Rant

Watch Out, Medium Is Screwing Up

This Medium bug is corrupting your content and costing you reads.

Update: I received confirmation that my issue is a priority one and is being worked on. Thank you Medium. I don’t mean to be cruel with this post. I appreciate your work and the Medium platform.

I don’t often rant. And I have an unspoken motto to never speak (or post) out of anger. But this is something I feel I need to say.

What you see below is a poem I published back on the 9th of June.

Looks good right? Shortly after I published it I searched on one of the tag topics; I think in this case it was poetry. I found my story. But wait a minute something doesn’t look right:

What’s that content below my title? I didn’t write that. Then I begin reading down further, and I found this:

Why is this author's text showing up under my article? Must be a bug, right? So I opened a ticket with medium and brought it to their attention. A while later I got an email response, “Yes it’s a bug.”

Ok, fair enough. It was a bug and they fixed it. I didn’t think about it again. Until this morning when it happened yet again.

Woah! What the hell is this!? That’s not part of my story! So, once again, I went hunting further down the page. And lo-and-behold I found the culprit.

I did a screenshot and opened yet another ticket to medium and complained about it.

I’m not going to bother going into asking why vulgar and explicit content is popping up when I view the general Fiction topic.

Clicking on my post showed the correct content, the problem is in the listing only. So apparently something in Medium’s database or content management system is corrupt or buggy.

I worked in IT for 35 years. I was a manager, a programmer, and a senior system administrator. I understand that there will be bugs. The proper thing is to open a ticket, which I did. Considering this affects public-facing content, and it affects customer data (yes, we are their customers, at least those of us that pay our monthly membership fee), I expected it would be given a very high priority.

If this weren’t so sad I would laugh. But the truth is, how many potential readers passed right over my article believing it was smut? Or conversely, how many people may have clicked on it thinking it was smut, only to be disappointed (just my dry and boring story, nothing fun here). If I only just happened to catch this when the bug was manifesting itself, how many total hours of my article's life was it showing the wrong text?

Bottom line, if this happened to me (twice), I bet it’s happening to you as well. That is unless someone on the Medium staff has decided to play a prank on me personally (I’m kidding, I know they aren’t).

I told Medium’s staff in my ticket/complaint that I was going to post a public notice about this, as I was livid. And this is it. I also said in the ticket that I may pull my content and move to Vocal or Simily (I may, I already have an account over there, though I don’t want to). I’m sure as far as Medium is concerned I am but a tiny flea and they surely aren’t quaking in their boots at the thought of me leaving. But then again, you only see the cockroaches when the lights are on.

Hey Medium, I just turned the lights on.

If you want to check your own posts, here is all I did to discover this. Just search on the tags you used in your post. Click on the gray highlighted tag name. Then scroll down and look for your story.

In the case of my story from today, the tag was Fiction. Yes, that ‘Fiction’. The one with 936,000 followers.

Here’s a link to Medium’s support page where you can file a support ticket: