Medium is a great place to write, but not so great to read (please hear me out.)

I absolutely love this website, but finding material to read is genuinely frustrating. The Medium staff have a very hands on approach when it comes to picking and choosing what we should and shouldn’t be reading. To better understand what I mean, please look over this screenshot of the Medium home page as viewed from my account.

As this is my home page, I’d expect to see stories and recommendations from those I’m following. Instead, there is a lot going on here that has nothing to do with me, my tastes, or who I am.

Instead of seeing my friends’ posts, I’m greeted with “Top Stories for You.” These articles aren’t even top stories for me; it’s just what’s trending on Medium. Personally, I don’t care that Nathan Kontny can’t sing or that Jessica Semaan is not happy (no offense to either writer.) I am here to mostly read about technology and photography. If Medium was truly providing top stories for me, it would be from authors in those fields.

My initial reaction was to just click the X and get over it. Except, every time I go back to the home screen, even during the same browser session, these irrelevant top stories pop back up.

It only gets worse from there. The entire sidebar is useless stories and tags that Medium thinks I should be reading. Featured Tags are not personalized by what I read and write, but rather what the staff wants me to look through. There isn’t even a way to add a tag to this list! When I want to read technology articles, I have to click on one of those tags and then manually rewrite the URL in my browser with the correct tag, in this case: https://medium.com/tag/technology.

Moving further down the sidebar, they list the top 5 stories on Medium right now. This may be the one appropriate place for these stories to populate, but unfortunately with the current design, it’s just more clutter. I’d rather see “Last 5 stories you read” or maybe even some featured artwork/photos from the current top stories. Virtually anything else could be there and it would be more useful than it is now.

Shouldn’t all this stuff be on the TOP STORIES page?

New users get hit even harder by this design flaw because, by default, they are following @Medium (whom I cannot tag — I’m guessing due to a bug.) Medium staff recommend a lot of things, pushing them into our feeds regardless if it’s a topic we care about or not. When they promote a story, it will always makes its way to trending or top stories due to the fact that so many people will see it. This skews the mechanism by which stories are judged as trending. On Medium, trending articles are not actually trending based upon their real world success, but by what the Medium staff hand picks.

I’ve only been on the site for about a week. In that time, one of my articles was tweeted by MSI, garnering it about 3,000 hits. Yet, it did not appear to be trending anywhere on the site. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even show as a top story in any of the categories (tags) it was written. The top stories in Gaming are from November and August (only one from January.) The top stories in Computers are from December and November (only one from January.) Are month old articles still trending that hard?

Everyone, myself included, has their own unique tastes, likes, politics, religion, opinions and so forth. I’m just not interested in your version of life learning or 10 ways to grow my business.

But maybe I’m missing the point of Medium entirely — maybe the goal isn’t to foster individuality — but rather cater to a very specific audience where words all resonate together in a giant echo chamber.

I hope that’s not the case.