"President Trump has said he believes Twitter put him in the White House. Recently, Mr. Williams heard the claim for the first time. He mulled it over for a bit..."

"... sitting in his Medium office, which is noteworthy only for not having a desk. 'It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,...

"... sitting in his Medium office, which is noteworthy only for not having a desk. 'It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,' he said finally. 'If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Williams’s remarks."

From a NYT Magazine article on Evan Williams — one of the founders of Twitter and a co-creator of Blogger (where we are right now) — who currently runs Medium. The article is called "'The Internet Is Broken': @ev Is Trying to Salvage It."

I had forgotten about Medium, but now I remember it was supposed to solve some kind of problem. Why the long article about it now? It came out in 2012, but what's happening? We're told Medium is "a new model for media in a world struggling under the weight of fake or worthless content" and "social and collaborative without rewarding the smash-ups" and "a force for good."

According to the NYT article — which is by David Streitfield — "Medium is not afraid to be dull." Is it just failing (or not trying to succeed)?

Mr. Williams is deliberate to a fault, and his stint as Twitter’s chief executive in 2008 was not a managerial success. “He’s not C.E.O. material,” his former girlfriend and the co-developer of Blogger, Meg Hourihan, said in 2010 when the Twitter board pushed him out....

In a commencement speech at the University of Nebraska this month, Mr. Williams noted that Silicon Valley has a tendency to see itself as a Prometheus, stealing fire from selfish gatekeeper gods and bestowing it on mere mortals. “What we tend to forget is that Zeus was so pissed at Prometheus that he chained him to a rock so eagles could peck out his guts for eternity,” Mr. Williams told the crowd. “Some would say that’s what we deserve for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump.”

Mr. Williams’s mistake was expecting the internet to resemble the person he saw in the mirror: serious, high-minded....