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 42,000 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.

The internet is broken. Fixing it won’t be free.

This is an ode to paying to get what you want, an explanation of how Medium’s membership makes a uniquely better home on the internet, and a call to join Medium as a member. Membership is 20% off during our summer membership campaign.

The internet is broken and getting worse. It’s flooded with ads, spam, misinformation, disinformation, division, and hate.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a healthy way to talk to each other that inspires, informs, empowers, and brings people together.

At Medium, we say our purpose is to “deepen your understanding of the world.”

That’s why this moment on the internet feels even more urgent than normal. Even before Google used AI to tell us to put more glue on our pizza (really!), search results were already flooded with content that was written by or for machines, not humans.

It costs money to run a website, so publishers and platforms tried to pay for their business with ads.

It’s easy to name a root cause — ads reward any content that can grab your attention long enough to show you yet another ad, and the more the better.

Now we have decades of proof that attention-grabbing isn’t the same as good. Instead of the information superhighway that we were promised, ads gave us an internet where almost all incentives are to create cheap, high-volume, low-quality content designed to get as many eyeballs as possible.

If we want to build a better internet, we have to build different types of incentive models. That’s what we’re doing at Medium.

Everything Medium does is paid for by our members, not advertising. We’re not trying to manipulate your attention to show you more ads. Instead, we care about a much harder challenge: How can we show you a story that you will be happy to have paid to read?

We’re biased, but we believe more places on the internet should be directly funded by their users. That results in honest incentives for those platforms to simply give as much value as possible to their community (you), so the community sticks around and keeps paying.

And since Medium is free to use, this value extends beyond the Medium member community. Those who can afford to pay for a Medium membership are creating a better internet for everyone.

Think about the current state of the internet. Now, imagine how much it improves when you get the incentives right.

Imagine a place that:

• Respects your time, free from ads and spam
• Recommends the most informed writers, not the loudest
• Protects you from a deluge of spam, fraud, and AI-generated content
• Promotes deeper understanding, not misunderstanding or division
• Rewards writers to do even more of the hard work of researching and articulating their ideas and knowledge.

Medium is one of those places. Here’s how our members are helping us build it.

#1. We are building a place that respects your time, free from ads

We already know that ads cause a broken business model with misaligned incentives. Publishers get paid for your attention, rather than the value they provide, so they want to publish clickbait, doombait, rage bait, all the baits — all to show you more ads. Readers, meanwhile, just want to read a good story.

We realigned incentives by removing ads. You want to read something good and interesting, and because you’re paying for it, we want that for you, too.

At Medium, we don’t show ads at all. As a result, Medium lets you focus on the story.

#2. We are building a place that recommends the best writers, not the loudest ones

Platforms have tried to replace authority with attention-based algorithms on the flawed theory that if it’s popular, it must be good. This has failed spectacularly to deepen our understanding of anything.

On Medium, we’ve often found that the most informed writers rarely have the time, or desire, to learn to play attention-grabbing games that other algorithms reward. So we focus on creating a platform where they don’t need to master SEO or build audiences. These skills shouldn’t be a requirement for being heard.

The voices who get pushed off the internet right now are very often the ones most worth reading. Our curation system uses subject-matter experts to spot the good stuff for you.

#3. We protect you from a deluge of spam, fraud, and AI-generated content

You’ve probably seen how bad AI-generated content can be. But you might not realize how much AI has lowered the price of creating spam.

Last year, Medium deleted and removed one million spam posts from your feeds every month. Last month we removed nearly ten million. That’s a deluge of digitally-assembled nonsense that is hitting every part of the internet. (On other platforms, spam can sometimes masquerade as yet another way to grab your attention long enough to show you an ad.)

For the most part, readers on Medium don’t see this spam wave because it’s filtered out by our engineers, our trust and safety team, our curators, and our community publication editors.

That’s a lot of work. We do more of it than other platforms simply because our members demand it.

#4. We promote deeper understanding, not misunderstanding or division

Curators on Medium focus on a set of quality guidelines to find writing that actually deepens your understanding.

There are a lot of ways for a writer to have the credibility we’re looking for, but mainly a writer earns it through deep thought, research, professional experience, and/or personal experience.

Your experience on Medium is improved by two processes here. First, we find the stories that reach this high bar and show them to you. Second, we work hard to push lazy hateful hot takes and intentionally divisive trolling completely off the site. The internet is vast and there are other places for trolls to troll.

Our preference for deeper, more compelling writing means that these guidelines are anti-partisan. Information doesn’t get better just because it has fans inside one political party. The best way to learn, and to find common ground, is to have a high bar for discussion. Anyone, regardless of political party, can come to Medium to deepen their understanding of the world.

#5. We reward writers to do the hard work of researching and articulating their ideas and knowledge

Writing is hard no matter what. But great writing requires more hard work: more research, more feedback, more revisions, more effort.

One of the hallmarks of the attention economy is that platforms incentivize content creators to make content as quickly as possible. That’s why we see so many writers outsource, copy, and use thinly-veiled plagiarism. Now they turn to AI generators, too.

But knowledge isn’t just content, and stories don’t resonate without a human voice behind them. We communicate with each other through stories because that’s the most effective way to learn and retain knowledge. To write those stories well takes time.

Medium rewards writers who put in extra work. As a result, readers enjoy a platform full of thoughtful, well-written human stories and ideas.

Look, we know Medium didn’t invent the paywall. You’ve seen them in other places that care about deepening your understanding.

But we are doing something unique and innovative. We are the only user-generated content platform that uses subscription incentives and opens those incentives up to writers. We’re proving that it changes which writers and stories succeed.

I don’t have any illusion that Medium will replace the internet. But I do think a healthier internet requires places like Medium — places that are building systems that help people spend their time and money in thoughtful ways — to exist.

If you’re like us, if you’re curious, if you’re hungry to deepen your understanding of your world, if you think we can do better than the current standard of how the internet works, then now is an important time to invest in yourself and us.

Join more than one million members to support a better place on the internet. Membership is 20% off during our summer membership campaign, now until August 17.

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

Yesterday we had 999,268 members. Today we have 1,000,275.

We’d debated making a fuss about the million member milestone, then backed off because it seemed a little artificial. Our real work is making Medium better for all of you. There are piles and piles of that real work.

But then as we got closer to a million members, everyone who works at the company started tracking our progress. Our internal member tracker updates every hour, and when we logged on this morning, it had ticked over past a million to 1,000,275.

This milestone feels good. That’s what I want to share. Whether we always get it right, the people who work at Medium work here because they care. I’ve never been with a group of people who cared more about doing something good on the Internet.

There is a moment in our not-so-distant past where a million members seemed impossible. So for us, we’re feeling some combination of relief and disbelief: “Wow, this really just happened?”

But on top of that feeling is a bigger feeling of gratitude to the writers here. A million people paid to read your writing. That proves that there is value in your authentic, passionate words. Without you sharing your experiences, expertise, creativity, and ideas, there just wouldn’t be any such thing as Medium.

Supporting the writers are thousands of publication editors who cheer, advise, edit, and curate. Together, you produce the writing that draws in all these members. Thank you to both, our writers and editors.

And to every Medium member: Thank you for being a part of this community. We’re so glad you’re here.

Thank you for one million members was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Tuesday, March 19, we hosted our very first Pub Crawl, a 24-hour virtual meetup that connected Medium writers with Medium publication editors. Below is a lightly-edited transcript of my keynote remarks — slides and all.

Hello, welcome to Medium’s first ever Pub Crawl event. I’m Tony Stubblebine. I’m the CEO here at Medium.

