---
title: Medium.com as my "a website can do that?" moment
date: 2023-02-14T22:31:08.484Z
slug: 2023-02-14-medium-can-do-that
author: Thomas Wilson

---
In the early 2010s, when I was a post-grad (not a professional), I started writing online.  And my first blog was on Medium.com.  And the writing experience there was *excellent*.

I think that was one of my earliest \"a website can do that?!\" moments.  I don't want to forget that feeling.

The buttery spacious experience of writing and laying out your piece felt like what every WYSIWYG editor should want to be.  The words *looked* beautiful and it did Just Work™️.  It wasn't clunky buttons, and impossible-to-escape-or-indent lists (looking at you Notion and JIRA).  

It's like the first time you *smell* fresh cookies coming out of the oven, or watch someone make music up close, or witness someone really *use* photoshop.  

It's one step before \"I think I could make something like this\".

And it was a website.  A website that didn't have Google money or Google brains.  A website that wasn't just plain forms and tables.

Medium might have tried to scale too far and fumbled the monetisation, discoverability, and editorial aspects.  I might have left Medium and taken a hard stance on markdown as the One True Format.  But that text editor was really fucking cool, and I hope all the folks who imagined that product into my browser in 2014 knew that.

![A screenshot of Medium.com's editor](https://help.medium.com/hc/article_attachments/360010397434/dropcap.png)

