Remember Back When?

A Medium story about Medium

erika
6 min readAug 18, 2021
2015 medium.com logo

Remember when Medium was a social media blogging platform? This logo represents when I started a Medium account. Old school techniques to build a following where word of mouth, clicking on tags and submitting your work to publications. If you enjoyed reading a piece, you’d tap the little green heart just once. It didn’t require repetitious clicking like “clapping” does.

When you left a comment, the writer actually responded! Back then, it was a platform for sharing experiences, a place to build upon inspired ideas, and foster civil discourse.

I miss that Medium.

“In the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value. What does this mean? Obviously, one form of that value is distribution. And there’s no doubt that something published on Medium has a higher likelihood to find an audience than the same thing published on an untrafficked island on the web…That’s why I say Medium is not a publishing tool. It’s a network. A network of ideas that build off each other.”- Ev Williams, May 2015

Ev and the gang launched the $5 monthly membership and Partner Program in 2017. Finally, financial reward for independent writers! But is it really? We’re four years in and we still don’t know how they…

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