A few years ago, a big part of my job was interviewing writers. We were (and are!) curious about why some people decide to open up a blank piece of digital paper and share their thoughts with the world.

Every day, I Zoomed with someone new.

“Why do you write on Medium? What bugs you about it? If you had a magic wand…”

I took notes. I shared them with my team. I pulled out patterns. A lot of what I heard confirmed what I already thought: People love the simplicity of Medium. They write to connect with people they care about. Sometimes they’re confused about how and whether to earn money.

There were a few surprises (like one writer who arrived on Medium as part of a UX course before pivoting to publishing original watercolor paintings), but overall I can’t say we learned anything we hadn’t already suspected — possibly because we weren’t trying very hard to disprove our assumptions.

Judd Antin, a business lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and a former design lead at Airbnb and Facebook, recently published a wake-up call on Medium about talking to your customers, and I wish I’d seen it that summer. “User research,” as it’s called in the biz, is one of the most popular ways companies pressure-test their ideas before building them — but Antin believes most of us could do it a little better. A few lessons stand out to me, all of which apply to listening generally:

• Approach a conversation as an exercise in bubble bursting. Look for evidence that disproves your assumptions about your customers instead of confirming them.
• Don’t get distracted by loud people. It’s so easy to only talk to your loudest and most disgruntled customers. Instead, seek out the quiet ones.
• Listen and then act. If a customer tells you a bunch of things they hate about your product and you nod vehemently but then do nothing, that’s almost worse than never having listened at all. No one will admit this, but lots of tech leaders interview customers as cover for what they’re going to do anyway. Instead, listen and then act.

Elsewhere on Medium…

• Our very own Zouhair Mahieddine, Staff iOS Engineer at Medium, on how to work with old code: Instead of jumping into a comprehensive rewrite, understand the code you’re working with first. Evolve in small steps, not huge leaps (which applies to so many big problems).
• Here’s a story that struck a nerve on Medium (267 comments and counting!): Veteran blogger and poet Carmellita explains how SEO-optimized writing makes everyone sound the same — it makes us write for skimmability instead of nuance, humanity, and specificity.

👋 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about saying hello

Every “hi” is a first impression. To do it well, lead with curiosity instead of apathy, mistrust, or resignation.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Yesterday’s winner is… The AuDHD Philosopher for correctly spotting a cheese wheel in “Kidfluencers: The Ethics of Marketing My Child.”

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Want to be featured in this newsletter? If you have a story that touches on a current or important topic in a broadly relevant, accessible way, pitch us: tips@medium.com

The first rule of good listening: try to disprove your assumptions was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium Day keynote: A better internet and other announcements from Medium Day 2024.

Hi there, I’m Medium’s CEO.

Obviously you are here for me to talk about Medium, but I’m going to start by talking about Vermont.

The first time that I wrote about building a better internet, Ryan Rucker, who is both a Medium reader and Medium writer, wrote a response that started out by talking about Vermont.

For our global audience who might not already know this, Vermont is part of the United States and is often considered one of our gems. Ryan wrote to say why. He said:

The first time that I drove through Vermont, I felt at peace looking at the beauty.

Later I learned that Vermont had banned billboards so that people could better enjoy this beauty.

Medium reminds me of Vermont. Too many places are littered with ads which then make the experience more stressful than it is worth.

So then I come to Medium. I read articles from seriously talented writers and I feel refreshed, informed, and far more connected. ~ edited version of Ryan’s comment.

Thanks, Ryan.

Like Vermont, we have said no to ads because they are a distraction from what you’re here to do. We are building a better place on the internet that treats you the way Vermont treats you as opposed to say, the way a Las Vegas casino treats you. We want you to be part of this.

Instead of ads, we’ve chosen to be member supported and you, thankfully, have given a lot of that support. About half of the attendees today are members.

For the half of you that aren’t members yet, I’m not here to sell you. I’m just going to tell you what we are doing and how we are doing it. And if that seems like that’s something you want to be a part of, then today is a great day to become a member.

So let’s talk about why the rest of the internet doesn’t feel like Vermont. We know the internet is broken and getting worse. It’s flooded with ads, spam, misinformation, disinformation, division, anger, and hate.

The villain is ads. They make businesses care more about your attention than they do about serving you. It’s as simple as incentives: When a business is paid for by ads, you stop being their customer.

However, because we are member-supported, we get to build our space on the internet very differently. I’m going to go deep on three keys that are only possible because we are supported by members.

First, we are building a place that recommends great writing, not the loudest writers.

This is the most important thing we’re doing, so I’m going to spend the most time on this.

Medium is about connecting you to great writing.

On Medium, we’ve often found that the most interesting writers rarely have the time, or desire, to learn to play the attention-grabbing game. Medium is built differently so that we can find and share these writers with you. Great writing comes from writers who are busy living, not busy hustling.

