I don't know if Medium <i>cares</i> that much about their own content discovery/cliquing/etc. Sure, the content has to be accessible from the site in some fashion so web spiders can reach it--but really, as far as I can tell, Medium blogs seem built for the generation of standalone post pages that get shared via their authors self-promoting them on their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, and then other people putting them up on social bookmarking websites like Reddit and HN. (Or at least, anecdotally, that's where <i>I've</i> found all the Medium articles I've ever read.)<p>You don't really <i>visit</i> someone's Medium blog. I've never seen anyone say, on their profile somewhere else, "here's a direct link to my blog; it's on Medium." It looks the same as every other Medium blog, after all; that's a strong disincentive to people promoting links their blog root, since they can't brand it--and I think that's intentional on Medium's part.<p>Instead, you just find someone's Medium <i>posts</i> shared in your feed on some sharing service, because someone you know linked to them. Which is really what the web has needed for a while, I think: a nice, clean, "here is a long standalone essay" hosting service which is <i>ancillary</i> to your more usual blogging, which occurs on FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.<p>A geeky comparison, that might explain their value proposition, as I see it: FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc. are like a VM stack: you want to only hold tiny little objects on it, because reading those objects (scrolling past them) takes time and "processing cycles" for the reader. You don't want to pass huge ones around, because they'll take up a lot of space everywhere they go, and you have to copy them piece by piece (there have been novels written over Twitter, but they're a bitch to read or quote or export, etc.)<p>Medium, then, is a VM heap to stick large objects on, and then pass them by reference on the stack (FB/G+/Twitter/Tumblr/etc.) In effect, it's a pastebin with really nice styling, feed generation, and collaborative editorial features, not a "blogging service" per se. Make sense?