No schadenfreude, but I’ve always thought that Ev Williams and the other twitter ilk were never too good at execution. Someone, somewhere along the story of twitter helped make it what it is, but neither Jack, nor Ev have been amazing at the business side of things.
But a former employee of Medium says it much better than I ever could –
I don’t know what’s in store for Medium, but it could have been a lot more than what it is today. Yes, the blogosphere is overcrowded. Yes, the true spiritual successor of WordPress is Ghost (or it’s Gutenberg, if you ask automattic). Yes, blogging is such an essential activity to the web that if every free and open source and well made CMS were to disappear tomorrow, someone would start making another one from scratch almost instantly. (heck, I made two for my personal use!) So where does that leave Medium? I don’t know.
I like the insight this write up by Casey Newton gives into what Ev thought he was doing with Medium.
To think that he can “fix the internet” and “increase depth of understanding” are grandiose plans if what you’re going to do is start a blogging platform that’s half-baked on day one of launch. Medium is often like LinkedIn now – it’ll throw up a soft paywall and you can just wander away and get your information fix elsewhere.
I do hope better things are in store.