Here are three examples of perspectives that shine on Medium.

First, a year ago, generative AI hit the news hard and the NYTimes was on it by publishing 12 names you absolutely needed to be paying attention to. The problem was that they only named men. This was such a bad miss that it even left out the chief technology officer of OpenAI. Soon after, Séphora Bemba, who isn’t a journalist but rather a professional in this field, published suggested corrections on Medium.

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued a recent ruling on immunity, partisan opinions popped up all over the internet. But in the I Taught the Law publication on Medium, Dan Canon, who is a Brandeis Professor of Law, put the news into legal context for everyone.

Fans of Andre 3000 had been waiting for years for him to release another rap album. Instead, and surprisingly, he released an instrumental flute album. On Medium, Joah Spearman wrote about hearing him perform it live, saying “Last night, I witnessed a performance that moved me to tears.”

Those three stories represent three examples of how all of us are filled with expertise. The first is expertise about your profession. The second is academic expertise earned through research and scholarship. The last is lived expertise.

By definition, all of us have expertise about what we have lived through. The magic of blogging is that you come to discover how often one person’s experiences, big or small, ends up being a big help to the people that read these experiences.

This is why we focus on the best writers, not the loudest ones: We want to help writers spend more time living and less time hustling the attention economy.

How do we help readers find these great stories?

There are more than 300 publications on Medium that accept submissions. Of course, they have standards. I’m pretty sure you have to have a law background to write for the I Taught the Law pub. And that’s the point. Each publication is a curator of a level of quality and a point of view.

A huge portion of what you read on Medium was published and edited by one of these community publications. But what you probably don’t know unless you are a writer or editor here is how much time some editors spend.

In May, we were lucky enough to have two editors come speak to Medium staff. This is Debra G. Harman, MEd. and Judy Walker from the Parasol Publications. They don’t work for us, they work for themselves and for their community of writers.

They were just awesome and as generous with us as they are with Medium writers.

We asked them what their editing process is and it’s so extensive that I felt like I needed a second talk just to summarize it. There’s the acceptance step, the editing and formatting step, the discussion amongst the editors step, and then, the working a piece up so that it is boost-worthy step. These steps all involve different editors in their publication and a direct human touch between editor and author.

I give this example because a lot of supposedly human interactions on the internet are actually pretty transactional. Retweeting someone is not the same as knowing them.

Medium is far from that transactional world. If you are part of this community, you’re going to meet real people, get real feedback, have real conversations. Many of you will end up meeting in person.

The second way we’re building a better internet is by respecting your time, free from ads.

A huge swath of the internet is supported by ads. But I don’t think you can build anything healthy if that’s your business model.

With ads, publishers get paid for your attention, rather than the value they provide. That is why the rest of the internet has so much clickbait, doom-bait, rage-bait, all the baits — they all grab your attention just long enough to show you an ad. But do they make your life better? No.

In 2017, Medium decided that we’d be member-supported rather than ad-supported. So, we don’t show ads at all.

As a result, Medium lets you focus on the story. That’s the obvious benefit. No distractions.

The even bigger benefit is what it means to be member-supported and know it. We learned the hard way that there is a big difference between what a member will click on and what they will be happy to have paid to read.

Our business only works if we hit a very high bar, which is that you read things that you are happy to have paid to read.

The third way we’re building a better internet is that we protect you from spam, fraud, trolls, and AI-generated content.

These are the bad actors of the internet.

Last year, Medium removed one million spam posts from your feeds every month. Last month, we removed nearly ten million. That increase represents a deluge of digitally-assembled nonsense that is hitting every part of the internet.

We’re able to do this because of our engineers, because of our trust and safety and curation teams, and because publications are great curators. They pick the treasures so that you don’t see the trash.

It does another important thing, which is that it makes Medium feel like a place where you can have a discussion, rather than a place where you are bound to have an argument.

The more we do to hold back bad actors, the more space we create for free speech.

So that combination of things — the way we focus on humans as writers, readers, editors; the fact that we’re member-supported rather than ad-supported; and the attention we pay to fighting bad actors — all of that is why Medium feels like a better internet. We’re working hard to keep it beautiful.

All right, let’s talk about updates. I have nine to talk about.

Medium is profitable.

August is our first profitable month in the history of the company. We got here because more members are supporting us than ever before.

In April, we celebrated one million members. There’s a side story about how good engineering has saved us money on our server bills. But mostly it was as simple as making something members wanted to subscribe to.

This milestone is one thing that should be important to everyone here.

It’s that a better internet is possible. It’s not a fantasy. What we’re doing at Medium works.