The purpose of today is to connect writers to publications.

The vast majority of what I’m about to talk to you about today is aimed at answering a question for writers, “Why should you work with Medium publications?”

Thematically, the answer is going to circle around one answer. Publications help you find readers.

There are a thousand places you could publish online. But the reason to come to Medium is because we have built a system, led by Medium publications, that helps you find readers.

As I talk today, I hope you can be open to thinking about the difference between Medium bringing you lots of readers and Medium bringing you the right readers. Publications are doing both. They are the force that helps stories go viral, and they are the connecting glue between your writing and the readers who most want to read it.

I’m going to start with a story about how Medium connects readers to writers.

I’ve put on screen a post from a writer, Sivan Hermon. Her post is about a decision point that a lot of people reach in their career: Should you become a manager or not? I’m using this post as an example because it’s great, and also because it got a lot of readers. There’s been 41,000 total, so far.

I want to tell you the backstory of where those views came from.

Sivan is a leadership coach who has worked at Google and has an MBA from Columbia. So she is writing from a place of both experience and expertise.

In the past, she has written for several different publications on Medium, but recently has been submitting a lot of her pieces to a publication called Code Like A Girl. This is a great publication that’s been active on Medium for a long time.

The editor for this publication is Dinah Davis (She/Her). Just so that we are all clear, this is Dinah’s publication. She doesn’t work for Medium; rather, she’s part of the community, just like the writers and readers are.

Dinah is also one of the subject matter experts who nominate for Medium’s Boost program. The Boost is for bringing readers to the best of the best of Medium. It’s one of — but not the only way — Medium brings readers to writers.

We rely on Dinah as one of the nominators in the Boost program because she knows a lot about her subject. That comes both because of experience as a practitioner and because of experience as a long-time publisher here on Medium.

So when Dinah read Sivan’s post she thought it met the bar for being Boosted. I’m going to show you a part of the Boost program that most people have never seen. The point of the Boost is to help make Medium a place where substance is more important than attention. As a result we put a lot of thought into getting every Boost decision right.

The part that most of you have never seen is that when something is nominated for a Boost, that nomination includes a note about the nominator’s thought process. The note explains why a piece is meaningful, important, and helpful.

This is an important internal artifact about how thoughtful Medium recommendations are and how they actually work.

Here’s how Dinah described the importance of this piece when she nominated it. She said:

This article is a fantastic look at figuring out if you should move from an individual contributor role to a management role. Most people assume that is the right career step, when in many cases it isn’t. I love this author’s set of questions to ask yourself to figure out if it really is for you or not.

So that’s Dinah making the case for why this is an important story for people to read. Our curators agreed, and after submitting that nomination, our curators Boosted the story.

The readers for this story didn’t come out of nowhere. Rather, they come as a result of the curation and care of a publication editor. This story had zero views when Dinah first curated it. Now it has 41,000.

Medium helps writers find readers.

There is a lot that Medium does differently and that’s because we take our mission seriously. Real stories deepen people’s understanding of the world.

The key words in our mission are deepen understanding.

In order to achieve this mission we have to encourage you to share true, authentic experiences and expertise. Every one of you has a story to tell — many of them, in fact.

Then we, at Medium, need to build a system that connects your experience and expertise to a reader that needs to hear it. When our system works, your life experiences transfer to the reader and the world is smarter and wiser as a result. This is what I would call a worthy goal. This is why we come to work.

That system we’ve built is a system of humans working together. There are writers and readers, and today we are shining a light on publication editors. Doing this right takes all of us.

What’s special about Medium in this moment in history is that our system puts humans and substance first. When you build your system around machines, people end up writing for machines. When you build your system around humans, people write for humans. Medium is a place for humans.

Right now, that means we are an antidote to AI content. Humans spot it instantly, and we are doing everything possible to reject it so that Medium can remain a place for your human stories.

And also, it’s within our mission to be an antidote to the clickbait and cheap content of the attention economy. When we’re judging an article, we don’t claim victory when someone clicks on your story. We claim victory when someone reads deeply and their understanding of the world changes for the better.

This mission requires a massive effort.

Every month, Medium recommends your stories eight billion times. We do that through email, through the For You feed, through read more sections, through our list feature. The Boost is an important vehicle for recommendations but it’s not the only one. We definitely aren’t Boost or Bust.

Out of all those recommendations, 45% of what people read was published in a publication like the ones we are talking about today. Publications are the curators here. They aren’t promoters, they’re curators. We’ve built a recommendation system that trusts their curation.

This massive scale of recommendations is backed by a lot of human effort. In the same way that you write with passion, publication editors curate with passion. They are constantly looking to find the right story for their readers.

Last month, 9,000 publication editors were active on Medium. These people edited across 4,500 publications and their work helped 82,000 stories find the right readers.

We’re not going to meet all 9,000 editors today but there are more than a hundred here at the event that you could meet. I hope that today inspires you to find one or more publications to write for.

There are publications for new writers.

There are publications for all sorts of writers and so I’m going to start with a type we’ve all been: new writers.

There are many publications on Medium specialize in welcoming new writers and helping them get started.

One of those publications has the, I think you’ll agree, has the perfect name. It’s called New Writers Welcome. Robin Wilding 💎 is one of the many editors for the very, very, aptly named publication.

Here’s how she described their purpose:

“The pub was created as a soft place to land for new writers. When people begin on Medium, they can feel a little lost, and some of the top-notch publications on this platform may feel intimidating for newbies.”

This word intimidating stood out to me. Yes, sometimes writing is hard, it can be competitive, it can require weeks of research and revision.

But sometimes you just want to write, to get an idea out of your head or to exercise your writing muscle. This is what’s so great about blogging. Sometimes you just write to write.

So the good news is that wherever you are in your writing journey, there are publications on Medium that want to hear from you. That’s true even if you are a brand new writer.

Find a publication that matches your topic

Most writers, though, look for publications that have a focus that matches the experience or expertise that they are writing about.

If you are a geologist writing about geology, then find a geology publication.

Here’s how Eric Pierce who is the editor of the Fanfare publication views it:

A great publication is a signal: it says this is the good stuff. I’ve found tons of amazing writers simply because they publish at a publication that I like.

As you look for a publication, I want to make the case for finding small, focused publications to write for. You might think the biggest publications deliver the most readers. But this is not actually true. Our recommendation algorithms factor in affinity as much as they do number of followers. So a small publication with a loyal readership will often deliver as many readers as the largest publications here.

For a lot of writers, affinity is what you are after anyways. A thousand anonymous readers aren’t worth nearly as much as a comment from one reader telling you that your writing changed their life.

This is the thing that I asked you to be open to. Medium can bring you a lot of readers. But also, Medium wants to bring you the right readers, and most times that’s more important.

This is especially true for a category of writers who write on Medium to advance their career. This could be coaches, it could be consultants, it could be all sorts of professionals. If you are writing about your professional experience then the most valuable thing Medium can do is bring you the right reader who will hire you for a consulting contract or hire you for a job.

Whatever you may have heard about the creator economy as a way to grind out a living, I assure you that other writers are having more fun and making more money by writing for the expert economy. The writers who make the most on Medium are using writing to build and demonstrate expertise. Period. It’s not even close.

I’ve seen people land multiple half-million dollar consulting contracts. I’ve seen them go from unknown personal trainer to trainer of the Hollywood stars. I’ve seen them land VP-level jobs. One time, I even saw a writer here get promoted to CEO.

I want you to trust that Medium is a place where you can write what is authentic to you. We are a home to so many different interests. Let’s face it, Medium readers are curious and multi-dimensional.

