Successful products make their users feel like winners. In the words of Kathy Sierra, good products help users become “baddass”.
Every choice Medium makes is about getting users to feel good. Here is an example. Why do people stop blogging? You start blogging with a lot of excitement and ideas, and after a few posts you get busy and stop writing for a while. After a while you feel guilty every time you look at it. Because every time you look at it you see the time stamp on your last post. You dread visiting your blog and it becomes a source of pain. It becomes yet another abandoned blog in the interwebs. What’s the medium’s solution to this phenomena? Get rid of the dates on stories completely.
