Medium’s New CEO is Listening

Have you made any requests?

For anyone else who was asleep or on holiday (like me) in recent weeks, you may have missed the big announcement. Medium has a new CEO! And he’s listening.

Tony Stubblebine introduced himself as the new CEO on 12 July, and already, I’ve put in my request for more control over our posts, in particular with regard to the highlighting function… because writers here have a love/hate relationship with it, and it’d be nice to get more control.

I said to Tony…

Welcome! Fabulous! There’s one thing I know many writers and readers would love on here — the option to control highlights on the stories they write and the stories they read. Some people find the highlights so distracting they give up on stories. Some writers object to a lot of highlighting. If writers had the option to turn highlights off, and readers had the option to read without seeing highlights, this would be a welcome addition, I’m sure. Perhaps highlighted text could show in the comments, but not ruin the flow of the actual article? This needs some thought. Thank you!

Other people have put in their own requests, including:

scrapping referred memberships;
improving opportunities to earn well;
getting rid of ‘get rich quick’ articles;
allowing more countries to join the Partner Program;
bringing back the mobile editing function.

Personally, I like the platform pretty much as it is, but there’s always room for improvement, and I wouldn’t say no to more earnings. I’m not mad.

If people don’t like their recommendations, they can control them to some extent, with a little effort, by following topics of interest and clicking the ‘less of this’ button on stories they don’t like.

The fact that changes to the algorithm have enabled smaller writers to earn more, seemingly to the misfortune of some of the more established writers, is unfortunate for those complaining but seems fairer if it means the pie is shared more evenly.

There’s still plenty of additional benefit in having a big following, but I think the changes have helped to level the playing field so that anyone can earn well if they deliver stories that people actually want to read.

There is one other thing though — I’d very much like to be able to switch from ‘recommendations’ to ‘following’ on my feed, and for it to stay that way for a while.

And I’d like to be able to click on ‘responses’ when I come back from holidays with 1300 notifications, and find the tab stays on responses when I want to read the next one! Because we’re all busy and time pressures are real!

What would you like to see changed?