This whole piece feels quite convincingly upbeat. It's good to hear, but also seems at odds with the daily experience of many of us with the platform's role in matchmaking between writers and readers, from the writer side, that is.

I think the big challenge for Medium in 2025 is not further growth, whatever the finance department might argue. There was frankly too much of that in '24, diluting and polluting the user and community experience to a damaging degree.

With breakeven/profitability achieved, I really feel the platform needs to get back to previous levels in terms of how it showcases and simply distributes great content.

Yes, there are many great articles out there. Yes, there are many great pubs with reliable editorial standards. But so much of that goes unseen amid the vast amount of [insert family-friendly expletive here].

Featured stories will presumably be refined - right now they seem to be having very little practical impact, at least at pubs with follower counts of 500 to 1500 in my direct experience as publisher and writer.

One function that I would find helpful would be a single button to subscribe to a digest of stories from a given pub, to ensure that readers at least get a chance to read the non-boosted pieces.

Pubs that publish too much of too little quality would find that no one remained subscribed to this - it would be a help above all to smaller, niche pubs, whether boosters or not. This is presumably what 'featured stories' is meant to achieve, but it is (a) too limited in number (1/week), and (b) seemingly undermined by the haphazard nature of the distribution algorithm, which continues to struggle massively with the huge volume of [insert expletive] content being churned out by chancers.

That's my two cents (i.e. the entire earnings from a non-boosted story...) regarding stories, pubs and distribution.

Here's to hopes for a better 2025.

Happy Holidays!