[Note: After I gave this talk at Medium Day, Richard Boekweg from our engineering team gave a great talk about the second biggest factor in our path to profitability: cost savings. Below is the star slide about how smart engineering cut our AWS cloud bill in half.]

Friends of Medium.

Last fall, we released a higher priced membership tier that offered the ability to pay more money to the authors you read. It is literally just an opportunity to be generous.

9,661 people are currently paying to be Friends of Medium.

All of this money goes to writers. Even as we cut other costs to make Medium profitable, we paid the writers more.

There is no better indication of the health of this community than the number of people who pay more just to be generous.

New icon and logo.

Over the years, we’ve changed our logos several times, first starting with a typographic approach and then moving to an ellipsis four years ago.

The ellipsis approach was meant to convey that there is always more to the story and thus that there is always more for writers like you to contribute.

However, the typographic approach drew us back because it conveyed the timelessness of writing. I connect this to our business success. Medium is a stable and hopefully timeless company, and so is your writing.

The new icon and standalone wordmark are live on our apps and on our website. They don’t use any new elements. The icon uses the existing typography of our wordmark to combine both concepts. It brings back a timeless typographic approach while using a gestalt technique for letting your mind fill in the rest to convey that there will always be more stories to tell.

This is not a rebrand; it’s a reaffirmation of Medium’s strengths. It uses concepts that we have believed in for a long time. Branding changes are often symbolic, and the symbolism here is that Medium has a strong foundation.

The Boost program.

The Boost is our primary program to curate the best stories for each reader. To date, we’ve boosted 4,200 stories and those stories have gotten 179 million views.

When I came on board as CEO two years ago, people were telling me Medium was cluttered with get-rich-quick scams and cheap listicles. That’s not true anymore, and now we’re hitting record membership levels. The Boost is the reason.

Verified book authors.

More than 9,000 writers have signed up for our verified book author program.

This is double from last year. This program helps book authors get the word out about their books and it helps readers understand more about the credibility of what they’re reading on Medium.

New countries.

We expanded the Partner Program to support payments to 77 more countries.

Understanding the world requires hearing from global ideas and experiences. Our Partner Program expansion now means that writers in 77 additional countries can now get paid for their writing. The total number of supported countries is now up to 119.

Global diversity is just one of the ways that diversity is a virtue at Medium. I always keep in mind a simple fact. You can only learn something from someone who is different than you.

One thing in the works.

Part of elevating publications on Medium is to constantly increase their ability to curate the best of what they see.

A thing that’s coming is that every single publication on Medium will have more power to boost stories to their own audience. That’s all I can say about that today.

Mastodon.

Last year I said that Twitter was dead. Well, it hasn’t died, even if it is dead to me. But I don’t feel healthy there.

What has happened is that there has been a large exodus to a number of places. We think writers who write on Medium often discuss what they’re writing in short form. Our interest is to help support that.

One way is with our Mastodon instance which gives you a hot at-me-dot-dm Mastodon username. (Mine is coachtony@me.dm.)

I think the fragmentation creates interesting options for people. I find the people on Mastodon to be the deepest thinkers and the most real. But I find Threads to be the best for self-promotion and sometimes, yes, I do have to play that game.

The Medium Newsletter

This is my last update, but it’s my first read of the day.

Earlier this year, we launched a deeply thoughtful and curious newsletter. We did this for one purpose, which is to showcase how the writing on Medium completes and complements the topics of the day. I don’t feel like I truly understand a topic until I’ve read about it on Medium. (Sign up for the newsletter here.)

If a friend or family member doesn’t understand what makes Medium great, send them this newsletter as a showcase.

And, I hesitate to say this to this many people, but we actively encourage people to submit tips for stories to feature, including your own. The Medium Newsletter is one of the largest on the internet, which means that getting featured puts your story in front of more than a million readers. If you have a tip, send it to tips@medium.com.

One more thing before I open this up to Q&A. That one more thing is to thank a small handful of people.

Thank you to the Medium team who is running this event. This is a ton of work and you do it with class. Likewise, thank you to the entire Medium team who has made this success possible.

Thank you to the 119 speakers who have volunteered their time today. Each is also a Medium writer.

Thank you for the more than 16,000 people who have signed up to attend for at least part of today.

But mostly, thank you for the one million members who make Medium possible.

I took this job two years ago knowing that we were going to have to make hard changes. But the hard changes are in the past now, so let’s go reap the rewards together.

State of Medium was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I used to follow a fashion Instagram account for everyday outfit inspo. The account had an interesting business model: it had hundreds of thousands of followers, so up-and-coming outfit-of-the-day Instagram accounts could pay a fee to be featured in posts or stories. I had an absolute shock while scrolling one day when the account featured a five-year-old girl, modeling the same outfit styles that many grown influencers favor. The girl (or her mom, anyway) had been active on Instagram since she was two years old.

