Do You Miss Seeing Topic Tags at the End of Medium Stories?
It seems like a simple thing to bring back
Change is afoot at Medium, and the new Powers That Be are listening to the little people. After all, we can once again write stories on our phones. And tipping is a thing now, which I didn’t even know I wanted until I received one.
Also, I know for a fact that Tony Stubblebine wants to hear our thoughts about the platform because he said so in this post.
“P.S. I’m listening. Let me know what is important to you about Medium.”
Yes, I am aware that most likely, Coach Tony’s intent was for readers to comment at the end of that post. Not for a plethora of articles demanding change to spam his inbox by constantly tagging him.
But this is Medium. What did he expect?
So here I go. My request today is a small and easy one. The thing I desire is for story tags to show up at the end of the stories. We used to have this, and they were useful in letting the reader know, is this fiction, am I reading satire, or is the writer deadly serious and possibly somewhat dangerous?
Because these days, let’s admit, it can be hard to know if what you are reading is meant to be funny or sincere.
Also, as a writer, I’d like to make a big and obvious announcement when I’m trying to be funny. Otherwise, things get misunderstood, and I get a bunch of angry comments.
You might be thinking, she must not be very funny if people can’t even tell if she is making a joke or not. And I would agree with you and say, yes, that is right, I’m really not that funny. So, please help us all and bring tags back to the end of the stories.
And one more reason, it gives me ideas on how to tag my articles by seeing how others are doing it. Yes, I’m a copycat, and I know it.
I realized how badly I missed seeing the tags when reading How To Tell A Writer She Sucks Without Actually Saying It from Linda Caroll this morning where she said,
“You know, once upon a time, Medium used to show our tag choices at the bottom of every story. So you’d get to the bottom of some piece that ticked you off and then see HUMOR as a tag.
“They took those away. Now we have to guess when someone’s being funny. Sometimes that’s easier than other times. Duh.”
Linda is funny enough not to need the humor tag. Some of us could use a little extra help.
Think of the humor tag as the laugh track on old sitcoms. If you didn’t know a joke was funny, the canned audience laughter would set you straight.
So please, Dear Coach Tony, bring back tags to the end of our stories, or confusion will continue to reign on Medium, and we won’t know when we’re supposed to laugh.