What is Medium? Or, more importantly, what does it want to be? A growing number of media observers have tried to attack that question, the latest being Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, who was ultimately unable to arrive at a satisfactory answer. It is, he said, “a place to read articles on the internet.” Is that enough, considering that description could be used for everything from Reddit to the New York Times? Only founder Evan Williams knows the answer to that — and it’s possible that even he isn’t sure.

But if Medium is to be successful, rather than just being a plaything for the former Twitter CEO, it is going to have to decide what it wants to be and how it plans to get there.

As Madrigal notes in his piece, entitled simply “What is Medium?,” the inherent contradictions — or at least the potential…