Hey Medium, Please Don’t Erase Us

A look at some of the new Medium changes arriving in the Fall of 2020

Exactly 2 months ago, Medium announced a lot of changes coming in the Fall.

1 month ago, CEO Ev further elaborated on what those changes might entail.

Today, we see the first major change to the Medium homepage — and I’m a bit…skeptical.

I’m a huge advocate of kaizen, the business philosophy of continuous improvement.

Part of that process involves constant experimentation, beta testing, and AB comparisons. And not every experiment works out, of course.

But sometimes companies still need to bite the bullet and make a drastic change without knowing all the side effects. And I see that happening with some of these changes today.

I’d like to share my thoughts on some of the ones I see happening below.

Note: I’d love to hear your thoughts as well in the comments — I’ll respond to all of them.

Upcoming changes to Medium.com

I can’t expect 100% of the following feature modifications to actually be implemented because many are still in a beta phase.

But some of them have already been, and we can see many more on the horizon in the beta versions of the app and publications.

Here’s a list of what I’ve seen so far, what Medium promised, and what my own thoughts are on the changes as a former head of product at a SaaS MNC.

Medium erased usernames on their homepage

This is the first change I want to talk about as I find it the most perplexing (and I think worst change by far.)

What do I mean? If you’re on the browser version, go check out what the Medium homepage looks like today:

There are 5 stories in the above pic, but I only see 1 author’s name.

Why do we see Jeff Dutton and not anyone else?

Because he self-published, and I follow him.

But I also follow more than 11,000 people and hundreds of publications. So my home screen should be pretty random these days.

But what about those great writers who put in extra effort, time, and skills to get published in those huge publications like Better Humans and The Startup?

I might read their article because the title and picture intrigue me, but what are my chances of remembering who wrote it now?

Medium is erasing our visibility.

So should we all just self-publish and hope for people to see our reduced-size profile and names?

And doesn’t this go against Ev’s own words about this?

“Medium’s most important job is to connect readers with the stories they most care about and the flip side — helping writers find and grow their audience.”

But it gets even worse.

Medium’s New Publication Format

There are a lot of neat and interesting changes they’ve brought to publications.

And some not so great ones too.

Right now, you can only see these in publications that joined the beta program — like Human Parts above.

First, I want to point out the reduction of the writer’s profile again, but in this other area.

Here’s a writer named Don Johnson’s recent post in Human Parts, a publication in the new beta program.

Look how tiny his username and profile picture is above.

Now compare that to another of his articles, not in the beta (AKA the normal version before):

His name and profile picture are at least double the size. AND there’s a follow button — meaning it’s being removed soon.

Thanks, Medium?

Reduced size means less visibility to potential readers. No follow button means it’s going to be even harder to grow your audience.

Not cool.

And one last example of this.

The bottom of Don Johnson’s post is barely there at all. I have to check carefully to even notice it.

My amazing coloring skills aside, it’s very difficult to see where one story ends and the next begins — on purpose.

Not Don’s purpose of course, but Medium’s.

But again, his name is hardly noticed there.

There’s no profile picture.

The follow button is finally there, but it doesn’t stand out much to me, and it’s not an area of the story that I usually pay attention to (after the writing’s done).

Here’s what Don’s other stories look like at the end in the normal version:

Look at that big beautiful profile pic, his profile description, Twitter/LinkedIn/FB sharing buttons, and a nice space letting me know the story is finished.

All of these add up to him getting more follows and his article getting shared more, pre-beta.

Those are all gone in the new version — just compare the two images.

We’re about to get fewer new followers and fewer shares, IMO.

Not cool.

But it’s not all bad.

There are many cool changes with the publication beta too.

Basically:

• Colors
• Customizability
• Continuous feed

CCC for short.

I won’t go into more detail here because Medium’s own article describes them quite a bit. Just check out some of the Medium owned publications or read their article for examples of what they mean..

Medium’s Adoption of Seamless Reading

You might have noticed this trend on some other popular websites out there.

Basically, seamless reading means you flow right into the next article on a list after finishing the first one.

You don’t have to press the ‘back’ button or go to another page to see a new article, nor even click a link. The next one just begins.

We probably have Netflix’s autoplay to thank product managers for this idea — it’s meant to take advantage of our propensity to binge.

Whether or not this is a good move in the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure.

Perhaps more of our articles will be read by each individual reader now.

