Sources: nearly all of Medium's sites are undergoing major upheavals; employees quiet on changes due to NDA
Medium, the publishing platform started by one of Twitter's cofounders, is gutting some of its most popular sites — Two weeks ago, publishing platform Medium …
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2015, Medium was still in its experimental phase: months earlier it had launched Medium for Publishers, migrating over a dozen outside sites including The Awl onto its own infrastructure. This report says that experiment is now in reverse — sources describe nearly all of Medium's own sites as undergoing major upheaval, with employees bound by NDAs and unable to discuss what is changing.
First-order effects
- Medium's staff are effectively silenced on the company's direction: the NDAs mean the people closest to the changes cannot explain them, leaving the platform's editorial strategy visible only through product moves rather than statements.
- Publishers like The Awl that moved onto Medium under the Publisher tools suite face uncertainty about the fate of the sites they joined.
Second-order effects
- The secrecy compounds a pattern the later coverage documents: by 2017 Medium cut a third of its staff while pivoting to a less-proven means of paying writers, and 2021 employee interviews described a dysfunctional company — repeated opaque restructurings make it harder for publishers and writers to commit to the platform.
- Each strategic reset forces Medium's hosted publications to weigh whether building audience on rented infrastructure is worth the churn risk.
Third-order effects
- If NDA-driven opacity plus serial pivots becomes the operating model, Medium drifts toward a structural credibility problem with exactly the writers and publishers its business depends on — the same dysfunction later documented in the 2021 employee interviews, which ended with founder Ev Williams handing the CEO role to Tony Stubblebine in the 2022 leadership change.
The trend: Medium's history of secretive, sweeping restructurings — from 2015's site upheavals through the 2017 layoffs and the eventual founder exit — shows how a mission-driven publishing platform repeatedly traded stability for reinvention.