Is Medium a Social Media Platform?

MartinEdic
4 min readMay 8, 2019
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

It sure looks like the next stage of the model

Facebook is losing users. Instagram is picking up older users. LinkedIn is just as kludgy and sort of necessary as ever. Twitter is the POTUS channel. Is Medium a social network? I’d argue that it definitely is, and it is a better one.

Stories are the glue of social interaction

Medium’s focus on stories about virtually anything is a brilliant strategy for growth. Everything we learn, we learn from either hearing stories or creating them. In fact, once our language skills evolved enough to convey more complex ideas and more abstract notions like myths and time-shifting, we as homo sapiens made a leap forward evolution-wise, and we have not stopped since. The ability to share made-up stories as examples and guides for behavior gave us a huge collective boost and helped us work together on longer term projects.

Dialog is the essence of the Medium style

After a couple of months of regularly writing and commenting on Medium I’ve realized that thoughtful comments are the glue that connects on the site, just as they are on all the other social platforms. But Medium is doing a better job curating what we see, in part because that curation is still done by…

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MartinEdic
MartinEdic

Written by MartinEdic

Mastodon: @martinedic@md.dm, Writer, nine non-fiction books, two novels, Buddhist, train lover. Amateur cook, lover of life most of the time!

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