The Best Medium Day Talks (That I Watched)

I have a confession. I fell asleep during Medium day. I was really tired, OK? And it looked like Medium was putting up replays for all the talks. Unfortunately it looks like not all the talks have a replay available. Maybe they’ll be up later. Who knows.

Update: looks like some new talks are being uploaded. Maybe they will be up later. Maybe I’ll have to write a part 2.

You can view the replays here.

However it looks like you need to register to view them and registration is closed. That’s unfortunate. I planned to have just a summary of my favourite talks here and then allowed you to watch them but it looks like that may not be possible anymore. Well, maybe Medium will make the talks available to everyone later so I’ll still talk about some of my favourite ones.

Do Nothing: How To Break Away From Overworking

I love author talks. I find them so interesting when an author gives a talk on their book. This is why I subscribed to Google Talks. A lot of authors talk about their books there. And this talk is no different.

In this talk Celeste Headlee goes over her book of the same title (just a little longer, which probably says something about the current state of book titles). She talks about the cult of efficiency and how we’ve been brainwashed into working harder.

How To Succeed As An Academic On Medium

And the title for the worst title for a talk goes to… Seriously it is very poorly named. I originally thought, “I’m not an Academic, why should I watch this?” But it’s about so much more than Academia.

It does cover Enrique Dans’ life as an academic but the core of the talk is actually about research. And I must admit this is where I am a little biased. Because it talks about RSS and I have an RSS app. He talks about how you should ‘blog with your feet’ which really just means how you should always be researching.

Although I should point out that Feedly sucks. It marks stories as read after 30 days whether you are a paid subscriber or not. Use my RSS reader Stratum, it’s much better.

Medium Keynote Address (and Q&A)

This is also a bit of a poorly named talk but it’s not the worst name in the world. This talk is by Tony Stubblebine, the CEO of Medium and he shares a lot about the inner workings of Medium. Too much if you ask me. He’s like Linus when he spoils a product launch.

He talks about how publications are an afterthought which I always suspected. It seems like publications are just bolted on the original infrastructure. But if I was the CEO of Medium I wouldn’t say that.

He also talks about the boost program. There has been a lot of confusion around it and he explains how the boost program is their attempt at human curation, to make people feel more satisfied with what they read so they end up subscribing.

He also talks about writing daily. He says don’t do it for the money because Medium is going to penalize things no one wants to read. I’ve actually been thinking about this. I write daily but the vast majority of the posts don’t make that much money. What if I wrote less but made sure every post was a banger? A little like how many YouTubers have a main channel for their quality content and a second channel for random other stuff? Anyways Tony goes on to say how writing daily is still a really good way of honing your skills.

Lastly he talks about Mastodon. He directly says that ‘Twitter is dying’.

I don’t think anyone can kill Twitter, not even Elon Musk. I wrote about it here. The reason is network effects. There are too many people using Twitter which means they have strong network effects. It is extremely unlikely that any other social media platform will surpass them.

Anyways, Medium is encouraging people to sign up to Mastodon. I signed up to Mastodon after watching this. But I don’t think it will take off.

Other Talks

There are some other talks that were interesting. Justin Cox’s The Write Stuff was pretty good. It talks about his publication The Writing Cooperative and how he looks at choosing articles and boosting. He says that he does boost articles submitted to him, but not all of them. I always thought it was a conflict of interest to boost articles in your own publication but I guess not.

Then there’s Zulie Rane et al’s How To Use Medium To Build A Writing Portfolio. This one is more focused if you want to get hired for a writing job. Otherwise it’s not that interesting.

Similarly there’s Darius Foroux’s How To Grow A Following On Medium. This one I really liked. Although partially because he talks like a mob boss. “So, eh, you want to grow a following on Medium huh?”

He talks about posting on popular conversations and adding stuff. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing. I find my topics on popular topics are the most interesting to write but I don’t know what’s popular. I mean I can see what’s in my feed and what’s trending but most of those things I don’t have much to add.

Then there’s the science of happiness. This one is pretty basic but it’s presented well. It’s the normal things: sleep, exercise, meditation, doing what you love, being in nature, gratitude and showing gratitude, smiling, giving, spending money wisely, avoiding comparisons, and relationships. It’s not going to give you any epiphanies but it’s a solid talk.

Finally there’s Emily Menez’s Writing Satire With Specificity which encourages you to give room for your writing to breathe. This is a problem I’ve always had since high school: I’m just not good at elaborating my thoughts.

There was actually another talk that I saw but I can’t find it anymore. And I can’t find any reference to it as if Medium is trying to gaslight me. (Update: it’s up again) It was about the search for extraterrestrial life. I only included it because there was one line joking that the research wouldn’t detract from dark matter research. The joke here is that dark matter doesn’t exist and is just an excuse to waste money on crazy experiments. At least in my opinion.

Also Buster Benson has this dymaxion map on his wall.

It’s my favourite map projection. At least I think it’s a dymaxion map. It doesn’t look like any dymaxion map I’ve ever seen but you can make dymaxion maps look different by unfolding it differently. Oh wait, I think I know what happened. Africa is mirrored in the X axis. Also New Zealand is cut in half. Well, at least they included it.

Anyways Medium Day was a pretty good event. There were a lot of technical issues though. Multiple talks had the speakers not being able to hear each other. And there were a lot of buffering issues that didn’t seem to happen in the main Medium presentations, only the other presentations.

I suspect next year Medium will sort it all out and have an even bigger Medium day. Looking forward to it.

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