And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet
But while other tech leaders enter the confessional booth, Mr. Williams, 46, seems to be emerging with a new outlook — a blend of old-fashioned Silicon Valley optimism tempered with the caution of a tech veteran who has seen well-intended products hijacked by horrible people.
Last week, Mr. Williams sent me a kind of mini-manifesto — a two-page document containing his thoughts about technology’s potential, the problems with ad-supported media and the regulation of social media platforms. We followed up with a phone interview, in which he expanded on the ideas, some of which he has been thinking about and refining for years but had yet to make public.
“One of the things we’ve seen in the past few years is that technology doesn’t just accelerate and amplify human behavior,” Mr. Williams wrote. “It creates feedback loops that can fundamentally change the nature of how people interact and societies move (in ways that probably none of us predicted).”
Last year, after that strategy failed to catch on, Medium laid off a chunk of its staff and turned to a subscription model. Users can now pay $5 per month for access to premium stories, and writers can earn small amounts of money when their stories get positive feedback (known as “claps”) from other users. The company has also hired human editors in order to elevate substance over fluff.
Mr. Williams wants people to find Medium valuable enough to pay for, but he doesn’t necessarily want it to be the kind of site that people visit 10 times a day. He has become a fan of the work of Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who has criticized the addictive qualities of popular internet services.
(The company recently solicited proposals for tools to help it measure “conversational health.”)
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/business/ev-williams-twitter-medium.html