But I’m a big fan of controlling my reading experience. And I haven’t enjoyed using this new ‘feature’ yet.

You see, I have to admit something.

I like to scroll. A lot.

In some of your stories, I’ll read the opening paragraph and then scroll right to your headlines to see if I’m interested in what you have to say.

But with the mobile app beta, I had to turn it off after 1 day of frustration.

My usual scrolling habits landed me smack dab in the middle of other people’s stories — completely losing my train of thought, where I was, and what I was going to have for dinner later.

In short, it made me frustrated.

And frustration is not good user experience, Medium.

New Profiles

For a good example of the new profiles, let’s compare the superstar Mediumite Niklas Göke against my own brutish profile. (His profile is part of the beta.)

Niklas’s fantastic new layout:

J.J. Pryor’s old-school profile:

I have to say, Nik’s version looks way cleaner and more professional.

But with customizability comes a learning curve — and many users won’t know how to make awesome looking profiles like him.

Other Examples:

Ev Williams’s own profile now looks like…well it looks like he got rid of his profile.

It’s just stories with a picture + description of him on the left:

The founder of the biggest publication on Medium, Ali Mese, also looks like he’s in the beta.

And the Editor in Chief of Gen, Brendan Vaughan, also has a similar one:

And here’s the Editor in Chief of Human Parts, Stephanie Georgopulos:

It looks like we’ll have a lot of options for customizing our new profile pages.

But as you can see, if you don’t spend the time learning how to make it more like Nik’s, it might look a bit bland.

No offense to the editors of course.

I’m never getting published again, am I?

Other Potential Changes

As this article is already way longer than I wanted to dive in, I’ll briefly mention some other changes I’ve seen in the betas.

Some are good, some are…well we’ll see.

• Follower counts are about to disappear — say goodbye to Feedium’s author profile listicles
• Top Writer status will disappear — I’m not sure if the function will still be used or not, though
• The notice stating which publications you’re an editor of will disappear
• The notice saying when you officially became a Medium member will be gone
• The sections ‘Profile/Claps/Responses/Highlights’ will no longer be around
• The twitter button on your profile is gone — again, hurting audience building and connectivity IMO
• You’ll be able to search within user profile’s stories now — as you can do with publications already in the Medium search bar
• Publications will have a ‘table of contents’ functionality — a very good thing for SEO — if Google can understand it, that is
• They removed the Medium owned publications from the homepage — which leaves more room for our work to shine
• You’ll be able to customize your profile page — even by adding landscape background pictures and colors
• Medium.com will now distribute your articles whether or not they’re behind the paywall — something they’ve only done for paywalled content in the last year
• They announced a new newsletter functionality — again, I haven’t toyed with this much, but at first read through it definitely confused me as publications can already send out newsletters…but now users have to follow your publication AND signup
• There’s also a new ability to post short-form content — which I admit I don’t yet fully understand the difference
• There’s a new section on the homepage, “Trending on Medium,” a popular function you might use on Twitter — I like this addition, but I haven’t had time to break down how it works yet — stay tuned

Wrapup

As usual, I never mean to be pissing on Medium while telling them it’s raining. My intention with articles like this is to point out areas of improvement.

I consider myself a proper Mediumite now after being heavily active on the platform for 1 year now — and I like seeing people enjoy their experience here.

It’s part of the reason why I try to help so many writers navigate the platform with my Feedium publication.

I read over Medium’s recent statements about upcoming changes several times and really applaud their effort. But I can’t help but feel a disconnect between what they’ve stated and what we’re seeing in the betas.

I’m sure more followers of mine will have a higher chance of seeing my articles on their homepage and feed now — but they won’t see my name if I’m self-publishing.

There will be fewer new readers for me now too if I publish on my own.

This makes publications all the more important to get into — which can be good and bad, depending on your abilities as a writer and self-promoter.

I fully applaud the effort to “be putting more emphasis on following people and publications.”

But with the changes above, it seems to be mostly in the exact opposite direction — unless you’re publishing everything in giant Medium publications.

But I get it, beta versions exist for a reason, and not all of the above changes are necessarily final.

And even if they are, well hey, Kaizen says there’s always room for improvement.

Listen to Kaizen. I don’t want to be erased.

J.J. Pryor

If you liked this dive into Medium, you’ll probably enjoy my Feedium publication or my free newsletter. Thanks for reading!