In recent years, developments in the blog world consisted of only improving the services offered. While it was a matter of curiosity what the next big thing for bloggers could be, I came across Medium. As I got to know it a bit, I couldn’t help asking myself, “Could a new era of publishing or blogging begin with Medium?” and searched for some answers.

In August 2012, Medium (meaning medium/channel) was launched under the leadership of Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone . Its purpose was like an answer to those who criticized Twitter’s 140-character limit. I hadn’t realized before that it could be something more than just a pure blog platform with a comfortable writing experience, away from annoying things. As its features developed (mobile device support, editing your posts with others, improvements in post collections, and the iPhone application coming soon), I started to think that it could become a publishing culture rather than just a blog platform. The initiative called Matter has a lot of influence on this thought of mine. The Kickstarter campaign called ReadMatter succeeded, opening the doors of independent, original, high-quality writings and journalism. Open the ReadMatter medium page, and if you have English, start reading an article. If you want, you can also start with the most read posts on the homepage. If you are a person who loves reading, I don’t think you will regret it.

Reading a post that contains pure information, which has been worked on without advertisement, without flashing fancy things, is more pleasant for me than writing it. When you sit in front of the screen to read a post you are curious about, there is nothing to disturb you. I want to point out this issue in particular, because my heart aches when I see the state of Turkey’s most-read online newspapers. Everywhere is advertisements and everything runs wild to get itself clicked by attracting your attention. Even worse, no one says STOP to this. I also take a stand in my own way and do not enter those sites unless I have to. In fact, I even stopped using ekşisözlük for the same reasons.

Now, this feature I will mention is, I think, a situation unique to Medium. Because unlike the rest of the internet world, medium.com does not allow you to follow people. In other words, you will not have ‘followers’ to inflate your ego. Only if the collections you create attract someone’s attention, they can be followed. Let’s say you created a collection called Turkish Writings and added the Turkish writings you found to this collection of yours. Well, people can only follow this collection of yours. So the person remains in the second plan. The value increases for the topics and therefore the writings about the topic. Thus, we get a quality blog content that is pleasant to read. I don’t know if it was tried before, but this restriction has contributed positively to the content quality for now.

Although there are not many Turkish writings yet, I want to give a few examples for those who know English. You will see that some writings are almost like books. ( Example 1 , Example 2 , Example 3 ) It is also possible to read posts like in Example 1 in ePub, kindle, or audio format. (This feature is applied by the initiative called @readmatter .) Also, while reading the posts, a (+) sign appears on the right side of the paragraph where the mouse cursor is, and you can add your comment for this paragraph. This detail showing the importance given to the content is indeed admirable.

For now, I am quite hopeful about the future of Medium, which is very simple and elegant, and at the same time “featureless” compared to other platforms. It looks like the key to the clean, high-quality, and original content I dream of. My suggestion to our new generation journalists would be to use this platform to show their differences. With Turkish and English writings, I believe it will be instrumental in showing one’s difference in Turkey and opening many doors by interacting with other writers worldwide. Maybe if your purpose in keeping a blog is especially to write, medium.com can be a good starting point. Considering that the number of people who open a blog, write a few posts, and then never look at its face for years is quite high, you can motivate yourself better with a simple solution. Do not let the word “simple” I use deceive you. The meaning of the word “simple” I use here is: “elegance purified of all unnecessary details.”

Finally, as an interesting detail, I conclude by sharing a quote from the post I wrote when I met medium.com.

Right now, while writing these lines, I am using the system called medium.com and I feel a writing pleasure that I have not felt before. I say these with all my sincerity. The width and comfort that are not in other blog platforms increase your appetite for writing. In fact, details such as category, tag, adding images and links that bother your mind disappear and you can only focus on what you want to tell. Yes… Interestingly, while planning to do a test shot by just writing “hello world,” I ended up extending the post perhaps unnecessarily.