Medium As A Bellwether

The boys at Obvious have launched a peek at a new experiment of theirs, called Medium.

Medium — to the degree that we can fool with it so far, or so far as they have fooled with it — is more of an indication of a new aesthetic that Obvious is pursuing than anything else. It has a iPad-like clean design — shared by all the curations that have been pulled together.

Reading between the lines, the Obvious Ones believe that the dynamic of old-school blogging — typified by Wordpress — is too restrictive, the shouting at Tumblr is too garish and loud, and the self-centeredness of Pinterest too Ayn Randian.

Something other is called for. But it’s not just a slightly different screwdriver, turning slightly more futuristic screws. This is a change where we give up on screws, we give up on hand-tooled websites, we give up on owning what we build.

I haven’t test been invited to post anything: at least for the present, you must be invited, another example of the dream that elitism and/or editors will lead to high quality, without the need for filters.

Certainly, in time, others will be allowed to play fully, but we don’t know what mechanisms will be used to limit or constrain people. Will every collection, like ‘Look What I Made’ in the image above, have gatekeepers who get to decide who gets to contribute? That’s how Tumblr topics work today, at least the popular, profitable ones.

Medium is a speculative design intended to challenge us to consider implications of the deep philosophy lurking within.

Will people be allowed to fool with the templates for collections, or are those fixed by the Editors-In-The-Sky?

Medium has an inbuilt voting scheme where viewers can ‘like’ something — although there is no like or upthrust thumb, only a numeric value showing how ‘interesting’ a post is, on a scale (I presume) of 1 to 10. 

Breaking with the blog norm of reverse chronological, Medium defaults to seeing what is more interesting. Which seems like a nod to Reddit and Digg.

I submit that this early version of Medium is a speculative design intended to challenge us to consider implications of the deep philosophy lurking within, rather than the test of a fully fleshed minimally-viable-product. The Obvious Ones have time and to spare. They are not threatened by a short runway of a few hundred G’s before having to show huge stickiness, or conversion to a Pro plan. They can rethink and reimagine a post-normal social media system, one that they believe will obsolete what we have come to think of as givens, like Pinterest, Wordpress, and Tumblr. 

Whether their twiddling will lead to a colossus, a killer app, remains to be seen. But we can be sure that something new and radically bold is coming, even if it’s not Medium.

Related articles

• 13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious (Nieman Journalism Lab) One of the most insightful analyses of Medium, by Joshua Bentam, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab
• Read-only Launch For Medium & Branch, But Twitter Founders Promise More (readwriteweb.com)
• Twitter Co-Founders Preview Medium, Their Publishing Platform That Gives Anyone An Audience (techcrunch.com)
• Twitter Cofounders Unveil Medium, A Publishing Platform That Feels Like Tumblr And Looks Like Pinterest (fastcompany.com)
• Twitter founders launch a blogging platform, Kevin Rose blogs about peeing (venturebeat.com)
• Twitter founders launch Medium: a cross between Pinterest and Reddit (wired.co.uk)

Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Memeorandum

Don Dodge takes on a thankless task, interviewing Gabe Rivera, of memeorandum. Thankless because he gets basically zero out of Gabe, who doesn’t (sensibly) tell any of the algorithmic secrets under the hood, or any of the cool things he is thinking about for the future. We hear him tell us why he thinks the memeorandum approach is better than others, but not much else revelatory. A nice try, though, Don.

[Disclosure: Of course, I had the benefit of spending a few hours with Gabe last week (I made him some eggs, while hanging around at Michael Arrington’s), and so I know there are neat things in the offing.]

Good Works, Bad Works, but Karma doesn’t work

Richard McManus at ZDNet’s Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/Write Web investigates the karma system at Reddit, and wonders if it’s better than Digg’s:

[from » Collaborative filtering: comparing Reddit’s karma system to Digg]

Indeed Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian says that “with reddit, we’re hoping that by focusing on filtering, users will be inclined to vote up links that genuinely interest them”. The Reddit method then is trying to capture that elusive social software principle of getting the user to reward him or herself first and foremost, but actually the system is enhanced at the same time. As Alexis said, “The nice thing about this is that although users are serving themselves by voting to train a personal filter, the by-product of their honesty is that the community gets a more accurate idea of what’s really popular.”

What do you think. Is Reddit’s karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg’s? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

My strong belief is that these rating/ranking filters are failing at a fundamental level: not because they don’t work, or because they can be gamed, but because they are

1. closed, and
   
   
2. tightly integrated to a specific solution.

I would like to see an open karma solution that would allow all sorts of applications to share individual’s karma, and to participate in the karma’s change over time. It’s crazy for us to have 252 karma ratings in 252 different applications!

Each application could influence this foundational karma in dissimilar ways. On one application, say Oyogi, your karma would increase by correcting answering questions directed to you, while Technorati might increase your karma based on the number of inbound links to your blog, and Typepad might increase your karma based on the number of positive comments you receive on your blog.

Since we are in the Web 2.0 era of mash-ups, won’t someone break their karma system out, and set it up in this way, so that we can avoid a fragmented collection of non-interoperable solutions? People who would like to have various, separate identities could still do so, and the solution could support anonymity, but the benefits of a open karma solution, that all could draw upon, is so obvious that I am actually surprised it hasn’t been done already.