This was published on November 7, 2014 on Hatch, our internal version of Medium. See Hatching Inside Medium for context on this collection.
Business Casual
Casual content on Medium
Medium is a great place for Medium-like content. Long’ish, well thought out, pretty, articulate, etc. That’s awesome, but our platform can and should be better for casual content.
I’m using the term “casual content,” though “short content” probably makes up the majority of what I’m talking about. A paragraph or two, a quote and a reaction, a picture, etc. Casual content isn’t necessarily less weighty, or less important (see: Twitter), but it’s easier to produce.
There isn’t much casual content on Medium because…
- It doesn’t look good or work well.
- It’s not what people think about using Medium for.
Obviously, those two things reinforce each other, but we can’t affect #2 before we fix #1. So, how do we do that? First, a history lesson.
In the very early days of Medium we acknowledged this exact tension and decided that we would pursue a product strategy that included templates for different content types. We built three different template types — article, article with cover image, and image with caption. We also built a few that we scrapped, like multiple text over image templates. We designed several others — quote, geolocation w/snippet, haiku, photo gallery, etc. See Leigh Taylor’s editor explorations and check the template images about 3/4 down the page on this article from our friends Teehan & Lax.
Our thinking was that we could foster an external community of template builders. The vast majority of users wouldn’t build templates, but those that had the skills and wanted to could design and build different content types for us. Furthermore, we could be innovative and allow for dynamic templates that included not only a look and feel, but also functionality. To start, we would be the template builders and we started with the aforementioned three.
In theory, the strategy seemed legit and Wordpress had already validated that there are plenty of people who can and will build templates. In practice, it didn’t feel quite right. The article with cover template was the same as the article template, but with a cover image. The photo plus caption template was similar to the article with cover template except the caption was small text. Which template should a photo and a paragraph use? What if I find a good cover image after I wrote my story, but already picked the plain article template?
All the templates were basically just a combination of words and images.
It’s also worth mentioning that we intended to maintain more control over the templates than Wordpress does. Although not allowing people to make ugly stuff has never been the goal of Medium, we certainly didn’t want to encourage it by creating a Wild West scenario with Medium templates. We thought about template building in the same way Apple thinks about iOS development… there are lots of rules and hurdles, but it’s because Apple wants to maintain an app experience they are proud of. We even considered developing a Medium templating language!
After wrestling with these tensions, we decided to go a different direction and build one more flexible template. In fact, we called it the “flex template.” With the flex template you could basically do all the things you could with the three templates, but there was more consistency across the content. The editor had to work a little harder.
This decision alleviated us from the burden of figuring out which templates to build, how to start and foster a template making community, and how to manage a template marketplace.
Decisions have trade-offs. The trade off we accepted with this decision was that the content on Medium would look and feel somewhat consistent. The template was flexible, but not to the degree that multiple templates were. At the time, that was a trade-off we were okay with because it made it easier to define what Medium was and what it could be used for. It helped us on-board people in our networks to start producing content on Medium. Thus, the “Medium look” was born.
We continued working on the flex template and added more formatting flexibility, like lists and quote styles. We overhauled the design of the template with a major redesign project we called “Cocoon,” which created the cover image with title/sub-title overlay and parallax effect. This version of the flex template produced stories that really resonated in the design world and further cemented the “Medium look.”
We’ve continued to evolve the capabilities of our editor by adding embeds, different heading treatments, separators, image grids, etc. but we still have one template, one editor.
As Medium is becoming more prominent in the world, the trade-off we accepted a couple years ago is becoming more costly. Medium is becoming the place for medium to long-form, meaningful content, at the expense of not being the right place for anything else, (save comics because… The Nib!). That said, I think we made the right decision a couple years ago. You can’t start by being all things to all people, and we started exactly where we wanted to.
The time is nearing to adjust our strategy a bit, because we should and the longer we don’t, the harder it will be.
I don’t think we need to revisit the one vs. many template decision, but I do think we should continue to evolve our one editor, our one template, to include options that make other types on content live comfortably on Medium, namely more casual content because we are pretty much killing the less casual to semi-pro content side of the spectrum.
More plainly, casual content is the best bang for our buck in a world where casual content is being created everyday by almost everyone.
I don’t think, however, that it should be a goal (yet) for Medium to be the best place for all kinds of content. We have done a good job cementing Medium as a great place for the kind of content currently on Medium and I think we should expand into other content types deliberately. It’s hard to imagine a world, in the near term, where 140 character blurbs work better on Medium than Twitter, or where individual pictures are better on Medium than on Instagram.
As a proposed constraint, we should continue to embrace our mission to become the best place to share stories and ideas.
Embracing that constraint will help us get our heads around what kind of content Medium could the best platform for. For example, telling a story or sharing an idea is hard with only a single image, so maybe we shouldn’t optimize for that kind of content. (We shouldn’t exclude it though!)
On the flip side, it’s easy to imagine sharing an idea with a quote and a paragraph, or telling a story with multiple images or a series of sentences, a.k.a. the Tweetstorm. Medium isn’t great for that type of content… yet.
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So, how might we better support and encourage casual content on Medium?
I have some ideas, you might also. If so, let’s hear them. Write a response, leave some notes, lets figure this out so Medium becomes the default and the best place to share (casual) stories and ideas.
