Lessons in Counting

A Glaring Error in Medium’s Updated Statistics

Maybe they should get an adult to code this stuff

I kept looking at that pretty new oscilliscope graphic of my views and reads, thinking something was off.

I finally realized, wait a second, my read % on all articles is above 50%, why is the green area less than 50% of the overall area? First I thought Medium pulled a fast one by having a non-linear Y axis, or not starting at 0. Both are legitimate data representations, although they’re often used to mislead viewers.

But no, they messed up something far more basic. Take a look at this:

Let’s take my peak day this month, Dec 9th, with 23 views and 18 reads. That’s a respectable 78% read ratio. But on the graph, the green wavy thing shows 18, and the blue wavy thing adds 23 on top of that to get to a total of 41… something.

Imagine you take 20 flights this year, and 10 of them were to Boston. What did you do 30 of? Answer: nothing. That number doesn’t mean anything.

I didn’t get 41 of anything on December 9th, why is Medium showing me Reads + Views when Reads is part of views? If my own staff did something like this at my old e-commerce company (they sometimes did), I’d take one look and tell them to click a different button from the excel line graph options. It’s like a math typo.

I’m not a finance major or even a math geek, but as a CEO if I don’t know how to add two numbers together we’re going to run out of cash real fast. Medium rolled out this metrics update and no adults with a basic understanding of statistics took a look at it first?

Medium’s past behaviour in the area of metrics has left me unsurprised that they let this one slip through. I’m hoping there’s a flood of emails to Tony Stubblebine alerting him of the error, but since we’re all writers not statisticians, odds are the great majority of us simply think our read percentages have dropped, trusting the graphs.

I’ll send off a note to Medium informing them of the error in presentation once I figure out how to talk to customer support. I’m a Friend of Medium, maybe that’ll get me some attention. I wish they had a Lover of Medium tier I could join where I could have a daily zoom call with Tony to rant at him and occasionally (accidentally) spit at my computer screen. Would totally be worth it. Are you listening!!?

Anyway, the rest of the update I’m pretty happy with. Finally, views and reads of my stories, not my comments. Thank you thank you. I can’t believe I had to wait for it.

I don’t understand why in giving us views and reads they had to take away claps and comments from the summary screen. There’s lots of room. Maybe it increased page load time too much. Nah, that’s giving them too much credit. They probably thought the extra black pixels would weigh more or cost more and they wanted to save money on their monthly AWS charges.

I do applaud the team at Medium for continuing to not boost any of my stories. Your consistency and commitment to quality writing is appreciated. Thank god most of my views are on social media and my newsletter. Love the community at Medium though! Mwah! Mwah!

Love you guys and gals!