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Tue 10 Jan 2017 4:26PM

Forget Twitter, Let’s Buy Medium

NS Nathan Schneider Public Seen by 113

A new provocation from Robert Benjamin on the new announcement from Ev Williams: "Forget Twitter, Let’s Buy Medium."

SF

Suresh Fernando Tue 10 Jan 2017 4:36PM

This is a lot more realistic as the funds necessary to drive this transaction will be within our reach. There are also a couple of other factors that make this worth exploring:
1. Evan Williams is already aligned from a values perspective, it seems.
2. The content on Medium contains, for the most part, more intellectual property than a tweet. Therefore content creators have more at stake... and are more likely to feel like/want to be owners.

A shared ownership structure could/would make sense.

@ntnsndr ... are you connected to Robert Benjamin?

I'm in if you want to arrange a call or some process.

NS

Nathan Schneider Tue 10 Jan 2017 6:46PM

Of course I'm connected with him; he's founder of Member's Media, which was featured at the first Platform Cooperativism conference.

AM

Aaron McHale Tue 10 Jan 2017 8:18PM

Interesting idea, although let's also not loose sight of the problem facing Twitter, that it could be sold and forced to make changes that wouldn't benefit it's user base.

Now, that's not to say I disagree with this idea, definitely sounds worth exploring as if it's more realistic, we may indeed be better of perusing it. It could even start a bigger movement within Twitter to do something similar, but let's just not loose focus of the primary goal.

DS

Danny Spitzberg Tue 10 Jan 2017 9:23PM

Quick poll - who here currently writes on Medium? I encourage anyone who actively uses the platform to join this super-supportive, always-lovely, free and informal writers collective, https://medium.com/pomqa.

And if we do end up committing to agitating, education, and organizing... it'll be great to have more voices in concert.

NS

Nathan Schneider Wed 11 Jan 2017 2:51AM

Write for medium if it becomes a co-op. In the meantime, write for ioo.coop! :)

JR

John Rhoads Thu 12 Jan 2017 11:21PM

Indeed! ioo.medium.com (ioo.fb.com, ioo.twitter.com etc.)

RS

Radu Seserman Wed 11 Jan 2017 3:29AM

I will pitch whatever I can to help with the purchase.
I wonder if there is a document to detail how the co-op to be will function. From my limited experience it seems that is more difficult to create and preserve a democratic community than to raise funds.

JD

Josef Davies-Coates Wed 11 Jan 2017 10:48AM

Who are the "rock-star attorneys, consultants, and strategists who have experience structuring scalable platform cooperatives." the piece mentions?

Also, in the UK this just happened - a small new authors co-op:

http://www.thenews.coop/112416/news/co-operatives/britains-first-a%E2%80%A6erative-launches/

Also the previous founders of http://www.contributoria.com/ which was a great experiment in co-creating and funding independent journalism are planning a new venture http://publish.org/ and have some interest in the co-op model...

Cheers,

Josef.

NS

Nathan Schneider Wed 11 Jan 2017 4:01PM

Thanks for the news @josefdaviescoates! And exciting to hear about Publish.

I imagine he's thinking of folks like Jason Wiener, who worked with him on his bylaws.

SF

Suresh Fernando Wed 11 Jan 2017 5:21PM

It seems to me that the essence of the Platform Acquisition Co-Op conversation is the ACQUISITION part.

The hypotheses are:
1. The world would be a better place if there were more tech platforms that were co-operatively owned.
2. The path to accelerate this process is to ACQUIRE existing assets

There are a lot of great co-op start ups doing amazing things... but a discussion on what is being built organically is tangential to this particular strategy.

The necessary conditions to move forward with the Platform Acquisition model are:
1. Platforms of small enough financial value (market cap) to allow us to pay off existing owners (if necessary). The transfer of ownership requires a transfer of financial capital
2. The Platform needs to have leaders that are values aligned since you need their buy in to realistically get a deal done. It makes no sense to pursue 'hostile takeovers'. Medium seems to have a values aligned leader.
3. The Platform needs to be under financial pressure. There needs to be an internal motivation to sell

Twitter fails on condition 1 & 2... at least it certainly fails on condition 1... and we have no reason to think it doesn't fail on condition 2. It satisfies condition 3.

Medium seems to satisfy all three conditions...

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