10 Ideas For Medium to Be a Better Platform

#3 Taking inspiration from kindle.

I always used to think that I’m just another writer on Medium. But Coach Tony’s article reminded me that I am not just a writer but also a Medium partner. That’s why they call it the partner program, right?

What this means is that if I produce low-quality content, I’m not only hurting myself but the platform too. That is why I’m starting to be more mindful of what I write these days. I don't want to be a meaningless high-volume content mill. I want to write stuff that truly helps people and this platform.

Because the truth is, I love Medium. I’m excited to see what the future for Medium will look like. Obviously, I want it to grow to dizzy heights. And I want to contribute to that growth in any way I can. Hence, in this article, I want to share 10 ideas that Medium can adopt to make this awesome platform even more awesome. Let’s get to it.

Taking Curation Up a Notch

Curation is an excellent idea. Putting actual humans to filter out quality stuff? Genius. And I think there’s even a way to take it up a notch. Let’s call this idea — Curation Feedback. In this, two types of feedback can work —

1. A simple grading system: The curator can choose out of three standard feedback options — something like “Good,” “Great,” “Extraordinary.” Obviously, “Bad” doesn't have to be an option because that’d be understood if the piece is not curated.
2. Mentioning the strong point: Out of a list of pre-decided options, the curator can choose what makes the article special. And this can be displayed to the reader while they’re reading the article. The prompt can say something like —

• The curators recommend this piece because it shares unique ideas.
• The curators recommend this piece because it is heartwarming.
• The curators recommend this piece because of its amazing storytelling.

And if the story doesn’t fit in any of the pre-decided options, the curator can choose “other” and manually mention what makes the story special. What those pre-decided options should be — I think that the Medium staff is more qualified to do that job than me.

And I know, this increases the work of the curators a bit — but I don’t think it’s too much burden. All they’ll have to do is choose out of a few options how they’d describe the story. This feedback will help the writers know their strong points and get a rough insight into the quality of their piece. Plus, mentioning the strong point will help the readers know beforehand what they can expect to get out of the piece. This can help us all grow.

Micro-Courses

Felicia C. Sullivan and Forge recently launched a 5-day course on Medium. And I loved it! Both the course and the overall idea. How about making such courses a standard thing on Medium?

In one of his articles, Tim Denning mentioned the idea of micro-courses. And I think Medium can be a perfect platform for that! This feature can initially start off as veteran writers like Felicia launching more micro-courses on Medium. Then maybe eventually, not-so-pro writers like me can contribute for courses too.

To keep the quality in check, writers can submit their courses to a team of curators, and if they feel it’s good enough, they can launch it on Medium. Some course ideas —

• How to become an idea machine. (A course James Altucher can launch.)
• How to write better titles for your articles.
• How to use mindfulness to boost your work ethic (I’ll be happy to take a course on this one)

Of course, since they are micro-courses, they can cost something like $5 or even be included in the membership. I’m sure you guys can figure that out.

Taking Inspiration From Kindle

I absolutely love reading on the Kindle because it will clip everything I highlight and compile it in the form of a document! I usually convert that text document into a pdf for each book I read and reread them whenever I get a chance. How about borrowing the concept of clippings for Medium itself?

Because otherwise, I don’t know if highlights serve a great purpose for readers. They’re great at telling the writer that “Hey! I love this idea”, but other than that, highlights might not serve a significant purpose for the readers because I can’t imagine people going back to reread their own highlights. Even if they do, clippings will certainly make it easier to do that.

It might work something like this. Every week — perhaps on Sundays — the platform can create a document containing all of the readers’ highlights for that particular week. The reader can download this and save it for rereading later.

An extension of this idea that I’m not completely sure of, but will put it out there anyway, is the concept of “Highlights Sharing.”

As a writer, I often open the profiles of my favorite writers on this platform like Niklas Göke, and see what they’re highlighting. I do this to try to digitally pick the brains of these pro writers and try to understand what kind of articles they’re reading and understand the kind of ideas they’re highlighting. This helps me learn what others are learning.

So if the idea of clippings is adopted on Medium, how about I also have the option to download someone else’s “Highlights for the week” document?

I know — this can raise some privacy issues — which is why I’m unsure of this idea. But even now, Medium allows readers to see what others are highlighting. And if any reader does not want to share their highlights — they can be given an option to opt-out of this feature. That should take care of the privacy issues, I think.