Last month, publications published stories in across 33,000 different topics. That’s how broadly interesting and broadly curious our community is.

And if you’re wondering about the boost, then yes, we’ve Boosted on 28,000 of those topics which says that we are confident that there are readers for every single one of those topics.

That means as a writer, you should feel confident writing what you want to write about, what you know about, what’s important to you — rather than wondering what’s popular. Be yourself; your writing is going to better for it.

Publications level up your writing, which, you guessed it, helps bring in readers.

Most publications give some form of guidance and suggestions. Look, I’m a writer and so I know the writer ego. Sometimes we don’t want guidance and suggestions.

But when we do want to level up as a writer, publication editors help. Even just the act of accepting or rejecting your submission to their publication is a helpful signal about what level of writing you should shoot for.

Editors also give their guidance in their style guide. Those style guides almost always capture important lessons about what sort of writing will connect with readers.

Many publication editors give their guidance directly after reading your pieces. A writer, Brent R. Stockwell, Ph.D., told us that getting feedback from his editor made him a better writer and for him that was actually the best part of writing on Medium.

“Probably the most important thing I’ve gotten from Medium is becoming a better writer.”

It was simple stuff, to take into account readers who aren’t ready to read the whole thing. And in that case, put the interesting stuff up front and give a short summary of the main findings near the top of the story — this is what the editor had learned through experience.

To give credit, the editor that he was working with was Robert Roy Britt from the Wise & Well publication. The reason editors like Rob give advice like this is because they know from experience what connects with readers and what doesn’t. Their experience is worth leaning on, and it’s a big part of how you can level up here as a writer.

That level-up is yet another way that editors and writers work together to reach readers.

Publications Boost your writing to even more readers.

Last, I want to talk about our Boost program. We introduced this program last year as a way to add human expertise as a signal in our recommendation algorithm.

We are the only platform that does this, and that’s because of our mission. Everything about us believes that substance is more important than attention.

Since we’ve launched the Boost, readers have definitely noticed the change in quality of what they read on Medium.

I’m going to sneak in a Medium business update here, because it’s good news. Before the Boost we were losing subscribers every month. At our darkest moment, we’d shrunk to 680k subscribers. But the Boost turned that around and today there are 990k members — knocking on the door of a million members — who pay to read writing like yours. What we’ve learned is that readers pay for quality, and the Boost is one of the ways we’ve delivered that.

We’re even knocking on the door of being a profitable company.

In case it’s not obvious, a healthy Medium is also good for writers. More subscribers means more readers for you, more money in the Partner Program, and, most importantly, that you can count on us. The direction we are going works and the work we are all doing together, as Medium, as writers, as readers, and as editors, it matters.

Given how well the Boost works, you can count on us to keep expanding it. Over and over today, I’ve given examples of the incredible scale of Medium. We make 8 billion recommendations. The community has 9,000 editors. Publications span 32,000 topics each month.

In comparison, the Boost program is still relatively small.

The way we’ve designed the system is to have publications act as nominators. Those nominations then go to an internal curation team here at Medium.

This combination of humans in the loop provides a mix of subject matter understanding and high standards. After a story passes through both of those steps, Boosted stories go to our algorithm. Unlike most platforms, our algorithm only acts as a matchmaker, not as a judge of quality.

In our Boost system right now, we currently have 110 publications acting as nominators. That leaves gaps and our internal curation team currently fills those in by looking for stories that aren’t in that set of publications. But long term, and I don’t want to put exact dates on what long term means, we will continue expanding the number of publication editors in the Boost program.

As a writer, this doesn’t mean that you have to publish in those publications. There are lots of ways to find the right readers for your writing. And not all writing is even meant to be Boosted. I certainly write plenty of silly stuff that I don’t want shared across all of Medium. But that writing is how I keep my writing muscle strong. It’s about finding the right publication for the piece you’re working on right now.

Find a publication to write for so that you can find your readers.

So far I’ve talked mostly to writers. But we have to end with some words of appreciation for publication editors. You are the heartbeat of this community. Your passion for connecting smart writing to the right readers is admirable. And you’ve done this even when Medium wasn’t supporting you. Before I was CEO here, I was in your shoes running publications, so I remember what that felt like.

I just want to underline for you: You have our full support. We understand what you do and how important it is to the community.

If you’re a publication editor, hopefully you see today as an appreciation for how much you matter, and that by the work we’re doing to connect more writers to you, that we’ve done something helpful for you.

Thank you to all the editors.

My keynote talk for Medium Pub Crawl was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is just a thought that I was sharing with some coworkers, lightly edited to work as a blog post rather than a message to people I work with.

I was thinking about the 49ers (American) Football Team as a long lived organization because Medium is also a long lived organization. I have to clarify “(American) Football Team” out of respect for our international, soccer loving teammates and also out of respect for Dan in engineering.

The 49ers had a golden era in the ’80s and ’90s, followed by a tough stretch. Now they are a strong organization again, but finding out how hard it is to get over the hump. If you aren’t a football fan, what I’m saying is that they won five Super Bowls in that golden era, and then in the last ten years have lost three. That’s good, right? Losing a Super Bowl is a lot better than not making the playoffs.

But if you looked at their faces over the weekend you could see how frustrated they were.

Medium is in a similar boat. We had a great start, then had a rough period, and we’ve turned it around and are entering our new golden era. I’m not going to make this about “but we’ve still got a lot of improvements to make” although that’s true.

Instead, I wanted to call out something that people seem to undervalue: being good at regular stuff. I think regular things matter, like agreeing on one tool for our documents or, and this is embarrassing, having the owner of our bank account be someone who still works here.

This is what Luke Millar pointed out in his 1% better talk about the British Cycling team. A lot of people are looking for big, magical improvements, but you can do a lot with the concept of aggregating marginal gains.

The 49ers were in the Super Bowl in large part because of their quarterback. He has been a surprise to everyone. His name is Brock Purdy and he was the last pick in the draft, which means every other team thought there were a lot better players to pick from.

Then he joined the 49ers as the third string quarterback which means his own team thought they had two better players than him at his own position.

Now that he’s turned out to be very good, even a candidate for MVP, people are wondering why.

The consensus answer is so basic: Brock makes good decisions quickly and has good footwork. It turns out the coaches and general managers in the league overlooked “makes good decisions” in favor of runs fast, throws the ball far.

I think that comes from a place of fear. If you aren’t confident in your plan then you hope for some magical savior to overcome your failings. In football, that’s a quarterback who can run when the play breaks down and he can’t find a place to pass. (Counterintuitively, Brock can also run which implies it has to do more with decision making and footwork than with raw speed).

In short, Brock being great at basics makes him great at his job. There’s nothing impressive or magical about him. He’s just relentlessly good at regular things.

To take this out of sports comparisons, I was in a convo at one of our local coworking days about the reality TV fashion design competition show Project Runway.

There’s a similar story about being good at the details. People seemed to agree that Christian Siriano is by far the best contestant of the entire series.

I once nearly jumped out of a moving car to go accost him on the street because I’m such a fan. As a fan, my fan theory is that the reason he’s so great is because he’s so good at the basics.

It’s a trope in the show that the other designers are pressed for time and have to literally tape their clothing to their models before the runway shows.

Meanwhile, Christian was always done early because he was great at the basics of measuring, cutting and sewing clothes. As a result, his innate talent and creativity was able to shine. (Fierce!)

Well, why am I sharing this? One is that I just wanted to put it out there that I would talk to any of you about how much I love Christian Siriano.

