I think the big Silicon Valley experiment of the last decade was to see just how many things could be turned into social networks. Venmo comes to mind; it is bizarre to me that some venture capital bro actually proposed the idea that we should turn money transfers into a pseudo social network but they did it, and now I can see inadvertently which of my friends are pizza addicts, just by looking at the news feed.

Medium seems like it was designed with that basic question in mind; how can we take a blogging platform and fuse it with social network elements as well as mass-media elements?

It's a good result. I hope it sticks around for a while. I like writing here.