What will Medium change?

1994, The birth of a blog, the world because of its change, it lets people in the traditional media bowl robbed the right to speak. In the 2006, the advent of Twitter changed the world again, and information was passing faster, and instant messaging made it more fragmented.

After the creation of bloggers and Twitter, Evan Williams has experienced these two changes. Not long ago, speaking at Festival Launch in San Francisco, he spoke about new product Medium, and he was ready to challenge the content rules of the internet world again-to subvert the internet ecology of "fast Update" and "Low-quality content". Will he succeed this time?

What will Medium change?

Since Twitter became the mainstream social media, Evan Williams has observed changes in internet incentives. People have become accustomed to the need for faster change of content, real-time updates of news messages.

And in fact, we've done well enough in this area--we know the size of a piece of news from a corner of the world a minute ago, and the world will change a little bit every time we press the refresh button.

Readers are full of hope to witness the changes in the world, but their patience only read the title and the beginning of the article. The performance of many content creators is also simply linked to the number of clicks on the comments, in order to achieve better "results", they have to carry the banner of the title party to seize those who lose patience. As a result, we see more and more low quality content is frequently forwarded to each other, in order to traffic, in order to click the amount of spell.

The internet is a good platform for everyone to get together and do something like Wikipedia, because he gathers people's power. So how do we use this power in the article and just share it? Although the media can do the whole process of creating, publishing and marketing the content of the article, this mechanism does not guarantee that the content reaches the highest value. We can give the job to people.

Williams thought it was time for the high quality content to return to the Internet, which was the original intention of Medium. Medium is a content publishing platform in which the sort of content is not updated in chronological flashbacks, but in the "recommended degree" of content.

When the user clicks on the recommended button after reading the content, the recommended content is ranked at the top of the site. They abandoned the "latest" and "fastest" time in reverse order. Because the "time in reverse order" rule, from another perspective, is encouraging fast, inexpensive content.

Medium hopes that by optimizing this sort and incentive mechanism, consumers will be able to absorb high-quality content more easily, but also for content creators to create a new sustainable ecosystem, no longer according to simple clicks to check the quality of content.

1000 readers, 1000 collections.

On Medium, the mechanism encourages users to read the article to the end and give a positive response-recommend it, or add the article to the "article Collection" (Collection).

The Collection is a bit like "Tag", but more structured. From the collection itself, it seems to be "categorized" by different articles, but the same article may be categorized into different Collection. Williams thinks Collection is redefining the article and setting different frames for the article. For example, an article on "Free transportation" was originally in the Collection of "amazing ideas" and was added to the Collection "we live in the future". Users can think from a collection, in addition to free transportation, there is no way of life with a sense of the future?

Different Collection will be established through different interpretations of the article. Compared with the traditional "classification" and "label", Collection is more like the user's "two processing" of the content.

I dare not say, as long as the good I am very happy

At the conference site, Williams also expressed his views on the status of the Internet, for example, he expressed dissatisfaction with the site to maximize the effect of SEO.

Business Insider have a lot of rubbish, they do badly in many ways. (Business insider super-delegates a lot of trash. It ' s terrible in many ways.)

Asked if Medium had ambitions to succeed in the next Vanity Fair (Vanity Fair) or the next New York Times, Evan Williams said

We are a platform, not a publisher. Our success is to help people share stories, ideas, and knowledge, and to influence others, to make good content come to the surface and to fill the internet with new cool things. I dare not say, as long as its quality is good, I am very happy.

He also believes that entrepreneurship is just doing "what you want to see in the world," and staying focused is the key to it.

As you grow older, it's getting harder to stay focused. Because you get more and more opportunities, the factors that disturb you are more and more ... So I have to reject people many times every day.

Most of the time, we see are trying to meet the needs of users and habits of products, a lot of users to compromise the lazy habit to enlarge and deepen to gain profits. It is also a point that Medium people appreciate, attitudes, clear trends and flaws, and the courage to challenge existing rules. I do not know if you are optimistic, but I also decided to read the contents of the Medium.