Like so many other people, I love writing on Medium. And I love writing there because it is the platform that has managed to bring together simplicity in the creation and publication of texts with appropriate dissemination within a community of readers. Discovering new stories, reading them and recommending them is also a pleasure due to the interface in which they are shown to us. However, the latest news and changes give a lot to think about your future.
Weeks after learning about the reduction of staff in the company and after the closure of the Medium community in Spanish -the one in charge of curating content in Spanish and giving greater visibility to texts that will now be lost-, the biggest update in a long time has reached both the app and the web version. In it, a feature that had been tested for some time among selected users and that is already familiar to all of us is made public: under the name of 'Series', Medium brings us the concept seen on Snapchat and in applications owned by Facebook.
Medium Series comes to be the interpretation of the short and fast stories to consume that we could see first on Snapchat and then on Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. One more place where create lightweight content to tell something more visually to the usual articles on the platform. The main problem with this is that users are beginning to be saturated with so many stories, we cannot - nor do we want to - be aware of yet another source. To this we must add that Medium has such good articles and so many excellent authors that there will be few reasons to spend our time watching these stories instead of reading any of them. I don't doubt that they are a very interesting narrative form, but not for this platform.
The new feature comes late and with less attractive options than those offered by Instagram or Snapchat, for example, in which we can draw, add filters or insert 'stickers'. The social factor also disappears, since it is not the stories of our friends or acquaintances that we are going to see, decreasing interest and interaction, something fundamental in this content. Medium is not going through its best moment and I do not know what the keys may be to obtain a better platform in the future, but what I am sure of is that this does not go through additions such as 'Series'.
