Medium Is Encouraging Shorter Posts With New Features

If you find yourself on blogging platform Medium, chances are you're digging into a long-form piece. According to the team at Medium, that wasn't the intent of their platform. Perhaps out of fear they're being known as a long-form only platform, Medium is making some changes today that should encourage much tighter writing. A new inline editor will allow Medium writers to scribble out a few hundred words quickly and easily, while redesigns elsewhere make for faster navigation.

Medium's new inline editor pops up right on your homepage, and is meant for quick-hit writing. If your idea balloons into something more, you can take it to the full-screen editor with just a click.

Shorter posts also get some attention in the stream. If what you're reading is truncated, you might get through the whole thing without having to expand it from your stream. If that's the case, you can also recommend the article right from your stream.

Medium is also allowing authors to add tags to their posts, now. As Medium puts it, "Tags are just what they sound like: Metadata applied to posts, added by the author, that connect them to related posts." Searchable tags also allow users to find what they're looking for faster, without having to dive through the stream.

The changes take effect immediately, and should leave Medium a much more social and engaging place to write rather than a heavy-handed platform for showcasing talent. While long-form is still very much welcome on Medium, it seems the goal is more blogs, more engagement, and much faster reading.

Source: Medium