Dear Medium, Please Stop Breaking What Works Well on the Platform
There is much you should fix but meaningful engagement, despite the trolls that you tolerate, is the best aspect and what sets you apart from other social media and content platforms and now you are hell-bent on ruining that — STOP screwing up!!!
Plagiarism is rampant, yet you do nothing to stop it, instead, you rely on member-owned and operated publications to police this for you. What do we get in return? Nothing but grief and now that you have realized that owning your own publications costs you more money in salaries than you were making from allegedly popular writers that your publications favored over deep thinking good writers, in addition to scrapping your platform-owned and partner publications, you have decided to devalue us. Shame on you. Are you really so stupid not to realize you need us?
I despise reading rants against the platform almost as much as I despise reading articles about how to make money on the platform, but you’ve really pissed me off more than ever before. I did not come here to make money. I came here to write and to have the wonderfully meaningful engagement I have enjoyed from fellow writers and all the more so from those who are just readers, the latter of which comprises both your customers and ours.
Now you have screwed that up too.
Two days ago you changed the format of how stories display on my computer desktop. It’s bad enough that you just now eliminated the display of publication banners that readers could use to navigate through publications to topics they like to read. What’s unforgivable is you have also eliminated the ability of writers and readers to see who has highlighted sections of our stories.
After comments not left by trolls, highlights are the most meaningful engagement between writers and readers. Yes, words still show as highlighted, but as with your crappy mobile app, which I never read on because that experience is lousy, and even people I have gifted memberships to have complained to me about how they could not enjoy reading on their phones because the app sucks ass and thus have not read mine or anyone else's content, but now us writers can no longer see who has highlighted which words (one highlighter displays on the scroll over whereas before all highlights were visible in the right margin).
I demand that you make the old format available to anyone who wants it.
Fix what’s broken, like:
- the never-ending failure of notifications to load
- the ridiculous clap system
- your stupid distribution algorithm that penalizes community building among writers
- your stealing member reading time as your own by counting reads by members that happen to click in through Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as external reads
Regarding the clap system, I wrote last year:
The clap system is a vestige of the old pay-wall calculus. Now, it only serves as either an ego stroke or a source of irritation between writers. It took me months before I even realized that multiple claps were possible. Then I could not figure out what different amounts of claps meant to different people. I asked a few times and no one responded. I’ve seen people complain that why clap at all if not giving the max? Are you kidding me? Finally, I came up with my own system: 0, 18 or 36. To me, 50 is perfunctory and 36 is very meaningful, because in Jewish superstition, 18 is a very lucky number as it’s formed with the same letters as the word for life, and thus “double ch’ai” connotes something very special. Le Chayim!
Make the scale 1–100, or 1–10. Make the rater anonymous unless they want to be identified. Each piece should have two scores à la Rotten Tomatoes. The average score from writers and the average score from readers. There should be a third score uniquely relative to the viewer — “rating by people you follow.” Lastly, people should have the option of receiving a notification whenever someone they follow gives a story certain ratings
Regarding the last two points, I recently wrote:
Writers that belong to the Medium Partner Program get paid for minutes read by readers who pay their $5 a month to read an unlimited amount of our work into which many of us pour our blood, sweat, and tears. We get paid absolutely nothing for external reads. I am ok with that. I am not ok with the fact that I discovered last night that every read on Twitter is an external read even if the reader is a paying member of Medium.
…
The curation algorithm, now known as the chosen-for-further-distribution-algorithm, penalizes writers who group tag fellow writers at the end of our stories. I am in “curation jail” for that practice, despite that I only do it in my poems and poets appreciate the tags because we are a community of writers who appreciate the chance to read and engage with each other’s work.
I have been told that the algorithm does this because readers find group tagging offensive. I now realize that is bull shit.
It’s just another method by which Medium seeks to restrict the distribution of our content and thus not pay us.
This older story of mine is relevant to what I have said here:
Thank you for reading.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,