Medium’s latest update 👏👏👏

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Today, we are ending the upvote[1]. That’s right, the archaic binary upvote system is being replaced with claps, the latest technology to demonstrate love on the internet.

Also starting today, New Medium. Check it out. 👏👏👏

Lots of you have already seen the recent branding updates – and the claps – but its more than a superficial change. Medium explains what they’re all about:

“The more claps you give a locked post, the more share of your membership fee that author will get.”

That’s right, Medium created an emoji-based economy for content creators to earn money. The more claps you give, the more money writers earn from Medium’s newish subscription membership.

P.S. If you are not interested in making money from your work, nothing changes. Medium remains free and open.

[1] Just kidding. Upvotes are staying. Go exercise your freedom to ⬆️.

New Medium 👏

We asked 34 customers what Viktor does for them. Not one said chatbot.

They kept using words like colleague, coworker, team member. One CEO called it the glue holding their e-commerce business together, which is a lot, but also… you see why. It lives in Slack and plugs into 3,000+ tools, so instead of jumping between tabs, you just ask for the thing. Pull Stripe against HubSpot, check Sentry alerts, spin up a campaign brief, build a landing page, send a report upstairs. It all happens there.

It has already hit top 5 on Product Hunt with 130 comments, is SOC 2 certified, and your data does not train models.

One user said it was the first time AI felt like a real coworker, which is either exciting or slightly concerning depending on your week.