I don't know, was it? From the beginning everything on Medium seemed to be written by folks who styled themselves as "thought leaders," but clearly weren't

medium had one killer insight, which was that if they dolled up blog posts to look like prestige news site articles, most people would mentally put them in the same category. at one point there was a wave of public figures using medium basically like they use/d the nyt oped section before and after

but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill the niche that medium wanted to. meanwhile substack mints prestige by emphatically not looking like a news site. medium doesn't really have a place on either end of that anymore

You mean this https://substack.com/ ? Never heard of it, thanks.

I think so. There was a phase where there was clean design + many high-profile users pushing it a bit above other platforms. Nowadays clean design is more commonplace, they ruined their own design, more low-quality content, ... push them far down.

I remember the clean design phase. It's easy to forget, but back then medium was really impressive. Their design team posted an article about quotation marks in 2015 and I still remember it today:

https://medium.design/quotation-marks-c8993b54417c

I don't have the link handy, but I also remember their team posting about how the process of creating the underlines for their hyperlinks and thinking how interesting it was to see all the thought and process they had out into it.

Thought leader is a synonym for empty suit.

If someone uses that in a bio you can just move along, you won't miss anything.

100% this. I also noticed a trend of people calling themselves "visionaries"...same thing.

I feel the same way about the descriptor "serial entrepreneur".

This is what I’m trying to fix with https://panakit.com

Use your own domain while still making it easy to publish blogs(eg. no servers, no code etc)