Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-ev-williams-medium-content-fast-food

Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees, with its emphasis on feeding the great, gaping maw of platforms like Twitter and Facebook too often producing what he describes as tantamount to junk food. The point, he says, is fixing the feedback loops that drive the production of so much junk. “I think a lot about systems which are dynamic and about how feedback loops drive behaviour,” Williams explains. “If you look at feedback loops like likes and retweets, they’ve been very carefully crafted to maximise certain types of behaviours. But if we reward people based on a measurement system where there’s literally no difference between a one-second page view or reading something that brought them value or changed their mind, it’s like – your job is feeding people, but all you’re measuring is maximising calorie delivery. So what you’d learn is that junk food is more efficient than healthy, nourishing food.” As Medium’s chief executive, Williams has built what the late New York Times media columnist David Carr once described as a “typewriter for the web”. It’s actually many things at once – a content management system for writers, for example, as well as a storehouse for musings from professional and non-professional creators.

1. The company raised another $57m late last year in a round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and has hosted the writing of everyone from individual bloggers to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook, who took to Medium last week to slam the campaign of Bernie Sanders as lacking a “clear path” to the US presidential nomination.

2. Tech firms turn frequently to Medium to announce new products or company news, and the self-styled “place to read, write and interact with the stories that matter most to you” supplements user-generated content with fare from staff writers like former Newsweek editor Stephen Levy, who leads Medium’s technology site, Backchannel. Williams & co have been refining the approach since Medium’s launch, for example by closing some Medium sites last summer and adjusting the direction and budgets of others. It also spun off its publication Matter, which will become a media company called Matter Studios owned by Williams. It will help finance and support media projects from podcasts to books to TV and video, among other things.

3. Medium has also recently attracted smaller publishers like the Awl, the Hairpin and Monday Note to migrate to it, with content from others such as Time Inc’s Money on the way too. New features, such as providing a way to launch paid memberships that generate revenue from readers, are meant to accelerate that same shift and entice even more publishers.

This is a big article and i believe it's good because the co-founder gives the message that we take all the information we want as to anything coming from any person as we want to feel entertained. We have audiences which can feel dissatisfied by advertisers or information but they will still consume this information and give feedback however, this would give Ev William giving idea that twitter is like the news and that it works like a newspaper industry.