Dear Medium,
I just became a member today because I want to support a platform that I use every day. $5 a month is a small price to pay to help you in your work to make the web a more thoughtful and engaged place. But as you might have guessed from the title there’s a bit more to it than that.
I use Medium as a place to selectively republish the scribblings from my 13 year old blog. Even though you’ve created a truly beautiful editor for the web, these old fingers still reach for Vim and Markdown. Old Dog, New Tricks, etc. But I love your import feature that makes it easy for people to move content around like this. Don’t ever turn it off, ok? I’m sure you’ve thought about it already, but maybe it makes sense for members to be able to import from RSS?
More importantly you let me participate in collaborative publications such as On Archivy, which is a discussion of where archives meet the web. I also use your custom domains service to host Documenting DocNow, which is a space for sharing news about the Documenting the Now project that I work on. Your analytics reports on how people are engaging with the content are simple, and super useful. I don’t have to go digging through a complicated dashboard to see what things people are enjoying. Thanks for making this possible.
And of course, I read content on here quite a bit. I should try to measure how often I wander over from Twitter, or through a notification or email that someone I follow has published something. You’ve clearly thought about the reading experience a lot since it’s easy to read on the web and on my smartphone in your app.
So, uh, now that you have my credit card number, ahem, I think it would be pretty awesome to be able to pay authors directly for their work. If I’ve enjoyed something someone has written and I want to support them I don’t want to have to click on ads. I want to give it directly to them.
I’m sure you’ve seen how Patreon works. It would be kinda like that right? Or maybe it would be a step in the direction of Ted Nelson’s micropayments. You’ve probably thought about this already and hang out with Ted Nelson on his houseboat.
But, you should totally do it! If you just want to turn it on for me that would be ok. But I think other people might like it too. Or maybe you did already and I didn’t notice yet.
In any event, thanks for your time, and good luck!
//Ed
PS. Oh, also, thanks for letting me to license my content with the Creative Commons. Cheers!