As a long time Medium author and publisher and occasional business partner I have all kinds of feelings. But the main one is about the need for urgency. One b

As a long time Medium author and publisher and occasional business partner I have all kinds of feelings. But the main one is about the need for urgency. One basic way to read these changes is that it just looks like Medium getting savvier about what drives and grows their subscription business. There's been no pivot there. The challenge for them still is to get their subscription business over the hump. And the hump they have been at for awhile is that the subscription has been growing despite being generally meh quality. It's just $5 and a lot of people like supporting authors that way. But what are the ways to go from meh to great? What I think Medium found is that they were getting better value by spending in other places. For example, I was part of bringing the back catalog of The Pragmatic Programmers books onto Medium. That was a deal that was relatively economical and had a direct hypothesis related to growing the subscription. For programmers now, at least, they have a nice headline for why a programmer would spend $5. So to see Medium focus more on what's working to actually tip the subscription over puts me at ease because I still see the company has being in a zero to one situation. It could succeed, but it hasn't yet.