Could a realtime reader experience help Medium grow its community?
With Medium’s Partner Program launch in August, everyone is talking about claps. Authors in the program will now be paid based on engagement from their readers, with claps being the primary signal.
Along with highlights, comments, followers, feeds, and sharing — claps are part of Medium’s innovation as the social platform for blogging. Taken together, these features help authors cultivate their community.
At Pusher, we create tools that help developers easily build realtime features into their apps. Recently our team has been experimenting with telling our story on Medium. In our company journey we have benefited from the ideas shared here, which is why our founder Max Williams and the rest of the team wanted to give back.
When our engineer Emily Green shared her tips for technical interviews, her Medium post was shared internally on Slack and a few of us simultaneously clapped her post to recommend it to our followers. We noticed that the number of claps does not update in realtime. 😰
We got to thinking, what would a realtime version of Medium look like? Would these features help Medium achieve its mission of sharing stories that matter?
Claps
With just a few lines of code, we made Medium’s claps update in realtime with Pusher’s pubsub messaging gateway. You can see the cursor going between two browsers above, both of which update with each clap.
By making claps update in realtime, Medium would help posts reach a wider audience. When a post is first published, getting those first few claps is crucial to putting the post in front of a wider audience outside of the author’s followers. With each person reading the page, seeing the clap count increase in realtime would be the social proof that they should add their voice to the chorus. More claps is more readers per post, which which will encourage authors to create more posts.
Highlights
Highlights were one of the innovative social features that Medium introduced to blogging. Sometimes you don’t want to comment, but you want to give a digital “here here!” cheer to the author. It’s valuable social validation to see that a respected expert highlighted a section, and it can also lead a user to tweet a section highlighted by other readers. If highlights updated in realtime as you read a post, it might prompt more users to leave highlights, which in turn would deepen community ties.
Comments
While it might be too noisy to make comments realtime before the author publishes (though we are working on a tool for syncing text like this), it would prompt more discussion if in-line comments appeared on the page in realtime. Two commenters could extend their conversation with multiple comments back and forth, since the update without a page refresh would give them a reasonable expectation of how long to wait for the other commenter to respond.
Avatar Presence
Imagine if you could see the avatar of every Medium user who is currently reading your post? What if this was visible to everyone currently reading the post, as well? This presence would give us a better sense of the community surrounding each post. Not every reader will clap or comment, but seeing that you are sharing the reading experience with someone you know or admire could bring us all together around topics. It would also make it seem more valuable to leave a comment or a highlight, since you know who will be reading them.
Medium is an amazing platform, but how much better could it be if it updated in realtime? It could build stronger communities and nurture debates more effectively than it currently does.
We’ve helped developers build and scale features like these (and many more!) with Pusher. We’d love to hear from you @pusher if you think you’d like to add realtime features to your app.