It felt obscene. This mom was making money by posting her young daughter’s #sponcon. How could the child consent? Was this not a clear violation of child labor laws? How would it affect her as she grew up to be subject to the demands of posting? But ‘kidfluencing’ — AKA using your kids to make money by posting about them on social media — is totally legal.

John Polonis, a lawyer — and dad — points out in his piece on the ethics of kidfluencing that few laws protect kids from exploitation online, and most are toothless. The strongest, recently passed in Illinois, requires kids to sue their parents if they want to recoup any of their earnings, rather than giving any upfront protections. He also highlights that he sees benefits to his social media presence even without direct kidfluencing: his YouTube thumbnails get more clicks when he includes a pic of his kids.

Maybe we should just ban all parents from posting about their kids online. But there are non-nefarious reasons to share your kids’ lives online, too. As father and writer Will Leitch writes, when he became a parent, it was hard not to post about his kids because fatherhood was so all-consuming. Plus, where do you draw the line? Many of us post pictures and videos online to share with friends and family. What if they go viral by accident? What if a brand offers you a sponsorship deal off the back of that?

It’s worth asking yourself where your line is, if only so you have a good answer when your child inevitably asks you why so many people know them as “Success Kid.”

What else we’re reading

• No, I’m not done thinking about the Olympics! I’m also not done thinking about the lifespan of a zombie stat, which I wrote about in a previous newsletter. That’s why physicist Rhett Allain’s myth-busting investigation into whether Simone Biles really gets 12 feet off the floor, as per USA Today, struck my interest. In short, not quite: She did reach around 10.9 feet, depending on whether you calculate the distance from the floor to her feet, or her head. Still amazing for someone who is 4’8”.
• Trans author and biologist Julia Serano shares how gender-affirming care has become the standard recommendation from the medical community even for prepubescent children. Over the past three decades, she explains, the “watchful waiting” model, where doctors advised against any interventions for pre-pubescent gender-dysphoric children, has been recognized as psychologically harmful. For children who are “insistent, persistent, and consistent about their gender identity,” doctors now recommend a gender affirmative model, which allows and encourages social transition.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: use a “dramadoodle” to unblock yourself creatively

I am normally a creature of regimented to-do lists and processes, which is why I was so fascinated by voice and theater teacher Kate Brennan’s idea of creating a dramadoodle to brainstorm, unblock, or problem-solve. Start with a blank sheet of paper, draw a bunch of shapes, put your prominent problem/question in the middle shape, and fill the rest with “words, snippets of thought, images, or whatever comes to mind when you think of your essential question.”

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

And the winner of yesterday’s quiz is Betty Volquardsen who correctly guessed that it was a cat falling in mid air.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Harris Sockel, Scott Lamb, & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Do your kids know what you say about them on the internet? was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every once in a while, I find a Medium story that makes me think about something familiar in a new way. Today, it’s essayist Jen Murphy Parker’s “The fun and games of college tours.”

The essay is timely, obviously: Over the next month, roughly 19 million 18-year-olds will start their first year of college. They’ll buy extra-long twin-bed sheets and medusa lamps. Their parents will spend anywhere between $30,000 to $100,000 to give them the once-in-a-lifetime experience of staying up until 1 a.m. obsessing over a final.

Before all that, they’ll wave goodbye to their parents. In 2016, Jenny Boylan described the weird mix of emotions this moment can trigger in a moving essay about sending her son to Kindergarten:

my wife and I… had two very different reactions as the school bus pulled away, the boy waving happily to us from the window. I had burst into tears, while Deedie just grinned in triumph. “But — we’re losing him to the world!” I cried, melodramatically. “I know,” she replied, with an air of immense satisfaction.

As you might’ve read in a recent issue of this newsletter, college isn’t as popular as it used to be. Since 2010, enrollment has been on a downturn as Gen Z questions the value of a four-year degree.

What those stats overlook, though, is the emotional impact of going to college — for both kids and parents. What I love about Parker’s essay is that it crystallizes those nervous, conflicted feelings on both sides. As she writes, “College dropoff is one of the saddest good things a parent can ever do.”

⚡ Lightning round: Great, recent Medium stories in 2 sentences or less

• John Kruse MD, PhD, offers a thorough breakdown of how anxiety functions and how to navigate it — including this fact: “Anxiety is often closely tied to a need for certainty.” Get comfortable with things being a little up in the air and you’ll (probably) feel calmer.
• Until 1969, no one knew how cats always manage to land on their feet… even when dropped from great heights! Turns out cats have an intuitive sense for how to conserve momentum during a fall, which was useful to NASA researchers figuring out how to help astronauts orient themselves in space.
• An essay that made me laugh at my computer yesterday, via The Belladonna Comedy: Maybe you’re having trouble writing because your thoughts aren’t chic enough for your sleek Moleskine notebook.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on influence

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a highly zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly wins a free Medium membership.

