Recent quotes:

Because inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.
Medium is chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks. Is it the publication for our particular moment?
From the outside, Medium's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Medium most certainly is. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Medium to create cachet. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. (Don't disclose who's working for Medium and who's working on Medium.) 4) Promote the people they've paid along with a very small subset of everyone else.