A couple of comments on things not mentioned in this article: - Medium's design is one of the big reasons it succeeded. Things written in Medium look authorita

A couple of comments on things not mentioned in this article: - Medium's design is one of the big reasons it succeeded. Things written in Medium look authoritative. They're also easy and pleasant to read. And that means people are more likely to read them. If you're cloning Medium as Open-Source, you need to clone the design. Yes, probably including the slow-ass Javascript (or at least, split-test with and without and see which gets more engagement). - Medium's discoverability is the other reason it works. If I write a post on my own blog, as I have done for 20 years, no new readers find it unless I promote it myself. I happen to be good at that, but most people aren't. On Medium, there are built-in mechanisms to bubble content up, and that's tremendously valuable if you don't already have a large audience and care about people reading what you write. - The domain. I've observed over the years that which domain your content's hosted on has an increasingly large effect on whether people are willing to click through to it. (Why? It's shown next to the link on Reddit, Hacker News, and other places. It's an obvious signal.). A "medium.com" domain link still seems to carry more trustability than a "randomsite.com". They did a good job building their brand.