Medium’s Disappearing Stories

Summary

The author of the article is expressing frustration over the unexpected disappearance of stories from their Medium reading list, which they curate for future reference.

Abstract

The Medium platform's reading list feature is highly valued by users like the author, who appreciate the ability to save a large number of stories for later reading. However, the author was surprised to find that a significant portion of their reading list, specifically 26% (13 out of 50 stories), had vanished without a trace, leaving them without any information on what content was lost. This disappearance is a mystery to the author, who likens the situation to the plot of the movie "Memento," where the protagonist uses tattoos as reminders. The author speculates on possible reasons for the deletions, including authors pulling their articles, account closures, or content removal due to policy violations. Technical articles, which the author finds particularly valuable for future reference, were also missing from their list. In response, the author has taken steps to preserve their reading list by saving it as a PDF and considers building a personal reference library or wiki.

Opinions

The author feels robbed and shocked by the disappearance of a quarter of their Medium reading list.
They are concerned about losing potentially life-changing advice or valuable technical references.
The author is considering alternative methods to preserve content, such as creating a personal wiki, due to the unreliability of Medium's reading list feature.
They suspect that some of the missing stories may have been republished elsewhere, which is a form of plagiarism and against Medium's policies.
The author is taking proactive steps to document the current state of their reading list for future comparison and to ensure access to important content.

My reading list has been edited and not by me!

Photo courtesy of Pixabay via Pexels

The Medium reading list feature has always been excellent because we are greedy. We will always bite off more than we can chew and our wish list for reading is no exception. We also want to horde our reading material and fill the shelves with advice and instructions that will be useful later.

Thus I was shocked and felt robbed that 13 out of my 50 “Reading list” stories are missing (26%). The worst part is the title is not available so I don’t even know what I am missing. Was it the one about the future of crypto markets or was it that one piece of advice that will turn my life around?

Screenshot by the author

This is a total mystery and I am tempted to add a note to each one of these entries for investigation, like the tattoos in Memento.

Ok, so I was just hoarding and getting a few items off the list is the invisible hand of Marie Kondo. But then I looked at my “Tech Reference” list and found 2 of 21 stories missing! Ouch, these are technical reference items that will save a lot of time Googling later.

The Big Question

Why is this happening? I know that sometimes an article will be pulled by an author. I have accidentally self-published when I intended to submit the story to a publication and have to copy/paste the story into a new one and then delete the self-published version. However, I am doing this within seconds of realizing my mistake before anyone could have read or bookmarked it.

Some people close their accounts but I would imagine the stories would still live on unless intentionally deleted by the author. So that lead will get a smaller font on my tattooed list of suspects.

Were those articles removed for violation of Medium policy? At first, I thought I could skip that avenue of inquiry since your typical Python tips list does not fall under hate speech unless you are a truly dedicated Cobol programmer.

But wait, what are programmers best at? Cut and paste. Code reuse is a highly admired skill but writing reuse is plagiarism and not permitted on Medium. I suspect that these stories were “re-published”, a polite way of saying stealing. Too bad really, I needed some of that content and will have to search from scratch when I need it.

Next Steps

I am curious to know what is disappearing so I saved my list to PDF to snapshot the moment and then compare it later if any items get removed.

As for the technical content needed for future reference, I will have to decide what is worth saving to disk and categorizing. Maybe it is time to build a personal reference library/wiki. Any suggestions?