Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Abhishek Chakraborty

We Already Had Stories. So Now We’ve Built Series. Beat That!

Millennials and teens are famous for their short attention span. They seem to love things which don’t demand a lot of cognition or thinking. For example, you can express your creativity easily through Snapchat by clicking a picture and then drawing some stuff over it. Or just go to plain old Instagram and put some photo filters. There you are…awesome result with minimal effort. Instant gratification. Hedonism at its best!

Medium used to be different. Medium needed a lot of attention. It takes some effort to write your own story, or even read someone else’s story. It takes some time in processing and understanding the text, and then retaining the knowledge to gain fulfilment or gratification. When I have another platform where I can get this pleasure so easily, then why waste so much of energy here, right? Why don’t I go and read some Snapchat stories before they disappear?

Medium was burning money and firing employees, so they needed some feature to tap into the attention deficient citizens of the internet who are the major sources of company valuation. Hence Series!

What is a Series?

A Series is a set of slides involving text and images — kind of like a Keynote presentation; but only for mobile phones.

You don’t have time to write a story? No problem! Just build a Series. It’s so easy that you won’t even need any topic to write about— it’s a no-brainer! Oh, you can leave it midway too, when you run out of stuff to put into your Series. Pretty cool, huh? And did I mention the claps?

Clapping is fun!

The best part is that it’s fun to Clap at a Series. It is so well designed that you feel like going on a clapping spree. It is so much better than tapping the green heart. Now we can clap as much as we want, and the sweet animations make us go nuts.

We used to recommend a story if we really liked it, and the recommendation was meant for the writer. Here, we are clapping at a Series for our own amusement — just to see the neat emojis fly off. After tapping that button for a while, I even forgot what the Series was about. Clever design! We love clapping. Creators love the claps. It’s a win-win.

Good design is not just about giving your users what they need. Good design is more about giving them the tools so that they can excel in their endeavours. Medium used to be a platform about writing your thoughts, about sharing your ideas and good content. The power of the platform was in the stories and articles. Medium was useful. Snapchat and Instagram are fun. Now Medium is trying to be fun as well. I feel Medium is a University Professor who is trying to be hip and hangout with the local kids because he is not getting enough attention from them.

Is Medium trying to become a slideshow platform where you are not bound by a 140 character limit? I wonder! By building Series, Medium is simply promoting attention deficiency and the Snapchat culture. Medium is changing its own belief and philosophy, and trying to be someone else so that it can tap into the teens’ and the millennials’ short attention span.

I know they were desperate and needed something to do fast. I just wish they had done something to promote good writing instead. When I saw Series, I was hoping for it to be something like Wattpad. After I realized what it was, I so wish it was like Wattpad! What if rather than creating a bunch of slides, I could actually write an article or a story in the form of a series? Wouldn’t that have been nice?

I wish Series becomes a huge it — chances are it will be. It’s safe, formulaic and pretty obvious, just like most of the Marvel movies. Series is simply showing how Medium is so desperate to avoid experimentation, lest they result in failure. I still think a successful creative company is a constant learning process. If you are copying, you are not learning. Peace!

How Medium is Trying to be The Snapchat For Text was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Medium is Trying to be The Snapchat For Text

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