's last point: they would try to hack and either succeed or give up and go elsewhere.

And I can assure you that content consumers, professional ones as well as casual ones, are NOT content to keep sifting through noise. Everybody finds ways to filter for signal, whatever "signal" means to them.

I've been lurking, but I love so much Mandy's `the nice thing about silos is that they let people with different values of "what's good" find each other and congregate together.`

And at a systems level, a great community allows silos internally, as well. Forums and channels and sub-reddits and whatnot. Ad hoc grouping.

Yes, Max! My opinion is that it's gotta be both/and, not either/or. We have to build tools that break down as many barriers as possible while providing opportunity for loose barriers to be immediately raised again. Put elitism in its place: further down the growth model.

Agreed. If you want to only look at what you consider the best of the best, that's entirely your choice. User choice is the best thing we can build into filtering tools.

Mandy did make a great point in saying the medium, and other similar services, may not permanently be silos/limited/invite - if they are only doing it for scaling purposes, then the entire course of this conversation could change.

Manik: Exactly.

You've got to start somewhere. app.net started with a group willing to (pre-)pay ~$4/month for a year, Medium started with a differently selected group.

We'll see how they expand.

By the way, I find it noteworthy that in the entire discussion about app.net and "Country Clubs" the aspect of content ownership and access to your content is never once mentioned.

It matters who controls access to and usage of the content you produce.

It matters if you are able to export all your posts at some point (much like we all wish we could get to our earliest tweets).

And yes, ultimately it matters who pays for these things and who the service provider answers to: a VC, an advertiser — or a user.

Almost all services launch invite-only these days. It’s about much more than scaling alone: many features may not be ready yet, or not work well; you may not yet have fully figured out your strategic plan, your marketing plan, your business plan, etc.

All of these are very good reasons to keep your user base small, so that you don’t have to worry about changing or breaking things for too many people during these volatile stages.

They also build anticipation - whether an individual wants to user a service or not, they will feel the need to try and get in if it is invite only.

Scaling is a great reason but building the urge to join is also certainly a driving factor, imo

Getting this thread back on topic though: the three things I’m curious about are:

1) Content ownership; with Medium the content seems owned more by Medium than the individual. Currently their URL scheme contributes to that, but that’s a temporary thing they’ve already said they plan to address. I just tweeted a link to Anil Dash’s post on Medium; why not his own site? Because Medium is more readable by far. But the reason I linked it at all is Anil, neither Medium nor his own site have any bearing on that.

2) Monetization. In what way might Medium make online publishing sustainable? For many, writing something great and sharing it for free on the web is fine; for professional writers, it’s a shortcut to unemployment.

And lastly, 3) …

3) I asked at the start: “Is “lead by example” a good enough answer to solve online publishing’s monetization problem?” I’m referring to #1 and #2 together. I linked to Anil’s post on Medium because it is inherently more usable to me than his own site, as far as consuming his content goes. But is this where the pain point of online publishing is?

There is a related Branch going on here: branch.com

Are sites like the NYTimes failing because of ad– and clutter-riddled pages, or is the problem far deeper and greater than that?

Advertising isn’t usually celebrated, but it currently funds probably more than 80% of TV channels and their content. That’s a lot of jobs, industries even, that survive because of it.

I don't have answers, but I will point out a few things.

It's a myth that publishing was ever "sustainable." Sustainable publishing has, for better part of the last 150 years, been closer to scrambling-on-the-edge-of-bankruptcy-but-just-eeking-by than actual, you know, profitability. For writers and publishers.

Relatedly, if the means to publishing are easier, than the bar to "sustainability" is also lowered. A Book Apart costs less to run than, say, O'Reilly. And we make less money, too. But hey, we make enough.

...

Additionally, ad-supported sites are struggling with changes in the ad market. The clutter is annoying, but secondary to the market problem. Advertisers don't pay for ads in the same way they used to, and your local newspaper is no longer the only (or even) best place for ad money to go.

I wouldn't pass judgement on medium re: content ownership until they have some time to settle the bugs.

The URL segments could simply be a temporary solution until they are able to handle users & posts in the "perfect" way. I think assuming anything based on what we see today is deliberately being short-sighted.

After all, it's just a day old to the public - plenty of things will change as it settles.

Hi, guys! Sorry to hop in so late. Great convo and questions. There are a couple things I can provide clarity on wrt Medium:

Keeping the ability to post exclusive is definitely *not* the primary way we are hoping to establish quality. It is very much the plan to open it up. There is a big aspirational goal with Medium to actually make it a *more* efficient and meritocratic place for unknown people who have important or well-constructed things to say to find their audience.

It's true we want to seed the platform with great stuff. But, more importantly, as Mandy said, invite-only for now is a practical consideration. We just don't have the tools to deal with a deluge of stuff and all the potential problems that come with that.

There's another consideration, as well: We are in the *very* beginning of defining what Medium is. I don't want to solidify that overly quickly and miss breakthrough ideas that may come with more experimentation. Once you have tons of users — especially people putting their hard work and ideas unto your platform — it's much harder to significantly change it. So we're going to artificially constrain growth for a while.

What *are* the ways we want to ensure quality? There are a few:

1) Meaningful metrics. The web has historically paid attention to two things: Unique visitors and pageviews. Thus, link bait works great. I think you can measure and pay attention to other stuff, and it will be useful feedback both to those who care about creating quality and a system that cares about rewarding it.

2) Organizing so good stuff floats to the top. As you may have noticed, the most highly rated content in Medium shows up first. The little green circle/number is our version of PageRank. Is it perfect? Not even close, but we'll work on it. Point is, we've deliberately put less emphasis "newness" than blogs and streams do, because we think other things matter too.

Hi Ev, thanks for chiming in! It's great to get some more clarity.

I think I'll just take a step back and see how Medium grows and changes as more people get access. I'm definitely very curious about it, also in terms of what kind of content you’re open to seeing published there. For instance, random short fiction stories—would those be totally inappropriate for Medium, or is it more along the lines of letting the community sort out what "it" likes or doesn't like? Could users create high-level collections at some point, or will those only be Medium-generated?

I can understand if you simply have no answer to these (kind of) questions yet, and want to find out as things develop and you learn more about Medium yourselves.

Oops, forgot one thing in list above:

3) There are some other features that are even more specifically designed to improve quality. You'll have to be patience for those though.

Speaking of, thanks to those who realize it's very early for us. We appreciate the patience!

Faruk,

Thanks for giving us some time!

We'd love random short fiction. We want to create a platform where a very diverse set of content thrives. Which, to answer your second question, means we will definitely be opening up collection creation.

Thanks.

That's exciting to hear. Now I'm even more eager to gain access at some point.

BTW, from the Rules page: “Don't bully or harass minors.” Or any other user, for that matter? ;-)

I'm letting Rorie McIntosh add his question, Evan may respond if he'd like, and then I'm gonna wrap this conversation up.