Medium looks really interesting as a content platform. There are reasons that the content seems to be higher quality (and read the comments) than on personally run blogs. At the same time there are reasons you may not want to write on Medium
The design card
Medium demolishes and destroys Blogger and Wordpress.com in design…
Javier Sandovial
Yes the design of Medium is pretty but design can easily be changed. Heck when SVTBLE came out everyone raved about how awesome it looked. When you search for ‘WordPress SVTBLE theme’ you get plenty of options that mimic the design easily.
Now that doesn’t speak to the publishing tools that Medium has and I don’t think it would be hard to create a great blogging platform with a beautiful admin that blows away what WordPress has now. WordPress does need an admin design overhaul but that is not new news.
If all Medium has is a design advantage that’s a pretty weak leg to stand on. Building a WordPress theme to match Medium isn’t hard. Yes the admin work is harder, but certainly not impossible.
Content Ownership
My biggest issue with Medium is content ownership as in I’m selfish and want my content. I don’t think that enough people think really hard about where the put their content.
I’ve looked and don’t see a way to pull your content out of Medium outside of copy/paste. That would get the words but not the search engine traffic. By spending time crafting content for Medium you may be putting some of your best content in the hands of others where you don’t control it.
Here’s another example. I put ONE post in the circled category, but when visitors click on that section, they don’t see the post I wrote for it, only the newest content for the group.
Javier Sandovial
I’m all for guest blogging on popular sites to gain traffic to your own properties but Medium doesn’t seem to put much in to promoting the single author.
Not inspired
So no I’m not inspired at all to even see about an invite on Medium. I have no account and have read nothing that leads me to believe I ever will get an account.
Update July 11, 2013: John brought this article up in the comments and I think that it only puts Medium further down on my list of places I'd ever want to put my content.