But the other is cultural. We live in a moment that is seemingly dominated by big personalities making bold claims at the expense of, you know, being good at their job. Does that mean hubris can replace competence? It would be nice if that were true because spewing bullshit sounds a lot easier than spending years mastering mundane details. Some of you might be thinking about Musk. But I’m thinking about that guy asking for 7 Trillion Dollars to fund his company.

The thing about “that guy” is that he’d a few months earlier been temporarily ousted from his own company in what can only be described as a train wreck of clown cars.

It was hard to look at those stories of obvious mediocrity, with confused messaging, terrible internal communication, and a seemingly plausible chance of squandering billions of dollars and square it with the fact that these leaders lead a very important and successful company.

It grates on me.

And so if there’s one story that I might be able to tell as I do my current job, it’s that it is ok to aspire to both big ideas and mastery. Try to have big ideas and try to be great at the details.

Medium itself is two big ideas. One is old, that it’s worthwhile to hear from everyone. The other is new(ish) and it’s that the attention economy sucks and we should charge a subscription so that we are incentivized to provide quality instead. But that wasn’t enough to make a successful product or business. It required these two big ideas and then also several thousand detailed improvements (so far).

What it took to achieve second place

The 1996 San Francisco All-City Championships was my last chance for greatness.

I spent most of high school as a mediocre two-sport athlete. For the winter season, I was an under-sized and under-skilled basketball player. For the fall and spring seasons, I was a pretty slow long distance runner.

Before my senior year, I decided my only chance at greatness was to focus on one sport. I chose running.

An important factor to this story is that I was running in the public school district of San Francisco.

The rest of the country is dotted with great coaches and districts. For example, I have a friend who ran for legendary high school coach Joe Newton. Coach Newton recruits kids out of freshman PE class with the promise that their first day of cross country practice will consist of merely 90 seconds of running.

Then over the course of four years, Newton’s runners build on that first day of practice, which for most people would cover 1/4 of a mile, to the point where most varsity runners are logging more than 100 miles per week. His team, the York Dukes arrives at the Illinois State Meet each year in limos, followed by the school marching band, in order to absolutely destroy the competition.

In comparison, the coaching philosophy in the San Francisco public school district was a bit more lax.

Not a single coach of any of the dozen high schools encouraged significant running in between the cross country and track seasons. As a result, the vast majority of participants lost all their fitness between seasons and never built a base that would allow them to run more than 30 miles in a week.

Consistent training was the key to success in the San Francisco district, but in order to get it you had to become your own coach.

For the summer before my senior year, I put myself to a strict regimen of 40-mile weeks with a long run of 10 miles and a single hard workout of hill repeats.

Many of my teammates, and possibly my coach, thought I was crazy and going to hurt myself.

Serious training in the off-season was definitely against the team culture.

Come cross country season, I could see the benefits of my first off-season training. I knocked two minutes from my 5k time and qualified, along with the rest of my team, for the state cross country meet.

By California standards, the San Francisco public schools are one of the two weakest districts in the state, matched in futility only by the Oakland public schools.

In California, each district sends at least one team to the State Cross Country Championships. So San Francisco was guaranteed to send a team, no matter the quality. That’s how I made it to State.

At the State Meet, I beat three of my teammates and two kids from Oakland, while losing to 182 other kids. (The following year, the team from the Oakland district managed to complete a reverse perfect score, with all seven of their runners finishing behind the entire field.)

I mention the strengths of various districts as a way of explaining that my quest to make a name for myself off of just a single season of training would have been unreasonable folly in most districts, but was in fact a very reasonable goal in San Francisco.

To my benefit, I kept my off-season training up in between the cross country season and track.

Our track season had two components. On weekends we’d travel to invitationals around the Bay Area where we’d compete against really good runners. On Thursdays, we’d compete against other high schools in our district, mostly full of not-very-good runners. These district competitions culminated in our final race of the year, the All-City Championships.

During the invitationals, I dropped my personal best times in the 1600m from 5:13 to 4:46 and in the 3200m from 12:03 to 10:29.

A year of training had done a lot for me.

At the All-City Championships, my coach entered me in the 3200m. In California, we often refer to this as a two-mile race, but to be specific it’s 18 meters shorter than two miles.

At this point, after making what high-school-me considered the grand decision to dedicate myself to running, I was still looking for the final payoff.

Improved times and a near-last-place finish at the State Cross Country meet hadn’t quite justified my investment. I needed to stand on a podium.

Before the meet everyone sees the rankings for the entrants. Here’s how it looked for my event.

Bolota Asmerom from our rival school McAteer was ranked first. He’d run a nation-leading time of 9:03. I was ranked second at 10:29, more than a lap slower than Bolota. Then two of my teammates, Ed and Sanders, and one more kid from Balboa High School were ranked 3-5 with near identical 11:05 seed times.

There’s a win-at-all-costs mindset in some parts of America. But in general, distance runners approach racing as about optimizing the allocation of their energy. Even pacing is best. Running the first part of a race too fast and then struggling to the finish line is a disaster.

I had personally seen Bolota sprint the last lap of a 2-mile race faster than I could run a single lap rested. Bolota was a massive outlier for the city.

In the race that I’m about to describe, I saw Bolota at the starting line and then not a single time afterward. He went on to win this race, to run for Cal Berkeley, to get a shoe contract from Nike, and to twice come within inches of making the US Olympic team.

I wasn’t under any illusion that I was going to hang with him and then surprise him with a gutsy kick at the end. My goal was second place.

Based on the rankings and my knowledge of the other runners, I seemed to have 2nd place locked up. I hadn’t lost to either of my teammates all season and the 36-second gap in our qualifying times was quite large.

I’d seen enough of San Francisco racing to predict the early part of the race. Bolota would go out at a pace that was easy for him but too fast for any of us. Then, for some unknowable reason, every runner from the other schools would try to stick with him, and then blow up during the second half of the race.

In response, my strategy was to run as evenly as possible with the dual expectation that: 1) Bolota would win and 2) everyone else would go out fast and fade.

Sure enough, at the end of the first lap, Bolota was in first place and every runner from the other high schools was trying to keep pace with him. My two teammates and I were in last place. I was executing my plan to perfection.

I hadn’t discussed strategy with my teammates, Ed and Sanders, because the strategy seemed so obvious. We would run even splits and they would stay behind me conserving energy against the wind. I would finish second and then they would fight it out for third.

On lap two, I wished that Ed and I had confirmed that plan. For some reason, he wanted to be in front of me. I firmly, and in my mind generously, moved back ahead of him. How was he going to finish third if he wasted energy trying to run faster than me?

On lap three we were still in last place and were receiving the kind of cheering from our teammates that any slow runner will recognize. Track teammates are loyal, but not exactly inspired by the slowest runners. This comes out in the cheering, “Great job! You can finish!”

This is the problem with even pacing in the San Francisco district. To spectators, it’s hard to fathom how badly the front of the race has misallocated their effort. The cost of running efficiently is a few laps of pity claps.

But I was absolutely positive that our plan was solid and could already see the rest of the runners coming back to us.

On laps four and five, we passed every other runner except Bolota. The race was panning out exactly as planned. Bolota was in first, out of sight and hopefully not running so fast that he would lap us. I was in second. My teammates Ed and Sanders were in third and fourth.

Lap six was as breezy as these things can get. I would like to stress that distance running is hard. In the final quarter of a race you’ve depleted most of your energy and have already been in pain for quite a while. I had been pacing my teammates at basically my maximum effort and I felt appropriately terrible.

At the beginning of lap seven, Ed charged past me.

The beginning of a distance race has no room for heroics. But the end of a race actually has plenty of heroic opportunities.