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Mike Logue, for correctly answering: “Centre Pompidou” (aka Musée Beaubourg), featured in Sophie Aguado’s guide to visiting Paris.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

“College dropoff is one of the saddest good things a parent can ever do” was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

​​🗳️ The Democratic National Convention begins today in Chicago, which (mostly because it’s so geographically central) has hosted more major political conventions than any other city in the U.S.
Issue #144: how to tell what your company really cares about, the creativity muscle, and what to do in Paris
By Harris Sockel

Here are three pieces of wisdom to take with you throughout the week.

• A koan that applies equally to individuals and organizations: If you want to know what you truly care about, look at what you’ve done over the last week, month, or quarter. As AWS design lead Pavel Samsonov writes: “Orgs lie to themselves with roadmaps all the time, but the track record of what was actually shipped always tells the truth.”
• A lesson on writing from Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief: Don’t think of creativity as a mysterious asset to dole out sparingly. Instead, creativity is more of a muscle that you strengthen over time by simply making things, even if they don’t meet your expectations.
• In Yiddish, trepverter means “staircase words,” or the retort you think of too late (i.e. at the bottom of a staircase). If you’re ever unsure how to reply to someone, especially if they’ve asked you a vaguely threatening question — Are you planning on having another? How old are you? Isn’t that expensive? — simply repeat their question back to them. “Speaking the inappropriate, outlandish or unwelcome words in your own voice allows you to reclaim power” if your staircase words escape you, explains voice teacher Kate Brennan.

🍾 Also today: If you’re thinking of visiting Paris…

Counterintuitively, Paris was 25% less crowded during the Olympics than it usually is at this time of year. Tourists who would’ve normally booked a visit didn’t, which led hotel prices to drop — and, judging by the photos I’ve seen on Medium, an odd peacefulness fell over the city. Honestly, it makes me want to visit.

Lifelong Parisian Sophie Aguado, one of my colleagues, shares a complete guide to the City of Light. What I love about hearing a local’s travel recommendations is they’re honest in ways you wouldn’t expect: Aguado issues some decisive burns (Don’t go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower! Too windy! Also, the Louvre’s food court is awful!) and surfaces hidden gems — like La Slow Galerie, a print shop featuring extremely cute illustrations by local artists.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Congrats to Friday’s winner, Holly, for correctly spotting the zoomed-in potato chip.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

How to strengthen your creative muscles — and more tips for your week was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

📹 Medium Day 2024 is tomorrow from 9 AM to 6 PM ET. Here’s the link to register. Scroll down to see the schedule!
Issue #143: Reflections on reproductive health, a tip on how to make friends, and the full Medium Day lineup
By Zulie @ Medium

What do these three problems have in common?

• “One of the most common things I hear from founders is: We keep launching features that have no impact. They just flop and we don’t know why.”
• “How should you talk about quantum technology? Much of the science communication community has settled on cheap analogies that fuel misunderstanding and hype.”
• “[T]he desire to eat chips at a party or watch another Netflix episode.”

They’re all problems that speakers at Medium Day — happening tomorrow between 9 AM and 6 PM ET — will be explaining how to solve.

At 10 AM ET in the Design track, UX designer Rosie Hoggmascall will be talking about how to avoid features that flop. Her solution? One-question surveys.

At 5 PM ET in the Technology track, quantum theorist Chris Ferrie will be sharing how scientists can talk about quantum tech in a way that makes sense to laypeople. Part of the problem, he says, is that we persist in pretending nobody understands quantum physics, which isn’t true.

And at 1 PM ET in the Self-improvement track, user researcher Riikka Iivanainen will explain why some people are better at resisting temptation than others. Or are they? It turns out that people don’t magically have a stronger self-control muscle… but they do have another superpower.

Those are just three of the talks I’m hoping to attend tomorrow. Other amazing speakers on the lineup include:

• UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming discussing how we can make our information ecosystem safer and more humane
• The Angular blog team talking about how to build the next generation of supercharged web applications
• Liza Donnelly, visual journalist and writer, reprising last year’s hit and doing a live drawing sesh
• Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine giving his annual keynote speech

Come along and learn something new. I’ll see you there! You can check out the full schedule here.

A long weekend read

If you want to spend 15 minutes reading something heartwrenching, infuriating, and beautiful, I can’t get over this story from neurolinguist, entrepreneur, and health activist Kristina Kasparian, PhD, who navigated a hysterectomy due to years of painful endometriosis — right after her surrogate lost her pregnancy.

