Who is medium

And it was good for them, and it was good for us. The Wired publication Backchannel left too. It lived on Medium until a few months ago.

After hearing this, it was clear that the party at Medium was winding down. At the height of the proverbial shindig, major tech CEOs loved using Medium. It served as an informal channel to share their most intimate thoughts. While they can still use the website for that purpose, it will never be the same again. SEO and social media wizards are now using Medium as a redistribution network. They post original content on their own optimized sites and then rerun it on Medium for more exposure.

This cheapens the brand. It's similar to the syndication model that basic cable relies on. Medium's no longer the HBO of online publishing platforms. All that remains are the contrarian headlines and cliche musings on income inequality. Medium will always hold a place in my heart. Too bad the barista flipped on the house lights, grabbed a mop and told everyone to get out.

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Edit Story. In this analogy, I suppose eating it would be making money, and so far, there's no sign Medium is doing anything but stockpiling cake. While people wondered why anyone would publish on Medium, as Marco Arment did , the big questions about what Medium was and what Medium was doing were relegated to footnotes.

Indeed, Arment's post included this one: "[Medium] will also face a problem I'm familiar with: If the plan is to grow frontpage traffic and be more like a magazine, what kind of magazine is Medium? What's it about? Who's it for? And if they narrow the focus enough to make that easier to answer, who gets left out?

In other words: what are the boundaries and limits of Medium? More specifically: is Medium a place where Peter Shih should post about San Francisco women he thinks are ugly? Is Medium a better place on the Internet or is it any old place on the Internet?

For us media producers, we have to decide whether Medium is a friend or a foe. They don't appear to have the financial constraints we have like making money through advertising or subscriptions , which gives them a design leg up, and they also don't have the ethical constraints we have in what runs on their site. If we publish something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on us. If Medium publishes something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on the writer.

In fact, in five minutes exploring Medium's latest posts, I found a post that came right up to the plagiarism line. The content marketing company that created it quickly pulled it down after I tweeted about it.

But who takes the brand hit for that kind of mistake? And if the answer is not Medium, have they managed to create a system in which only positive attributes can be attributed to the posts they pull from their platform bloggers?

That doesn't seem like a tenable long-term situation. This is the Internet, after all. Individual writers, too, should probably know what it means that their writing is going up on Medium. If Medium is a publication, their work is situated within the journalistic tradition, with goals separate from corporate imperatives.

If Medium is a platform and the goal is for it to acquire more users, then everything that gets posted on its site is marketing for that platform itself, even the very best stuff. The payments to writers get filed under user acquisition, and belong in the business category "growth hacking.

Maybe, though, I'm applying old-line thinking to this new creation. Some receive intuitive information, in which images and words appear as mental impressions that are then relayed along to the living. In other cases, a medium may hear actual auditory messages or see actual images of these messages. Many people who do spirit communication regularly find that the dead can be quite a chatty bunch sometimes.

If they've got something to tell you, they're going to make sure you get told. What you choose to do with the information is up to you, but for a lot of mediums, it can feel like they've got someone's dead granny screaming in their ears, and if they don't pass that message along, she's not going to shut up.

During a seance , a medium may be the method by which messages are relayed from the spirit world to the guests at the event. While some mediums may enter into a trance-like state, others may be completely awake and fully lucid while passing messages along. Sometimes, particularly if there are a group of fairly magically-aware people at the table, messages might be coming through all over the place, in no particular order.

It can feel like the spirit world version of a chat room, with everyone just being bombarded right and left with messages from the other side. Keep in mind that many people who are not highly trained mediums can still receive messages from the spirit world. In recent years, we've seen the emergence of "celebrity mediums," who are people that have become famous simply for being mediums. This, in turn, has led to some fairly intense scrutiny of those who claim to have mediumship ability.

People like the " Long Island Medium," Theresa Caputo and Allison DuBois, who inspired the hit television show Medium , have often been criticized for taking advantage of their clients' grief. Still worse, many are accused of being frauds. However, like many other metaphysical disciplines, there is simply no scientific way to prove or disprove the presence—or absence—of psychic abilities such as mediumship.

If you're going to engage the services of a medium, be cautious about what you reveal ahead of time. Some people, who regularly debunk mediumship, go to the trouble of creating fake online social media accounts as part of secret sting organizations that disprove the work of celebrity psychics. If you've decided to hire the services of a medium, for whatever reasons, there are a few things you should keep in mind to guarantee you get the best session possible.

First of all, try to come in with an open mind. You may be feeling skeptical, but if you let that be an issue, it can certainly color your results. A corollary to that is that it's important, to be honest about why you're there. If you're only trying to debunk things or to expose the medium as a fraud, go ahead and admit it up front.

A medium who's legitimate may still be willing to work with you, if for no other reason than to show you that their skills are very much real.