Ed surged into this seventh lap much faster than I wanted to run. It was pretty obvious that the speed change was directed at me and that he intended to break my will at a moment when I was in a lot of pain. Track is both a team and an individual sport. So good for him for attacking.

Ed’s lap seven surge was bad news for me. I was at the edge of my capabilities and had to make a decision. Would I stick to my own pace and hope for the best or match Ed’s pace for some unknown length of time? I thought I was faster than him, but you never know. Maybe his surge was going to continue all the way to the finish line.

I gathered some courage (as much as I’d ever had to gather at that point in my life), matched Ed, and tucked in behind him. I doubted I could keep that pace to the finish line, but was hoping he couldn’t either.

I still remember that decision as digging into a level of pain that I hadn’t ever experienced except in the last few meters of a race.

As we approached the start of lap eight, the final lap of the race, I wondered if Ed had anything left. Most runners would start their kick, a finishing burst of speed, at the start of this lap. If Ed had energy for a kick, I would be toast.

But he didn’t and I did. Part of the hell of the seventh lap had been the surprise of it, followed by the uncertainty about how hard it would get. In comparison, the eighth lap is emotionally simple: you give as much as you can no matter what.

I started my kick at the beginning of lap eight. Passing Ed was easy. He’d put all of his energy into the gamble of breaking me in lap seven. In a few steps I was around him and I could tell that he didn’t have the energy to stick with me. Sanders? He was a casualty of Ed’s earlier surge.

Lap after lap of consistent running had placed me exactly where I wanted to be. I was in second place, sprinting toward my first podium.

Some of my teammates had stationed themselves at the back corner of the track. This is the 200m mark. Once you pass them you have a single 100m curve followed by a 100m straight away.

This is a nice place for fans because there’s less of a crowd and the passing runners can actually hear you. Here’s what my teammates were saying to me, “You have to go now! You have to go right now!”

The key part of that phrase is “have to.” Normally your teammates assume you’re giving your best and say things like “Great job” or “Keep it up.”

They only say “have to” when something bad is about to happen to you. What they really mean is, “Someone is running very fast behind you. I hope you’ve been sandbagging and secretly have enough energy to speed up.”

It’s the cheer of last resort.

Sure enough, just as I approached the final bend, the Balboa kid came sprinting past me. He had been ranked with a similar time to Ed and Sanders and had run a classic San Francisco race.

Untrained and barely tested, his season best didn’t represent how fast he could actually run a two-mile. Then, inexperienced, he’d run one of the worst-paced races of all time. His first two laps were too fast as he tried to keep up with Bolota, his middle four laps were slow and fading. We’d passed him easily. But then his final lap was suddenly full of energy.

And now he was my problem. I think that distance runners have a gear which they call all-out-effort. Once you’ve decided to use that gear there’s nothing else you can call on.

That’s the danger of the “have to go now” cheer from my teammates. It invites the runner to switch to the all-out-effort gear without actually knowing how to measure what remains.

Thankfully I had a little bit of patience. I knew the cheer was bad news, but I waited until the Balboa kid passed me to see how much faster I actually needed to go.

The answer was bad. Compared to the digging I did in lap seven the pain of matching the Balboa kid was unbearable. But I was supposed to finish second. I’d dedicated myself for this moment. And I just couldn’t stand to let someone take it away from me.

I tucked in behind the Balboa kid and let him lead me around the final bend and into the finishing straightaway. It sucked. But I was right there and he’d put everything he had into passing me.

With half of the straightaway remaining, I came around him. This was my all-out effort. According to the finishing pictures, I beat him by 10 feet.

It’s the proudest I’ve ever been about a race simply because it was the first time I’d ever really worked for something. On paper, I’d done what the rankings said I should do. But the reality is that my teammate and the Balboa kid had pushed me to my limit.

I did get to be with the winner, Bolota, two more times. Once on the podium and once more in the next day’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

My heroics and best race ever had been succinctly summarized on the front page of the sports section as:

The only way runner-up Tony Stubblebine could have made contact with the winner would have been by satellite up-link.

Later in life I found myself latching onto a phrase, “Success is more work than you want, but less than you fear.”

I have no idea what work it took for Bolota to whip us so thoroughly. Obviously, years of dedication went into it, and then a decade more of dedication to compete at the professional level.

But for me, all my personal goal took was a year of focused effort and a few minutes of intense pain. At that point in my life it was the most work I’d ever put toward anything. But really, a year is not an impossible amount of work. It’s just that most of us (myself included) are too afraid to invest that level of effort.

My Best Race Ever was originally published in Runner's Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Per usual, I’m late on finishing this gratitude practice. What happens is that I keep a draft over the course of the year and then it takes me awhile to finalize.

I’d started doing these in 2007 as a check against the stress I was feeling as a dirt-poor first-time entrepreneur. I was worried about the opportunity cost of leaving my job and thought that if I couldn’t find at least 52 highlights from the year then I was making a career mistake. This year, all the sacrifices (mainly uncertainty and pay cuts) suddenly came together as me being the perfect candidate for my dream job. It only took 15.5 years!

Here are my prior lists:
2021, 2020, 2015–2019, 2013–15, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

This was a wild year, work wise. I had gotten it into my head that I was going to enter a stage of half-retired solo-creator and spend the rest of my days researching and writing an encyclopedia of wisdom, taking the Codex Vitae concept and just making it a way of life. This idea was fueled in a big way from Michael Bungay Stanier’s concept of worthy goals from his book How to Begin. I wanted to work less, but still work on something big.

But then I found out the top job at Medium was available, started lobbying hard for it, and got it. It has a stark side effect: I went from half-employed to extremely over employed.

The Before Medium Time

I’m sure I worked on a lot of things early in the year because I had a coaching business, a coach training business, and three publications. But I was also looking to transition and so the work that stood out as good things were related to that.

1. Started organizing my writing into a Codex (now offline).

2. Wrote 132 newsletters. Focused my daily newsletter as a way to research my Codex. Honestly, this would have been a nice life: research and publish, and build up an encyclopedia of knowledge that would at least be useful to me. All while traveling and being free of management hassles. Alas.

The Journey to Medium

Here is, basically, how I got the top job at Medium.

3. The Conversation. I sniffed out that something was up with Medium on, I think, a Thursday. So I got Ev on the phone and got to the root of the problem. People were feeling like the execution required for Medium to succeed was overwhelming. I disagreed, and asked for an opportunity to make the argument that it could be done and that I was the person to do it.

4. Fly to Puerto Rico. The only caveat to pitching is that I’d promised Sarah a work-free, do-nothing-but-read, sit-by-the-pool vacation. We had that vacation, in a resort in San Juan, and I did sit by the pool. But even if I didn’t have my laptop, I spent a lot of time working out my argument in my head.

5. The Memo. I actually wrote a bunch of memos, but the first was about how distribution and payment incentives needed to change and why. That Memo was published, unlisted, on Medium on May 2nd. After getting the job, we changed distribution on Febuary 21st, 2023 and incentives on August 1st, 2023. Saying they needed to change is one thing, making the change was actually a lot of work.

6. The Interviews. Once I got Ev (Medium’s founding CEO) on board with the idea of stepping down, he started a real interview process with a bunch of candidates, including me. My favorite interview moment was a board member asking what big ideas I had to save the company and how firmly I told him that his question represented everything wrong with the company. Medium is great, it just needed focus. (And in hindsight a small pivot and some innovation)

7. The Drive. There was a small window between accepting the job and starting. The thing I did with that time was drive my RV to Arizona and then park it in long term storage. So the journey to Medium was literally a journey of 2,400 miles.

