Late last night, Medium CEO Ev Williams published a blog post about the company's future. As is often the case when discussing the sleek publishing platform/publisher/startup founder's soapbox, Williams' post was somewhat hard to parse.

In the post, Williams writes that "Medium is not a publishing tool. It’s a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people." He also notes that "in the last few months, we’ve shifted more of our attention on the product side from creating tool value to creating network value." It's a definite change in strategy for Williams, who noted in February that "Medium the product is a publishing platform" and that "Medium the company is both a publisher and a platform, but our effort is to build the best publishing platform there is."

If you're confused, you're not alone. So what does Williams’ latest Medium strategy missive really mean?

Essentially, Medium is about to look — or at least feel — less like a traditional internet word factory and a lot more like a social network. Company sources and individuals familiar with its strategy tell BuzzFeed News that companywide changes intended to increase user sign-ups and interactions are on the way, with a greater emphasis on increasing the number of logged-in users, and getting them to share content with their friends and favorite posts by clicking on heart-shaped icons. It’s also moving away from its sole emphasis on longform content and time spent on the site. As a part of those changes, the company is floating plans to restructure the management of one of its flagship collections, The Message. It also silently closed down one of its best-known sites, Re:form, in early May.

Medium launched in 2012 as yet another blogging tool — but with a prettier interface. Its founder, Ev Williams, had also founded Twitter and Blogger, and the move initially seemed like another foray into personal publishing. But it quickly began paying for high-quality editorial works, and brought on a slew of notable editors and writers to make that happen. It hired hotshot literary agent Kate Lee in 2012, and former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen in 2013. It acquired the young but highly respected science publication Matter that same year and it was later relaunched as a successful (Matter was nominated for two National Magazine Awards this year) longform magazine. In 2014, it poached legendary writer Steven Levy away from Wired to start its tech site, Backchannel. It brought on some of the Web’s best independent voices — Andy Baio, Paul Ford, Virginia Heffernan, Anil Dash, and Rex Sorgatz, among others — to write for The Message, a collection it described as “a modern version of Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin Round Table.” Within two years of its launch, Medium built a reputation as home to some of the best writing to be found anywhere.

At the heart of this, and the rubric under which it paid many of its writers, was a metric called TTR, or total time reading — a measurement of how long a reader spent on a page. While Medium once called this “the only metric that matters,” company brass has recently referred to that internally as a misleading metric, and is backing away from it in favor of others that measure how its audience is interacting with the stories on the site.

According to sources, Williams held a "strategy update" meeting in late April to discuss the company's direction and to address, among other issues, generally plateaued traffic across the publishing platform. In the meeting Williams and Hansen, the head of Medium's Content Labs, decided the platform's main goal would be to prioritize and increase engagement across the publishing network. Specifically, to encourage more readers to create accounts and sign in to Medium.