Overview: Communications Strategy

Should you blog on dedicated blogging platforms like Medium, or on your Hub? It's not an either/or.

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

The feature enables Medium users to volunteer to translate Medium stories into the language of their choice. Approved translators see a “Translate” button on Medium stories and clicking that button clones the post and seeds the clone with a Google translate version of the story in the language that they select. They then go in and make the Google …

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

publications, where people are carefully curating great content around particular topics, themes, and ideas Here are eleven great publications that you might want to follow today:

Garnish your post with a photo of a cute little kitten and animal-lovers will flock to your button like zombies to a brain smorgasbord... good writing ... does not presently guarantee an audience on Medium... risks becoming a click-bait factory, a lame production line pumping out articles around the same limited themes...it needs to radically i…

political polarisation creates groupthink creates more polarisation, which prevents ideas from circulating and developing.... Pumping resources into ensuring one side of US politics is overrepresented on Medium is bad for US politics, and bad for Medium - In response to Influencer Outreach: Progressive Politics (job ad on Medium)

it’s been recommended over 6,500 times... the problem is this: the article is… crushingly insubstantial... there are dozens of similar pieces churning around Medium at any time: how to listicles, life-hack guides, autodidactic treatises on ‘personal growth’ etc etc... in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them join them”, here is my hastily co…

A decent long read: on @medium, The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes: "Don’t feel constrained by presumed short attention spans. If you put in the effort, so will your audience." - The Optimal Post is 7 Minutes — Data Lab — Medium

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

"We’re very excited to announce the launch of a new feature for Publications. We’re calling it Letters. ... It’s a way of connecting with your followers and starting a conversation. It’s delivered to the inboxes of all your followers. It’s also a post, so it can be recommended, highlighted, built upon, and have a life of its own." - Introd…

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

"Every new platform that relies on user generated content depends on influential users who make the platform indispensable, thereby attracting larger numbers of users to try it out. But it's a Catch 22; the platform needs the influencers to make it indispensable, but these users won't become addicted unless it's already indispensable" Same 'vic…