8. Kansas. On the drive, somehow multiple people that I was trying to visit came down with COVID (or don’t like me). So I ended up doing a detour to Kansas and having a really spectacularly straight and flat bike ride down a rail trail. It was everything I expected of Kansas (as someone who spent a lot of time in Iowa).

9. The Eisenhower Library. This was the best stop in Kansas and I’m still blown away by the scale of technological change during Eisenhower’s life. His career spanned dirt roads to high ways to nuclear power to the space race. It’s like how I was born in a time of only network TV and lived to see NFTs and TikToks.

10. Herzog. He had been head of design at Medium, but before that was a Lift/Coach.me person of interest. He’s one of my favorite people ever and just happened to be passing through Flagstaff at the same time as me. We had brunch at the Toasted Owl. He was part of a huge group of friends who helped me before I started.

11. On July 12th, I was announced as the CEO of Medium. Here is my Introductory post.

The Turnaround.

Medium was wasting money and losing money (those are related, but different), was well off its mission of deepening people’s understanding of the world, and was losing subscribers. The community was demoralized, and it seems like a lot of the staff was too. Most of the turnaround work happened in 2022, although most of the results came in 2023.

12. Medium Leadership Retreat. I gathered a pretty big group of people for a retreat in San Francisco and that has now become a happy memory because it represents how far we’ve come. We were all strangers to each other and now we’ve been through a really interesting journey together.

13. Greg Pass. Part of the turnaround was getting people to embrace the reality of incrementalism. We’d flailed for a bit chasing big ideas that were never completed or mattered. Our reality was that we needed to start delivering results and we had too many problems to fix at once, so that article and concept helped get us on the same page of leveling up things that were broken, even if we couldn’t take them to the highest level. TLDR; turning a D into a C is better than halting the whole company to turn that D into an A.

14. Company Offsite. There’s a book about taking over a new leadership role called The First 90 Days that talks about finding allies. The turnaround at Medium worked because people here like the mission and each other. That was clear when we gathered the company together at an offsite in the Catskills and saw how excited they were see each other, many for the first time. In other words, the company was already filled with allies of what needed to happen.

Sarah & Tony Visit the Paris Office

Medium has an office in Paris. Sarah and I turned it into a vacation, visiting my French teammates, renting a car, and then doing a road trip to Belgium and Amsterdam.

15. Sarah’s willpower to defeat jetlag. She insisted that we stay awake through the first day, dragging us on a walk all over Paris. It worked and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without her.

16. Best croissants in Paris: Du Pains Et Des Idees, founded in 1875.

17. Drive to Amsterdam. We really love backroads exploration.

18. The Pulitzer cribbage tournament. Great hotel in Amsterdam. I am currently leading the tournament.

Culture

Compared to the prior pandemic years, we really stepped up our activities. So I guess 2022 was the year where the pandemic ended for us. (I still haven’t had COVID, knock on wood)

19. Van Gogh Museum. Great museum in Amsterdam. I think I understand his psychology a bit more.

20. Louvre. Heard of it?

21. Amsterdam graffiti museum. This was also great and I’ve got a pic at the end of this post.

22. Opus 40. The Hudson Valley has a lot of interesting outdoor sculpture, including this one.

23. Amanda’s rituals at Lincoln Center. A friend of ours made an art installation showing the power of ritual. Very effective.

24. Old man and the Pool. Aging humor from Mike Birbiglia.

25. Memphis Jookin with Lil Buck. Fun, also made a good point about what we consider fine art.

26. A Strange Loop. It won the Tony and also this Tony liked it.

Visits

27. Met my new niece, Arden! She’s perfect.

28. Hosted Christmas for my Mom. Gives me chills to think back to the first pandemic xmas, where she set the tree up in her garage, rolled the garage door up and sat inside while we sat in the driveway. Glad to be past that.

29. Hosted New Years’. Love having a full house. I learned to play Gin Rummy.

30. Hosted Thanksgiving. Also a full house.

31. Hosted the Patils and stumbled onto an epic car show. This led to the painting “Eloise and his (sic) family,” now hanging in our living room.

32. Empire State Building. My California family came out to visit NYC, got the coldest, rainiest weather possible, but I think they liked the Empire State Building. That was one of the attractions that blew my mind when I first visited NYC in 1989.

33. Fiascon. Sarah’s part of a group of grizzled tech veterans that call themselves Fiasco and mostly tell their grizzly stories over Slack. This year they also gathered in person by renting out a place near Catskill. Eloise and I went, and Eloise stole the show.

Outdoors

34. RV/MTB Durango. Got a long weekend just after starting at Medium to test out having an RV stashed in the mountain west. Drove it to Durango for some MTB.

35. New hardtail MTB. Also, got a simple hardtail for riding back at home since my main MTB is stashed with my RV.

36. Kayaking Jackson. Met up with my college buddies for our now-annual outdoor trip. We went Kayak camping around Jackson Lake in Wyoming.

37. Hetch Hetchy. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Yosemite area, but this was the first time here. Great views, great hike.

38. Canyon de Chelly. One of the benefits of road trips is running into the second tier (or worse) points of interest around the US, like National Monuments and State Parks. This is one that I pulled into just because I was driving by. Loved it.

Sports

39. Warriors Championship. Biggest moment for me was watching their body language change mid-Finals as it became clear they felt they had figured out how to defend the Celtics.

40. Cooperstown. First time. IMO, Bonds and Rose should be in.

41. Harlem Crit. I’d become a fan of YouTube videos of an LA cycling team, Legion. So I got to watch them in person doing a criterium around Harlem. In person, cycling is nuts to watch.

42. Wembanyama. Part of our Paris trip involved getting tickets to see him play for the local Paris basketball team. He’s 7'4 with an 8' wingspan and he can shoot. Wild to watch him shoot over people at will and throw passes while reaching around multiple defenders at once.

Exercise

43. Zwift: road 2035 miles

44. Upgraded my bike computer to a Garmin Edge 830. Nice.

Favorite Books, TV & Movies

45. Murderbot. For me, I read this through the lens of an autistic cousin who also struggles at work.

46. Fall. Timely book by Neil Stephenson that included a relevant background plot about rich people paying for curation. The wealthiest had the most curated Internet experiences as a competitive advantage in life. The poorest had dopamine driven, attention optimized algorithmic curation that drove them crazy. This factored into why Medium now has human curators.

47. Loved this TV: Couples Therapy, Murderville, 1899, Succession, Slow Horses

48. Get Back (beatles). I’m a sucker for behind the scenes about how people actually manufacture excellence.

48. Loved these movies: Top Gun in drive thru, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Home upgrades

Notable that this year didn’t include any construction.

49. Added more Wemos and pool lights

50. Chlorine. Cigar in the pool.

Hobbies

51. Food & Drink: Had a Negroni period. Realized Cornish game hens turn out great on the smoker. Smoked my first brisket, which is sort of a right of passage for BBQers.

52. Chess. Took the time to learn the basics of Chess.

Hi. I’m Tony, CEO of Medium. Welcome! I’ve been writing on Medium since it launched in 2012, and I became the CEO of Medium ten years later in 2022.

I can’t promise that if you write on Medium for a decade you’ll become our next CEO, but I can promise you that spending time with Medium will deepen your understanding of the world — whether you’re reading, writing, participating in a community within a publication, or doing all three!

I want to share my perspective with you on what Medium is, why I think Medium matters, and how I think you can get the most out of Medium.

What Medium is

Medium is a place for reading, writing, and curating human stories. It’s where anyone can share insightful perspectives, useful knowledge, and life wisdom with the world. The reason we built this place is because we believe human stories have the power to deepen your understanding of the world.

