// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK
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The company is betting that the future of blogging looks a lot like group chats.
The company is betting that the future of blogging looks a lot like group chats.
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For the first time ever, Medium is becoming more than just a blogging platform. The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note taking and journaling with something resembling a private social network. The app is meant to get you writing more, and help you share that writing with friends and fans. And it’s part of a much bigger idea about blogging, and a much broader thesis about the state of the internet.
“I don’t think we’ve actually had a launch of anything important since 2017,” Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine tells me over Zoom, a few days ahead of the company’s biggest launch in apparently almost a decade. That was when Medium’s then-CEO, Ev Williams, decided to quit chasing ad dollars and become a subscription business. “It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet,” Williams wrote at the time. “It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to.” Medium began charging for access to most content. “We got out of the attention economy,” Stubblebine says now.
The trend Williams saw back then, though, has only accelerated and metastasized. AI companies are hoovering up any content they can get their hands on, legality be damned; search engines and chatbots are sending less and less traffic back to the web. Medium, like most websites on the internet, relies on Google for a huge portion of its traffic — in the time of Google Zero, that’s an existential risk. “When Google started taking away all the traffic,” Stubblebine says, “what I told them is that this hurts us, but it also hurts you, because I’ll just tell you what my product roadmap is going to do: I’m going to switch to private blogging… We’re just going to take everything underground.”