Suggestion Box
3 Things I’d Like to See on Medium
In a very particular order.
1) Stop Lumping Comments in with Stories
I don’t know what diabolical genius came up with the idea that Stories and comments should all be treated as “Stories.” On the one hand, if authors thought about this long and hard, they’d make sure to leave only comments worthy of showcasing in their writing portfolios. On the other hand, the reality is a messy RSS feed and a disorganized portfolio that doesn’t clearly distinguish between our Stories and our comments on other people’s Stories. Or replies to comments others have left on our Stories.
I understand not allowing us to monetize comments; as I said to Toni Koraza:
I like the ability to embed a comment, like that, and to comment further on it, like this, but such “responses” will never be eligible for curation or monetization, so the streams — the RSS feeds — should be entirely separate, as they are with Publications and Topics.
While we’re at it, why not turn our Profile pages into a proper portfolio, organized by tags? Perhaps none of us will ever earn that level of trust required to bypass manual curation to allow our stories to flow naturally into the Topics we’ve tagged them with, but at least let us organize our own Profile pages by subject matter. It seems cumbersome to have to set up a Publication just to do that, as I have done here:
If we go to all this trouble just to be neat, tidy, and well-organized, at least consider allowing us to replace our own Profile with a Publication we’ve created.
2) Formatting is Genius, But Can Still Be Improved
Formatting on Medium is a tasteful stroke of genius: a clean layout with a well-chosen, reasonable typeface in standard sizes; a good selection of content block types that are familiar to most users of WordPress; and an easy way to choose free featured and illustrative images.
That said, I would like to see a normal drop-down selection for Kicker, Title, Subtitle, H1, H2, H3, Paragraph, and Code. I would like to see indent text buttons, so that we could indent a paragraph one or two tab stops without having to pretend that it’s a block quotation or a pull-quote. I would like to see options for left-, center-, and right-aligned text, while we’re at it, but if that is asking too much, I’ll give in on that point, in the name of negotiating a win-win situation. I won’t even ask for colored text, highlighting, underscore, or strike-through.
3) Elbow Room in the Bio Blurb, Please!
I’d like to see the personal bio area expanded a bit. Even Twitter gives 280 characters per tweet, now. Once upon a time, Medium gave a generous 20 characters more than Twitter did, per tweet, but they haven’t kept up with the times. I appreciate brevity and tight writing, but I have a life that warrants more than 160 characters.
I hope that Medium and Medium Staff will consider the suggestions offered here, and elsewhere, so that this site we’ve all come to enjoy will grow and thrive for a long time to come. As they say in the corporate world, it pays to recruit — and retain — talent. Here, words matter. So does supporting the writers who write the content that brings in readers, not just once, but often enough that both writers and readers find real value in that $5 membership fee that they could be paying to Netflix or Amazon. That matters.