Topics range from data science to poetry to self-improvement, and everything in between. Each story has a chance to influence others, plant a seed, perhaps even start a movement.

We do our best to help stories find the audience they deserve and help readers find stories that move them, through a system based on human curation and member-driven engagement. As a result, over 100 million people read and connect on Medium every month.

Why Medium matters

Medium is creating a new information ecosystem — one that’s open for everyone to participate in — that rewards quality over quantity. One that values diverse perspectives and doesn’t allow hate, harassment, or intolerance. One that spreads important ideas and sparks intelligent conversations. When you read and write on Medium, you contribute to a global community that values depth, nuance, and substantive storytelling.

This is why Medium exists: to spread human-centric, human-created ideas that deepen our understanding of the world.

How you can get the most out of Medium

Keep up with the most timely and culturally relevant stories on Medium by checking out our Staff Picks. Add stories you want to revisit to your reading lists.

Publications on Medium are independently run communities of like-minded authors and readers who care about the same things you’re most passionate about. Follow publications and submit your stories to them. Browse this list of publications accepting submissions from new writers.

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Leave your first response

Leave a response for me by clicking on the little 💬 talk bubble at the top and bottom of this story. Experience firsthand how every story becomes a lively community when you join the conversation. It’s less scary than it seems. Go ahead, tell me a bit about where you’re writing from. Let me know what brought you to Medium, and what is inspiring you right now.

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Medium really comes to life when you decide to write your own story. Our writing interface is simple, beautiful, minimalist, and open to everyone.

We know you’ve got some great stories waiting for the right time to come out. There’s no better time to start than right now.

Once you realize how easy it is to publish a story and share it with others, you might not be able to stop. If you’re looking for some inspiration, browse recommended stories on your homepage and these publications accepting submissions from new writers.

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Again, welcome to Medium. Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. I look forward to seeing you around.

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

I’m almost two years late in publishing this, but I want to keep my annual gratitude practice going. Plus I have drafts of 2022 and 2023 going, so I’m almost caught up.

Regarding 2021, it turns out we did have COVID years, plural, and this was the second one. My summary of the first stands in well for the second:

And yet, I have plenty of gratitude. I mean, obviously, it was a horrific year. But I’m taking a Stoic approach — control what I can control.

Yup.

This gratitude practice started in 2007 as a check against the stress I was feeling as a dirt-poor first-time entrepreneur. I was worried about the opportunity cost and thought that if I couldn’t find at least 52 highlights from the year then I was making a career mistake. Now it’s morphed into a mindset shifter and important life log. I love these lists as a way to look back on what I was doing and what I thought was important.

Here are my prior lists:
2020, 2015–2019, 2013–15, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

New house

I wonder in ten years whether I will remember 2021 most for the pandemic or most for the second home we bought. I’m hoping house.

1. Closed on a house. It was an adventure to get to the point of actually closing. Sarah and I are persistent people and worked through a post-inspection renegotiation, undisclosed environmental problems, delays and delays, with, finally, just before signing paperwork, a pool leak. But if you are reading closely, yes, we bought a house with a pool. This is definitely a good thing in our lives.

2. Wood Pellet Smoker. The first thing I bought for the house was a wood pellet smoker. I love the control and the outcomes. I’ve now smoked pork butt, pork shoulder, several ducks, chicken, scallops, steak, salmon. I got a CampChef Woodwind and I can literally check the temperature of the meat and the cooking temperature and the level of smoke with an app.

3. Eloise in the snow. There’s more snow two hours north of NYC and the snow is deeper and cleaner. Thus, we have a very happy dog.

4. The kitchen sink. Our new house was not even close to move in ready, and thus required some renovation. Every renovation is an exercise in Hedonic Resets. For ours, the last thing to go in was the kitchen sink. We had months of delays where we were doing dishes in a paint splattered utility sink. Then once the kitchen sink dropped into place I felt unbelievable joy. Yes, Hedonic Resets are so powerful that they turn doing the dishes into a joy.

5. New Car. New house means more driving, so we bought a nicer car. We’ve always been cheap on our cars and so this is the first time we have anything approaching modernity. Very nice experience to have a backup camera for the first time (that’s how far behind we were). The car was dropped off by Carvana, and we may have nearly been their last customers.

6. Kids swimming in the pool. The thing I like best about this house is having ambient energy from friends and family. The height of that is the energy of kids jumping into a pool. The first testers were my niece and nephews from Boston.

7. Smoking duck. Duck doesn’t have enough meat, but it sure does taste good coming off of a smoker.

8. Like 2Chainz, I also got to enjoy mowing my own lawn for the first time.

9. IKEA master. I did it. I found the hardest IKEA item to assemble and I assembled it. The IKEA bunk bed with trundle is the boss level of IKEA furniture and I managed it on deadline.

Pandemic Milestones

2021 was very much a year of sheltering in place (or in our case, two places).

10. First vaccine. Sarah and I were so careful about quarantine and felt so much relief when we walked away from the vaccine center with our first shots. Thank you science!

11. Dad’s east coast visit. I went more than a year without seeing my dad and step-mom and that’s much, much longer than we’d ever gone before. It was a “holy shit it’s good to hug you” kind of thing.

12. Our first CA visit. Once we were double vaxxed, we flew back to CA where most of my family lives. Hugs are good and I still remember a big hug from my youngest sister.

13. Thanksgiving. This was our first test of the new house as a family gathering point. I “built” our kitchen table out of a giant piece of plywood and some Etsy table legs.

14. Anna & Akshay. They were our first friend guests, arriving before we even had a kitchen or dining room table.

15. Jason & Amanda. Our second friend guests and the people who introduced us to the Oculus Quest.

16. Mom’s art show. She’s living an inspiring retirement as a full time artist, and got her own show with the artist collective she’s apart of in Philadelphia.

17. Boston. We leaned into the joy of podding, staying a few weeks with Sarah’s brother and his family.

18. Willow & Maia. Had dinner with these two cousins while we tried to piece together a shared understanding of the Stubblebine family history of kidnapping, free love, forced child labor, estrangement and alcoholism. At every stopping point, Maia’s partner Phil tried to summarize it back to us and, well, hearing someone else tell it really made the history seem bonkers.

Exercise

19. Built a home gym. Stationary bike, treadmill, pullup bar, squat rack, bench press, kettlebells, dumbbells, and horse stall mats.

20. Started winning Zwift races, always in the D category. Here’s a video.

21. Bought a new Wahoo Kickr direct drive trainer for Zwift racing.

22. Biked 2318 miles

23. Backpacked the Tetons (3 nights).

24. Built and road and crashed my own MTB trail. Later realized people maintain better trails just down the road.

25. Not sure how much I ran, but having a treadmill in the gym was great.

26. Discovered that chopping wood is great cross training.

New Office

27. Built a desk out of Amazon-purchased standing desk legs and an old door. Feels luxurious to have so much space.

28. Also switched from the old Apple Monitor to an LG Ultrafine 27". Very happy.

Movies & TV

29. Dune.

30. Shang Chi at the drive in.

31. Nomadland.

32. Unforgotten, a Britsh crime drama.

33. Dark.

34. Lupin.

35. Succession. The “My dad told me to” scene was so cynically on point.

36. Wandavision.

37. Only Murders in the Building. This later turned into a Thanksgiving tradition for us.

Got Out

It was hard to get out of the house, but we tried.

38. Went to Warriors vs Nets, row 7. Great statement game by the Warriors and sitting close really shows how athletic and physical NBA players are.

