Medium is a wrapper layer around Twitter social graph, for people who want to rant or self-promote more (because 140 characters isn't enough for a rant or self-

Medium is a wrapper layer around Twitter social graph, for people who want to rant or self-promote more (because 140 characters isn't enough for a rant or self-promotion disguised as content). When you sign up for Medium, you login with Twitter account. Then you automatically get posts from all the people you follow on Twitter who writes post on Medium. This means if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you instantly have a lot of following on Medium to begin with. All these other comments about how "beautiful" it is, or how "it gets out of the way", etc. are nothing more than just side benefits, they are not the reason why it's getting traction. Same as how Meerkat got immediate traction by implementing twitter login while its previous products with basically the same technology never got any traction.