MEDIUM
Are You There Medium?
It’s me, Anthony
Dear Medium,
I love your platform and everything you have done to help writers find a home and a community, as well as how you offer countless quality articles from hundreds of thousands of writers to your immense (170 million) reader following.
I am very happy here and I have found several places I call home in publications where writers can often be a tight-knit community. I love reading countless new pieces each day; I love writing something every day and being able to decide when I want it to go live. I’ve found that I don’t even use Word anymore. I just log into Medium and type my thoughts away. This works especially well for those thoughts I have in the middle of the night.
Those are some of the many things I love about you, Medium.
But here are a few things I do believe could be improved so that we can all benefit. I know that for me, it would be of tremendous benefit:
On the mobile app, specifically Android, could you please find a way to remove comments from the list of published pieces? When I click on 'Stories' and look at the stories I’ve published, I have to scroll through every comment I’ve ever made and it takes me forever to find what I’m looking for. I know there is a setting you can click on each comment you make that asks whether you want to publish this comment to your profile (which works from a computer and mine is never selected when commenting) but when they show up in my limited space on my phone app screen to scroll through hundreds of articles—it gets tough, to say the least.
This brings me to my second suggestion for improvement. Can you please find a way to integrate the profile customization and layout that is available to publications and make those available to everyone with a membership?
I have so many articles that it not only takes me forever to sort through them but it makes my readers have to do the same. This makes all my work published a month or longer ago
hard to find
and out of sight
and out of mind.
I understand that this might be a bit deliberate on your part—you are all about what’s new, trending, and relevant—good art, but to a humble old poet like me, my work suffers for being buried in itself, you see? Furthermore, good poetry is timeless, wouldn’t you agree? Thus, if the functionality offered within Publication Management were available to me, in this instance but ultimately to everyone, then we’d have the ability to create tabs for titles of our series or customize the layout (with pictures) of how we want the reader to see the work — the same way publications do now.
This solution is beneficial for a couple of reasons. It allows you to fully empower each member. Some members might be intimidated by how much more there is available but for those of us that want those added features, it would truly be a lifesaver. It also provides more customization for those that are more visually artistic. In a sense, you would give everyone the opportunity to use two mediums of expression instead of just one with writing. Visual art combined with the written word. That sounds pretty excellent to me. Again, I seek the ability to sort my articles the way publications do as starkly opposed to the current way, which is a long scrolling list with no pictures to remind me of what the piece was about. I don’t want to have to start a publication just for my work but I don’t know another way around it. However this ultimately ends up, I appreciate even if you read it long enough to consider it.
In closing, I do wish to offer my gratitude:
Thank you for giving us a place that we can put our emotions. We know this is your fuel — emotion. Help me temper my emotions by taking a look at these suggestions. I’d greatly appreciate it.
With Peace,
Anthony O’Dugan