It’s a gorgeously written reflection on your right to choose the reproductive healthcare that is right for you, what “selfish” choices mean when it comes to your own body, and how far many of us go to make others comfortable, even in the face of our own pain and suffering. I loved it, even though I hated hearing what Kasparian had gone through. It made me think more deeply about “society’s views on being a woman and having children,” as commenter Skye Knight eloquently put it.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: how to make a new friend

Music therapist Evin Ibrahim points out that, contrary to popular belief, getting older is not a hopeless case of inescapable loneliness. Writing from her experience interning in senior homes during the pandemic, she explains that older adults who have friends work hard at the skill.

How did they do it? “[A]sking questions, finding common ground, offering compliments. But there were also the less-obvious skills that come with emotional intelligence honed over time: kindness, patience, curiosity, and an openness to someone else’s world.”

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a highly zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly wins a free Medium membership.

Yesterday’s winner: Shawn Mitchell for the correct answer of “Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign logo.” Congrats, Shawn!

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Harris Sockel, Scott Lamb, & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

How to avoid feature flop — and more expert advice you’ll hear tomorrow at Medium Day was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When Kamala Harris ran for president in 2020, she mentioned in an interview that one of her inspirations was Shirley Chisholm — the first Black woman elected to U.S. Congress and the first woman to run for the democratic presidential nomination.

That’s not exactly how Chisholm wanted to be remembered. Here’s one of my favorite quotes, from an interview Chisholm gave decades after losing the nomination to George McGovern: “I want history to remember me… not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency… but as a Black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself.”

Harris was so inspired by Chisholm that she designed her campaign as a visual homage. Advertising exec Marcus Wesson recently turned to Medium to unpack the design parallels. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

D.C.-based creative agency Wide Eye used Chisholm’s color, type, and layout choices as inspo for Harris’ 2020 brand:

The same design firm branded the Biden-Harris White House, Biden’s campaign, and the Harris/Walz campaign logo (which underwent a few subtle design tweaks last weekend).

You can tell a lot about a design by what it doesn’t contain. There are no metaphors in the Harris/Walz logo — no arrows, flags, fire symbols, eagles, stars, or exclamation points (RIP Jeb!). Instead, there’s just Bureau Grot Condensed Bold type (or a similar custom typeface) on a solid background. It’s a decidedly straightforward, no-nonsense design. The Trump campaign’s logo is pretty straightforward, too, but it has a star border.

“Grot” is short for “grotesque,” a genre of typefaces first used in 19th century British advertising because they were blunt, unadorned, unpretentious sans serifs (and a little awkward-looking at the time, when most typefaces were elegant serifs, hence “grotesque”). The vibe sort of seems aligned with the Dems’ campaign messaging this go-round: We are plainspoken and normal.

What else we’re reading

• Former pro-wrestler Jesse Jantzen, who made it to the 2008 Olympic trials before losing to a wrestler he’d beaten in the past, reflects on how painful it can be to walk away from a sport you’ve poured your life into: “When people retire from our sport, they leave their wrestling shoes in the center of the mat, to symbolize leaving everything they had athletically in the arena, walking away satisfied.”
• From the archive: Chief People Officer (Credit Karma, Vevo) and adviser to the writers of HBO’s Silicon Valley Colleen Wheeler McCreary explains why she’s ripped out performance reviews for over a decade. They process-ize something we should all be living and breathing every day: telling our coworkers how we honestly feel about their work.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on initiative

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

And the winner of yesterday’s quiz is…cue the drumline… Jim the AI Whisperer who correctly answered: “It’s the album cover from Calimossa’s Club 555,” one of Barack Obama’s favorite tracks of 2024.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

A branding expert’s look at Harris/Walz’s campaign typography was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update to our quality guidelines (August 2024)

Why should you publish your story on Medium? There are many good reasons — our simple, intuitive editor, our strong domain authority, and how easy and quick it is to publish a story, for example. But one of the main reasons is that if your story is good, it has a shot at reaching a wide audience.

Unlike other platforms, you don’t need an external audience. You don’t need to know anything about SEO. Those things can certainly help, but our curation and distribution system is designed to match great stories with interested readers, so you can focus on telling your unique stories without needing those skills. Our recommendations system is built around incentivizing writers to share the deepest, richest stories.

This is in contrast to, for example, a common and infuriating format of recipe posts you find on the open web: you’re forced to scroll through page after page of nonsense to get to the actual recipe. That extra “story” is all for the sake of creating advertising space and optimizing the page to rank higher in search engines. It’s not done for the reader. This isn’t because the writer doesn’t care about the reader; it’s because the incentives are not aligned between reader, writer, and publisher.

Since we’re supported by readers, not by advertising, we have the privilege of keeping our curation focused on the reader.

Our readers value thoughtful, nuanced, knowledgeable perspectives — we do, too

We’re pleased to announce a new revision to our Quality Guidelines today. This revision changes little in the guidelines themselves; most of the updates are clarifications based on feedback we received from writers and editors.

