For the first time, Medium is becoming more than just a blogging platform. The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note-taking and journaling with something akin to a private social network. The app is intended to enable you to write more and help you share those writings with your friends and fans. And it’s part of a much larger idea about blogging and a much larger thesis about the state of the Internet.
“I don’t think we’ve actually launched anything major since 2017,” Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine told me over Zoom, days before the company’s biggest launch in seemingly almost a decade. That’s when Ev Williams, then CEO of Medium, decided to stop chasing ad dollars and become a subscription business. “It is clear that the failing system is the advertising-driven media on the Internet,” Williams wrote at the time. “It just doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to do that.” Medium has started charging for access to most content. “We are out of the attention economy,” Stubblebine says now.
The trend Williams saw at the time has only accelerated and metastasized. AI companies are hoovering up any content they can get their hands on, legality be damned; search engines and chatbots are sending less and less traffic to the web. Medium, like most websites on the Internet, relies on Google for much of its traffic – in the age of Google Zero, that’s an existential risk. “When Google started removing all traffic,” Stubblebine says, “what I told them is that it hurts us, but it hurts you too, because I’m just going to tell you what my product roadmap is going to do: I’m going to move to private blogs… We’re just going to take everything underground.”
All this brings us back to TK, an application and network that has no use or need for Google references. The idea behind TK is pretty simple: it’s a simple note-taking app, with an emphasis on daily journal-style notes and longer-form writing. The app itself is nice enough, like an ultra-minimalist version of Evernote, but it’s the writing part that Stubblebine is most excited about.
On one hand, you can point an AI model at your writing and use it to help you organize or make sense of all the notes you’ve taken, by searching through your notes or asking for feedback on your writing. “TK” is both the name of the app and a shortcut: Type in the letters (which writers frequently use as a placeholder—they’re easy to find later, because the letters T and K almost never appear next to each other) and you can call the template to fill in some information for you. Stubblebine refers to “Unix pipes” several times in our conversation, and his idea is to use the big language models to do some of the heavy lifting of creating and managing notes.
Once you’ve written something – and Stubblebine points out that it doesn’t have to be a blog post – you can share it however you see fit. You can share it via links or email like you would share a Google Doc, and collaborators can write, comment, and leave emoji reactions. You can also add your writings to what TK calls Libraries. Stubblebine calls the concept of libraries “private blogs,” which is a good metaphor. The first libraries I’ve seen in the app are mostly focused on one topic, and people can contribute their writing on that topic. There is no public face to any of this; it’s just a blog for and by its authors. Sometimes a few, sometimes a few hundred. Some groups share their current book projects, exchange recipes, and publish drafts of poetry, all in front of other group members. It’s a blog meets group chat.
This private blog concept is a big part of the future of Medium. “Medium is, on some level, performative,” Stubblebine explains. “You have to want to share yourself with the world.” But in a post-Google world, he says, that’s essentially impossible. TK does not measure page views or reward authors for generating traffic. “It’s a community that’s going to give you feedback and encouragement,” Stubblebine says. “It’s not about wanting to be noticed.” Features like this, he says, will soon come to the broader Medium platform.
TK is now available for free via apps for web, Android and iOS. (Stubblebine says a native desktop app is also coming soon.) If TK works, it could be a crucial new way for Medium to make money. Clearly, Stubblebine says, there are ways to make money through private, paid content. That’s the business of newsletters. But also, he wonders, what if there was a way to package all the best parts of the Recipe Box library and charge people, or AI agents, for access? “The generic web is getting dumber and dumber,” Stubblebine says. If AI is the future, “it has to be based on this layer of human intelligence.” And all that intelligence might be better outside the confines of Google’s algorithm.
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