PF: Every letter is an animated thing.

RD: Mouse over it; it does something. So: Medium's not giving you the leverage that they give you in Word. But it’s still what you see is what you get, for a very constrained definition of what you get. They’ve scoped that pretty tightly, for the I would say admirable purpose of being able to inject it into as many consumption mechanisms as possible.

PF: Agreed.

RD: It's pretty low-friction when you compare it to something like this, the Wag’s archive that we’re going to be dumping this into, which is image-based. They’ve miraculously got Drupal to participate in the production of this thing.

PF: Whoa.

RD: Yeah; When I first met you, you described what you did at Harper’s as sort of spit, tape and fishing wire, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here. There’s a scrappiness to something like that, that gives the content some character. Where on Medium, for better or for worse, you’re living or dying on the quality of the language, because there’s so little else to give it character.

PF: Well, the character is that of Medium. And there are ways to work with that. I think a lot about form, and the way that people react to and interact with form is always very telling. Medium is a set of constraints. Some people really get upset about the constraints. Some people embrace them. Some people don’t even notice them, because all they want to do is type some stuff and get some paragraphs in.

I’ve had a conversation with a friend from the very literary world. And he was just like, “Those people over there don’t know how to put together a great review section, and I’m worried about that publication and that publication.”