If you’re new to our Quality Guidelines, welcome! These are the same guidelines used by our curation team, and describe how we assign each story we review to one of three distribution categories:

• Network Distribution — stories that are matched to readers who are following that specific writer (and/or the publication, if the article is in a publication). This is the baseline category for any story on Medium which does not violate Medium rules.
• General Distribution — stories that earn General Distribution are matched to readers based on their interests, and on related writers or publications they follow. These stories are also given Network Distribution.
• Boost — especially high-quality stories that meet our Boost Guidelines (below). These get a higher priority in being matched to readers and are also given General and Network Distribution.

Writers and editors who are interested in how stories are chosen for Boost can find more details in those guidelines. There you’ll find that the criteria for Boosting stories is based on five broadly defined factors:

• Writer’s experience
• Value and impact
• Respect for the reader
• Non-derivative
• Writing and craftsmanship

I’d like to share some of our thinking behind “writer’s experience,” which is a unique element in our stance on quality in writing, and something we’ve found that our readers especially value.

Our readers love your experience

Readers prize reading stories that have a clear sense of a writer’s experience not because it makes a story warm, inviting, or emotional — though it can certainly do all of those things. They prize your experience because it transfers valuable understanding to them.

For example, anyone can look up how to prepare roasted potatoes and write a story about it. It could even be a good story. But it’s not what our readers come to Medium for. We call this a “write-around” — pick a topic, look some things up, and write around it. Write-arounds can convey information but they typically miss the mark on conveying real understanding.

Over time, we’ve emphasized writer’s experience in our Quality Guidelines, and we’ve noticed that writers are mistakenly trying to check that box, rather than give the spirit of what our readers really want. For example, some writers will include a personal anecdote somewhat related to the topic of the story, followed by a write-around. We also see stories that sprinkle in anecdotes, opinions, “in my experience” phrasing, and other bits that seem to be an attempt to fill this criteria for Boosting. However, the writer doesn’t bring any actual insight into the subject at hand.

This type of “filler” is disappointing to the reader who wants the writer to share the actual experience they could learn and grow from.

An example of writer experience versus a write-around

The state of recipes — real instructions for cooking food — offers great examples of what we mean by a story that provides writer experience in the form of insight rather than filler. Compare, for example, Crispy Oven Roasted Potatoes to The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever Recipe from Serious Eats.

What Are the Best Potatoes for Roasted Potatoes? The answer to this question is: it’s your choice. I prefer a smaller potato like the baby red or white potatoes so there are fewer cuts of the knife to make. But if you prefer, use yukon golds, sweet potatoes, or even russet potatoes, and cut them into 1-inch cubes.

Versus:

For variety, I tried the three most common supermarket types: russet, Yukon Gold, and red.

Russets get the crispest crusts and roast up a pale golden brown. Their interiors are fluffy and mild.

Yukon Golds roast a little darker owing to their lower starch content and higher sugar content. This leads to more flavor, but it also means a slightly less crisp crust. Their interiors are nice and creamy, with plenty of flavor.

Red potatoes roast up very dark because of their very low starch content, but have difficulty getting crisp. They come out of the oven crunchy, but soon lose that crunch, turning soft and tender.

Both are well-written and valuable to readers. Both contain personal experience. However, in the first case, the experience offered doesn’t contribute anything to elevate the readers’ understanding of how to make delicious roasted potatoes. In the second case, the reader’s experience goes far deeper: experimenting with different varieties, testing different techniques, and making specific recommendations based on that experience.

The first example is good writing, but it’s not nearly as helpful. “It’s your choice” is just filler. Insight into the actual differences — from someone with direct experience of cooking them — is far more valuable. The recipe by Kenji is infused throughout with this sort of direct experience that the other example lacks — even though that other example sprinkles in lots of colorful asides.

Boost is a high bar

When you get a story Boosted, you should be proud because it means we think it represents the best of the best on Medium. It’s a story we are thrilled to share with readers, and we trust that they’ll be equally thrilled to read. The process of curation is a process of finding the best exemplars of our Boost Guidelines, because these types of stories provide the best experience to readers.

Unlike a lot of other places on the internet, there aren’t any easy formulas to reach a wide audience on Medium. There’s no specific title, length, time of publishing, or topic that does best. All our incentives are set up instead to reward writers for sharing their best stories with our readers.

To reach an audience on Medium, a good place to start is to focus on your own lived experience, and consider why sharing that experience can be valuable to another person. Why are you writing about this particular topic? What can you uniquely bring to the story, and why is that valuable to another person?

Meeting that requirement of writer’s experience alone doesn’t guarantee that a story will be Boosted. But it’s a good place to start for any writer striving to authentically connect with their reader.

