What happened, Medium? You changed. I don’t think we can go on like this.
Medium,
Your home stream is full of urgent whispers let out into a world that doesn’t want to hear them. A million voices crying out at once. Asking, wondering, ‘what happened?’. Experimenting with it and playing around, filling the stream with mindlessness. And here I am, contributing to it.
No, I didn’t use that boxless box, which sits there and calls to the keyboard. I went the old route. Call me old-fashioned if you will, Medium, I don’t care.
I had such big dreams, Medium.
Could you be used as a blog platform for an organisation I work with that desperately needs to get with 2015? Yes! Could you have been a place to collect some of my favourite student work? Yes! Could I have pulled and pushed some of my favourite writers over here too? I tried.
The old you, that is. What with the sense of being private in public. Open, but not wild. Pushed to subscribers, but not in your face to others who didn’t want to hear it unless the steam gathered naturally and so it was probably worth hearing. Now, what with these tags and this stream? I’m not so sure anymore.
This isn’t the end, Medium, not by any stretch. I still love your sleek interface, your simplicity. I still love the fact you don’t really feel like a social network but kind of act like one. That you give us endless white space to fill and ways to fill it. That you are home to some of the most beautiful writing I’ve seen this past year.
I think, Medium, that these changes will make things better for solo writers. For people like me (as me) who put down thoughts they’d like others to hear and share. But I’m not sure some of the other plans I had will work out.
Medium, I know you didn’t mean for it to turn out like this. You wanted to be open to new things, to lots of voices and ways of working. Just like so much other ephemeral tech, so many other pieces of hardware and code that antagonise and tease, that try to be everything to everyone because the internet works best at scale.
No, this isn’t the end by any stretch, but I’m not entirely sure what the future holds.
Cheers, Medium, it’s been fun. I hope it still can be. I’ll try, will you?
T-
PS, I do like the tags.