Evan Solomon

I used to do this kind of thing when I was taking a long flight. I'd organize all of my unread Instapaper articles and print it into little bound together book at Kinkos. I told someone about it once and their response was, "Do you just hate the environment?" Seems like you could probably hook this up for Medium using RSS feeds.

@micah those are all good points. The app is, as you say, a "first shot". It's not finished by any means. One point you make is about "removing the value of the writer". I actually think about this kind of in a more optimistic sense, which is elevating the value of the content. Medium definitely places the content before the individual in a lot of elements of its design, and that's not an...

@rrhoover we have ideas for stats to help people understand engagement beyond pageviews, and in a context that makes sense for them. Our currently stats are *very* old and really don't reflect the way we think about engagement and success internally. We just haven't prioritized getting the new stats finished and launched yet. Lots of other things going on...you know the story.

@kaz we're definitely not done yet on the network front. We're getting there but it's still largely aspirational. One of the things we've been looking at a lot recently is the portion of reading time (https://medium.com/data-lab/86c4970837d5) that's internally referred, and it's making good progress. Currently, Medium is a little like a flywheel. We still need some external energy (like sharing...

@ow Custom domains aren't on the roadmap. Our vision for Medium is very much a network. That doesn't make custom domains completely impossible, but it probably makes them less relevant. We are explicitly *not* building a disjoint collection of sites running the same software (which lots of other products do very well) — we're building a network (of stories, of creators, of readers, of...

The internet has conflated being a writer (or any kind of creator) and being a distributor. There are good reasons that has happened, but historically it's actually quite an anomaly. Part of our core thesis at Medium is that the status quo isn't quite the right balance.

Owen, nothing happened to self publishing, we just think it's not the right tool for everyone and that there's a lot of value we can add by (1) making everyone's content look good and simple and (2) building a network rather than forcing writers to also be their own distributors. We agree we need more variety in the way content looks. We're working on it now, while still keeping everything...