39. Took Eloise to Dog Day at Trenton Thunder. Finally experienced the famous Taylor Pork Roll.

40. Went to the Met and it had the same special energy as the first time that I visited NYC. That’s a Hedonic Reset in action.

41. Art Omi. New York state is rich in sculpture parks. Storm King is the crown jewel, but Art Omi in Ghent is a more fun and accessible visit. Plus you can take your dog.

Work

I must have been thinking hard about a change because I don’t have a lot to say about Coach.me or the Better publishing empire on Medium. Instead, I was looking to simplify.

42. Started a daily newsletter and got 150 issues out before the year ended. (archive here).

43. I got into SEO and placed a bunch of pieces onto the top of Google. I enjoy the systems thinking piece of this.

44. Ended my Heavy Mental training program. I’d run it every day for four years, developed a lot of great material, and helped a few thousand people. But I was happy to lose the daily responsibility.

Sarah

I’ve blocked out the work I did to oversee construction and renovation of our new home. What a mess. But I did get to be a great appreciator of the work Sarah did to furnish the house.

45. Joined Costco to get multiple NovaFoam matresses. These are great.

46. The kitchen was her design.

47. The house is filled with furniture from her family’s (now closed) furniture company, Country workshop.

48. Introduced us to the world of induction stoves.

Therapist & coach

49. Have to really give my therapist credit for helping me feel my feelings rather than rationalize them. This is probaby the most important breakthrough of my entire self-improvement journey, cut procrastination in half and made me a much more grounded person.

50. Worked with Justin Cox as a newsletter coach. He was great — natural coach and super well informed about all things writing.

Oddities (+2/51)

51. I always enjoy coming face to face with extreme competence and that’s what we got to enjoy with Sophia, our head of pest control. Pests were the cause of a lot of the remodel and when we were done it was so noticable that our neighbors commented on not seeing hordes of mice coming from our property onto theirs.

52. My only participation in the NFT craze was that I sold Tweet #420 for $5 worth of Etherium. No idea what either the Tweet or the Etherium is worth now.

Other notes: This was the year of the insurrection, the year Omicron had us cancel our Xmas trip to California, Juniper’s trip to NYC, Eloise meets her cousin Misu, ran the Momentum conference. I also wrote a bit beyond just the newsletter: Wheaton Scale for Productivity, habit coach methodology, write with the book in mind.

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I get that this is a big pivot given that we switched to a new editor recently. But things are changing at Medium and I think this will ultimately be a boon for everyone, authors, readers and publications.

I would like to inspire some (but not all) of you to start a publication and give you some guidelines on how to do it well. If you are an author, there are many other publications to write for and hopefully there will soon be even more (check the comments for suggestions).

Medium has always had publications that acted as something in between a group blog and a sub-reddit. Publication editors help set a quality bar, give feedback on your posts, and bring you an audience. Publications are a pillar of the Medium experience.

But the publication opportunities that (I think) are exciting are changing. In the past, the way to have a successful publication was to publish on anything and everything. So Medium was dominated by broad, high volume publications. Better Programming was one of those pubs and we published on topics that might not have a lot of overlapping readers. How many of you are currently programming in all of these languages: Go, Rust, Javascript, Ruby, Python, Swift, Kotlin, and Dart?

Better Programming has published stories on all of those topics and more, and so by definition we were often publishing stories that a lot of you don’t want to read. The direction Medium is heading is to optimize for publications that are more focused than Better Programming has been.

There are two types of focuses that I’m personally excited about. One is that publications are de facto communities of enthusiasts. The other is that publications bring a level of expertise to Medium’s boost program. Caveat: these are just what I’m excited about — maybe you have more creative ideas than I do.

Both cases beg for publications that are focused.

If you want to build an enthusiast community of people who love Kotlin, who want to write about their Kotlin projects and what they are learning, then you don’t also need authors in your publication who are writing about Swift.

Similarly, Medium is leaning on the expertise of publication editors to contribute as nominators in the Boost program. It’s hard to bring credible expertise when your focus is too broad. Most nominators also have first hand expertise beyond what they publish. So, if I were to run Better Programming myself, I think I could credibly nominate within Rails (I’ve built several companies on that stack) and Regular Expressions (I wrote a book), but I’m clueless on nearly everything else.

Running a publication isn’t for everyone and it isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. The best publications are run out of authentic interest in a topic and nothing more. In technical topics, there can be some financial rewards, which I’ll get to. But mainly it’s best to think of this as a way to harness a passion you may have. I know that the community building impulse is strong in many of you because I’ve seen how many people have started publications on Medium over the years.

For any of you who are interested, I’m going to give you some tips on starting a publication. These aren’t exactly a recipe, but I’ll try to arrange them in order.

1. Pubs are easy to start and at minimum you have yourself as a possible author to fill the pub with stories. Here’s a link to get going.
2. If you want to accept other authors then you need to setup instructions. Almost all publications that accept other authors setup a “write for us” page with instructions, make it a tab on the publication, write a style guide, and then create a Google form to handle new author applications. Copy ours.
3. Do you want to focus on inclusivity? If so, then your role is probably more about support and encouragement and less about setting a high editorial bar. People get squeamish about being judged but the thing I’ve long recognized is that all writing was useful to the writer and is often useful to at least a few people, but very little writing is going to trend on Reddit or HackerNews.
4. Do you want to focus on exclusivity, i.e. finding the best of the best ideas and information on a topic? Medium’s Boost program gives publication editors a tool to recruit authors: “I can help boost your stories to more readers.” You can’t just boost anything, it has to be the best of the best. And so focusing on that is a very exclusive approach. I often think of a publication here about Runners where the editor is using his access to the Boost to work with professional running coaches, professional runners, and the former editor-in-chief of Runners World. That must be so fun for him! The programming equivalent is different for each programming languange so I’ll use an example from the language I got started in: if I started a publication for Perl, I’d use the boost as a way to recruit Larry Wall.
5. Consider becoming a Boost nominator but also consider that doing that will require having a strong nose for the best of the best. Of course every story on Medium is “high quality” but there are certain stories that are important, accurate, helpful and maybe even more than that. This isn’t official policy, but unofficially, it would be reasonable to submit an application to be a Boost Nominator once you have a publication with three authors and ten stories.
6. Getting a publication started requires recruiting authors. Hopefully you know some already, even if they aren’t on Medium. I think that if you don’t know a subject well enough that you also already know other people with similar enthusiasm and expertise in that subject, then starting a publication isn’t for you. That’s not a hard rule, but I’m saying it from experience. After recruiting from your own network, the way almost every other publication has recruited authors is by monitoring relevant tags on Medium and then using the private note feature to invite recently published stories into your publication.
7. Lets talk money. If you are a publication that Boosts stories you will get paid an honorarium. Plus if you build an audience, your own stories might make more money. But, you are missing the big picture if this is the most important thing to you. Writing and editing is a form of portfolio building. The software engineering field pays so much money, way beyond what Medium pays for writing. So focusing on getting paid from Medium is the ultimate example of a local maxima because the you can make 1000x more by building a reputation and using it to get a job or raise. This is just fact.

If you do start a programming publication that is looking for authors or you’ve already started a programming publication like that, post a link in the responses along with a link to your submission guidelines.

Authors: I looked up Better Programming’s stats. 4.6k authors have published 16.8k stories to Better Programming. Those stories generated 151M page views. Not all of them were behind the paywall, but the ones that were earned authors $999 thousand dollars. It’s been a huge honor to play a role in that and my thanks go out to the editors who’ve made it happen and to all of you for writing. Medium is still a great home for you, it’s just that you should find new places to publish.

Let a thousand programming publications bloom. was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.