Platform Issues
Concerns for Changes on Medium
As an editor, writer, and reader, I struggle to understand the recent changes
Many changes are happening on Medium.
I endorse functional, operational, and technical changes to get better results for any platform. However, if changes make things worse, we need to consider feedback and improve accordingly.
In this post, I want to briefly share my concerns from three perspectives, wearing my editor, writer, and reader hats.
Editor Perspective
As an editor, I am confused and struggle with rapid changes.
Things change so quickly that even as an editor with a technology background, I cannot cope with the unexpected things popping out of nowhere.
I posted one of our issues losing the banners in our publications yesterday. It created major concerns for our editors.
After this post, Medium confirmed that only editors of the publications experience this possible bug. They raised a ticket to address the solution.
The biggest issue for me as an editor, was losing two hours of effort when I entered around 100 new writers, but the publication did not save the changes. We had to troubleshoot and fix the config changes in the publication. It was a painful process and caused delays in adding new writers. We had to apologize to our writers.
All my publications look different now. For one of my small publications, as a trial, I opt for the beta design offering but cannot revert the publication design to the previous state.
Our editor Agnes Laurens reported the incident in a story yesterday. The editors characterized the issues as unexpected troubles out of nowhere. We are confused.
Another editorial challenge is sharing meaningful content with our followers.
As an editor, I used to sort out our curated stories based on topics daily. I used to distribute the stories to selected reader groups via our mailing lists.
Now, we are unable to see the topics in curated articles. I don’t know how to sort the articles. I don’t know how to distribute them to our dedicated readers of the selected topics.
The new feature on the curated stories states “Chosen for further distribution”. That’s it. No topic names!
We also faced administrative challenges.
In stories, I see a remark saying “Your story is not eligible to earn money. To make this story eligible, join the Medium Partner Program. Learn more.”
First, I thought that our writers forgot to add their stories to the partner program. As a duty of care, I sent multiple private messages to the writers reminding to add their stories to the paywall so that their stories become eligible for payment.
Then, I felt foolish because this remark was for all stories. I have no clue what it means and why this remark comes out of nowhere. Is it a feature or a bug? I have no idea yet.
Writer Perspective
As a writer, I struggle to understand what Medium is trying to achieve with these changes.
I keep bumping into new features and experiencing several glitches. For example, when leaving comments or responding the comments, the pop up windows show blank.
For the changes to happen, I keep hitting the F5 key multiple times as the browser cache fill too quickly.
Besides, I don’t know whether my stories are eligible for curation or being considered. The “hang on tight” remark disappeared.
The platform turns out to be unstable. It is a concern to me as a writer.
Who knows, more bugs may appear and affect my productivity as a writer.
Reader Perspective
As a reader, I noticed that the writer names are not showing on the first page of Medium. I used to select the writers I followed. Writer names disappeared.
Now, I feel in the dark as a reader.
I am wondering what the point is and why Medium removed writer names.
Conclusions
In this post, I briefly shared my observations from an editor’s, writer’s, and reader’s perspective. Looking at the changes of Medium from these three perspectives concerns me. I struggle to understand the changes and the rationale behind them. This post is not a criticism but is a request for information to understand the progress and the reasons.
Thank you for reading.
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