Medium has had a great 2016. The publishing platform, created in 2012 by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, saw its monthly visitors reach 60 million by December — a year-over-year increase of 140 percent.
Medium was a flurry of activity in 2016, with over 7.5 million posts published (up from 1.9 million posts at the end of 2015). The variety of content available on Medium also boosted engagement rates. Over the past 12 months, total time reading tripled to reach 4.5 million hours per month. Altogether, readers spent a staggering 3.6 millennia reading together on Medium in 2016 (that’s over 31.5 million hours).
Medium’s most popular content categories included politics, sports, Donald Trump, startup, and tech, among others. Despite boasting personal articles by celebrities, politicians, and business leaders, a number of the biggest blog posts on Medium were published by its general users. There was Talia Jane’s open letter calling out her then CEO for underpaying employees — the post subsequently went viral. Similarly, Penny Kim’s account of being scammed out of an income by her Silicon Valley employer also found extensive coverage in the media — it ended the year as the most read Medium article for San Francisco. Additionally, Jordan Belamire’s article describing her virtual reality groping resulted in a host of responses, and thousands of shares.
However, by and large the biggest articles were related to the general election and its outcome. The most widely read article of 2016, entitled “History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump,” was authored by academic and historian Tobias Stone.
The following were the top 10 posts of 2016, in order of popularity:
Meanwhile, some of the biggest public figures and celebs to publish to Medium in 2016 included Ben Stiller, former Knicks head coach Derek Fisher, and Vice President Joe Biden.
Earlier this year, Medium raised $50 million in funding, which went toward strengthening its resources in order to deal with the increase in demand for its content. In June, it acquired Superfeedr: a unified application programming interface (API) that can handle RSS, Atom, or JSON feeds.
Correction: This article originally stated Medium has doubled its users this year. In fact, the site has increased its visitors by 140 percent since last year. It has now been amended.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?