Medium knows what they’re doing (UX Study)

I found a brilliant little trick Medium uses to make articles feel a little more worth your time.

When Medium presents you with an article, this is what you see. The interesting thing is that there is no indication of exactly how many recommendations / comments / reads / etc there are.

i.e: There is no social counter.

Even when you try to find out how many people engaged with the article, Medium doesn’t make it easy for you. You can keep clicking “show more” and it’ll show you 5 or 6, but never let you get to the end. Is it 50? 500? 5,000,000?

With Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Yik Yak, you can immediately tell if something is big, huge, or viral. As a result, people reach for the stars and power users start to emerge.

Medium does something a little different. It makes it difficult to tell how popular an article is, just that it is popular, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for virality. In other words, you’re more likely to read articles, and more articles are able to reach wider audiences.

In the future, when Medium articles consistently get tens of thousands of recommendations, they might attach “26,000+ Recommendations” to their content. Until then, “36 Recommendations” is a lot less satisfying than just leaving it as “a whole bunch of people recommended this”.