But even if the concept of “Highlights Sharing” isn’t adopted, I really think Medium should take inspiration from kindle and adopt the idea of clippings. This will make us all better readers.

Bringing More Organisation to A Writer’s Feed

Any writer inevitably has certain niches he writes about. For instance — Sean Kernan writes about humor, life lessons, writing, marketing, fiction, and more. And for every article he writes, he’ll include a header stating the niche of the article. (Red circle in the image below)

So how about a writer is given an option to create folders to organize his or her articles, and the reader is given access to those folders? For instance — Sean Kernan would create folders like “Writing,” “Marketing,” “Humor,” “Life Lessons,” etc., and these will show up somewhere on his profile.

And let’s say it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I feel like reading something funny, and Sean’s my go-to guy for that — I can open up his feed, click on the “humor” folder — and see all his humor articles in one convenient location. These articles can be arranged in two ways — by date and by the number of views. I can pick the piece I like most and start reading it.

This feature can help better organize a writer’s feed enabling the readers easier and more controlled access to a writer’s older articles as well. And in the future, this feature can even help writers launch their books on Medium — one chapter at a time.

Optimizing The Drafts Folder by Adding a Search Tool

At the time of writing this, I have 425 drafts sitting in my drafts section. It’s a mess I’ve wanted to clean up for weeks now. But every time I clean up by deleting unnecessary drafts, after a while, it again goes back to being the same kind of a mess. Entropy at play.

And most writers might not be as messy as me. Some might even achieve draft zero. But I do think that the drafts section can get significantly more organized by adding a search tool.

As a writer, there are some pieces you write within a day. But some pieces sit in your drafts for months. This happens because you have a nice idea, but you are missing a few pieces to the puzzle. And it takes time — sometimes months and even years — to accumulate all the pieces.

And whenever I find a new piece of the puzzle, and I want to note it down, it’s tough to find the first draft. So I have to make a new one. This leads to the multiple pieces of the same idea being recorded in more than one draft. If there were a search tool added to the draft section, it’d be much more convenient to record ideas.

And I know I can easily outsource this to some other application like Google Keep. But it’d be cool to have this feature on Medium itself. After all, Medium is about good ideas. And I don’t want to store my ideas somewhere else. I want to store them here itself.

Other Ideas

The above were some major ideas — but there are also some minor ideas I’d like to pitch.

• A “Send to Kindle” option: This is a feature on Blinkist that I love. Instead of reading the book summary on your mobile, you can send it to your kindle. This helps a lot. A) Because reading on a Kindle is easier on the eyes. B) This helps me keep my screen time down because a kindle is devoid of distractions present in a smartphone. Now I know that this might interfere with the “member-reading time” model we have here and steal from the writer’s reading time. But an easy fix for that would be if x minutes of an x-minute read would get added to the member-reading time whenever a reader exercises the “send to kindle” option. I think this feature will come in handy for longer (10+ minute) reads.
• Segregate notifications for mentions. A cool new move by Medium was to segregate notifications that are responses because they need action, and it’s better to not let them drown in a sea of other notifications. This, I think, should be extended to “mentions” as well. If someone mentions me in their article, I’d like to read that article. And hence, I do not want to miss that notification.
• Track the time we spend on writing articles. Niklas Göke shared this idea on Twitter, and I found it really insightful. He says that this can help us understand what articles we take more time to write and which articles we write rather quickly.
• Track our reading habits. I know you already track our reading habits, and that is how you recommend to us what to read. But how about sharing that info with us? I don’t know how exactly it might work — maybe something as simple as sharing what topics and what writers we tend to read more. This can help us be more aware of our own reading habits.
• More Top-Writer tags: I’ve always wondered why mindfulness, philosophy, and spirituality are not top-writer tags of their own. Perhaps they should be.

Final Thoughts

Medium’s recent bonus was a truly amazing move. And I wanted to return the favor. Since it is said that ideas are the currency of the 21st century, over the past week, I came up with twenty ideas for Medium to become a better platform. The above 10 are the ones I thought were good enough to be shared.

I understand that not all of these ideas are actionable. But in the long run, even if one of these ideas is adopted and it helps Medium grow even a tiny bit, I’ll be happy to have contributed to its growth.