I don’t think the Internet reached any kind of maturity. If anything, it’s in a state of a highly problematic teenager with delinquent tendencies.

The main reason why it’s so hard to pull something like Medium off is simply the lack of money. As I said, Medium has the benefit of huge investment and the intention was to create a revolution in the media.

To some degree, it succeeded in this highly ambitious goal. Medium too, however, is like a teenager trying to find its way and mission in life while figuring out how to make a living doing it too.

It’s a tricky one and it also makes one see why publicly funded media, such as PBS or BBC, often produce the best programs — they aren’t crippled with the main focus of the shareholders and investors on profit.

Their work wouldn’t be possible if those stations went commercial and only cared about views and clicks in order to generate revenue and profit.

It seems that Medium leadership team is grappling with this too. Also, they are trying to come up with a perfect AI algorithm but since it’s after all AI, I don’t think they themselves can predict or fully understand how it will work.

It’s all gone very commercial right now, and they are calling it “providing value to the reader.”

In many cases, though, the value is not there, has been lost, or maybe we are not seeing eye to eye on the definition of “value.”

I think that Medium thought of something like PBS’s funding structure that is also based on membership and has no ads when developing their business model. PBS, however, enjoys public funding and accepts donations in addition to the membership.

The main difference thus is that PBS is not for profit while Medium is. I guess that’s where it all went wrong.