The way I see it from the outside, Medium had a lot of lofty goals that unfortunately turned out to be in conflict with each other in the real world. One one h

The way I see it from the outside, Medium had a lot of lofty goals that unfortunately turned out to be in conflict with each other in the real world. One one hand, they wanted to create the best writing and reading experience on the web, by investing heavily in product design, and manually curating and promoting quality writing that would be interesting to read. On the other hand, they wanted to democratize publishing by making it easy to write and encouraging just anyone to get their ideas out onto the platform, regardless of how readable those writings were. Subscribers that were willing to pay monthly for access to curated, thoughtful writing increasingly found a site filled with low-quality boilerplate. Established writers who had at first enthusiastically adopted Medium increasingly fled the site in order to protect their personal brands and reputations. In the end, no one was happy, except mediocre clickbait writers. There wasn't enough subscription money to justify focusing entirely on quality, and ad-based models were too much in conflict with the platform goals for them to be able to make up the difference via scale. I definitely don't think Medium has been a failure in its first 10 years. Quite the contrary --- they really did raise the bar for reading experiences across the web, and for a time, they did have the best and brightest writers churning out thoughtful, interesting content. But it was an idea ahead of its time. Without established cultural and technical micropayments infrastructure (a situation which has seen practically no progress in these past 10 years), it was always going to be an uphill battle to fund the kind of experiences they wanted to create. I doubt there will be many changes in this state of affairs during the next CEO's tenure. That said, I hope to be surprised, not just because it would be good for Medium, but because it would provide much-needed hope for the web as a whole. Our need for social platforms that care about empowering and educating people, rather than exploiting them, is even greater than it was 10 years ago. Perhaps Medium's next act can help rekindle that flame.