And when your story does get Boosted on Medium, you can be sure that it’s a meaningful act. It wasn’t done in the service of advertising, or SEO, or to generate filler material as a vehicle for any of that.

It was done as recognition of your excellence in deepening our understanding of the world through the power of writing.

Thank you for being a part of this community.

How our quality guidelines incentivize your best writing — and how we curate those stories for our… was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the best things I ever did for my productivity — and it’s a super small thing — was to hide my dock on Mac OS. Actually, first I removed all the pre-loaded apps I’ll never use on my work computer (Pages, News, Garage Band). Then I hid it. Finally, no more manipulative red dots! Only after getting rid of those dots and ever-present icons do you realize how much energy tech companies have poured into drawing your attention away from whatever you’re trying to do.

Even if you don’t use a Mac, the underlying principle applies: the best way to help yourself focus is to control your environment.

We tend to think of our workspace as a physical location, but as Niklas Göke writes, “your computer screen is an environment you choose to enter, consciously or unconsciously.” There are a few things you can do proactively to make it a more focused zone for deep work, like turning on Do Not Disturb and cutting down on open tabs. I loved these 10 time management techniques from former Airbnb product lead Lenny Rachitsky, each of which doubles as a way to take back your attention. One of them I practice religiously — using my calendar as a to-do list:

If any of this resonated with you (and this is not remotely sponsored, I’m just a fan!), I recommend Arc — it’s a browser that automatically deletes your unsaved tabs after 12 hours. As someone whose Chrome tabs regularly ran amok (and crashed my computer), I can say that Arc made me considerably more sane.

⚡ Lighting round: Great, recent Medium stories in 2 sentences or less

• Highlights from Barack Obama’s 2024 summer listening and reading lists: “365” by Charli XCX, Hanif Abdurraqib’s memoir There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, and LA-based indie hip hop producer Calimossa’s “What’s in the Tea?”
• A leader’s main job is to say the quiet part loud. If everyone on your team is talking about something and you haven’t acknowledged it, you’re already too late.
• Alexa V.S. challenged herself to walk 20K steps/day — and found that while she was exhausted at first, a few months into the experiment she started to feel an energy boost like never before.

🗣️ Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about ongoing feedback

Most companies do performance reviews (affectionately known as “perf” here at Medium) once or twice a year, if that. Business strategist Amanda Swim offers a better option: a quick 30-minute feedback sesh every 30 days. Your manager and you each bring three pieces of positive and constructive feedback for each other. Boom. That’s it. Now maybe you won’t need to wait until December to find out if your boss thinks you’re doing okay or not.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Mariam Hassib, for deciphering a blurry, sparse image — it’s the second circular figure in Ralph Ammer’s “Is perfection boring?”

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

How to minimize distractions before they start was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s a quote I can’t stop thinking about, from one of the most-read stories on Medium last month:

“This moment has been a long time coming. I’ve imagined it for many years, long before this current crisis. The fact is, I’m an expert in a dying field.”

That’s Classics professor Brian S. Hook coming to terms with losing his job. His university cut his department after enrollment dropped 25% in four years. “I was trained to help students learn to read Latin, to read literature and history… to think creatively and critically,” he explains. But that was a hard sell. Students wanted to major in something that would immediately land them a job.

And I don’t blame them! College costs over $100K on average (40% higher than a decade ago). Gen Z-ers, proud members of the “toolbelt generation,” want skills they can sell. Fifty years ago, most college students majored in either education, history, or some form of social science. Today? It’s economics, government, and computer science (the top majors at Harvard for the fifth straight year). Even if you don’t end up working in any of those fields, studying them will help you speak the lingua franca of tech, and thus get a job. The number of English and history majors nationwide has dropped by about a third over the last decade.

What’s interesting to me, though, is how culture’s obsession with humanities hasn’t fallen off… it’s just migrated. Subjects like history and literary criticism are content now, Hook argues. “I’m sure there are ways to monetize [my expertise as a Classicist] on YouTube or TikTok,” he writes, ”but that’s not education,” it’s entertainment.

Elsewhere on Medium…

• Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube who lent her garage to the founders of Google way back in 1998, died on Friday. Hunter Walk, Wojcicki’s direct report and protege, remembers her as an advocate who saw leadership potential in him before he saw it in himself.
• Nanie Hurley draws whimsical cartoons for her daughter every morning to stave off separation anxiety: “If you have a toddler who hates going to school… you might want to try the ‘one picture a day to keep the tantrums away’ idea. It worked for us.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about perfection

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Gonzalo Ortiz, for the correct answer of: Melissa DePuyt’s Washington Post ID badge from her article, “Think Like a Journalist.”

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

A Classics professor on the decline of the humanities was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.