Medium founder, Ev Williams, stepped in front of mainstream media last Wednesday, announcing the company will let go one third of its workforce (50 people) and will also drop the advertising based business model. For those of you unaware, Ev Williams is also a co-founder of Twitter.
Without having the chance to actually be in the mind of Ev Williams (which is the kind of feat we, as humans, are still very far away from) one can only speculate about what's going to happen to Medium.
Among these speculations, those linking Medium to Steem are starting to get traction. Fred Wilson, a popular VC, even urged Ev to have a look at Steem for monetization. On Steemit itself, @andrarchy wrote a nice piece on the same topic.
Since it's already Sunday, which is my way of perceiving the Universe slowing down, which in turn leads to a perception of having just a tad more time to spend on daydreaming or just small talk, I decided to throw in my 2 SBD cents on the matter.
Here are my 2 cents: Medium will not come to Steemit, because Steemit is already the next Medium. Oh, the blasphemy! I can almost hear your screams and feel your anger. How dare I?
Well, let's look at the pros and cons:
| Medium Assets | Steemit Assets |
|---|---|
| established community of writers | decentralized platform, managed by DPOS |
| beautiful UX | its own currency, already exchangeable and trading |
| - | an extra apps layer, built on top of the blockchain |
| - | censorship resistant |
| Medium Liabilities | Steemit Liabilities |
|---|---|
| lack of a sustainable business model | Pleistocene based UX |
| - | highly speculative (crypto inheritance) |
The table above is very, very, very simple, and it is like this for a reason. Ok, two reasons: the first one is because it's Sunday (did I already write this?) and the second one is because I wanted to over-simplify, for the sake of clarity.
Now, if you start doing the math, you'll see that Steemit wins. As a matter of fact, you'll see that Steemit doesn't even play on the same field with any other social media platform. It almost feels like wrong to compare Steemit with Medium (or Twitter, for what matters), the same way it feels wrong to compare an Airbus 380 with a canoe. It's just a different, far more complex and effective machinery.
Of course, there is one small thing that could turn this upside down: just like an Airbus is useless without kerosene (making it an overweight, barely floating, canoe), Steemit is useless without a significant user base. Without more people using this beautiful piece of engineering, Steemit will be just an ugly pile of servers, dumbly monitored by a few remaining witnesses.
But if this user base will eventually reach a critical point in Steemit (and I estimate that critical point to be between 100.000 and 500.000 active users per month) then the world will never be the same again. And the next logical thing will be to build a micro-blogging platform on the same blockchain.
Will this happen? Will this happen in 2017? Will this happen ever?
Well, I wish I could answer to all these questions, but I am on a much slower train of thoughts today, because, and I think I should have mentioned this from the very beginning, today is Sunday.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses