You make valid points. You used a word that sums it up, for me personally, at least.
That word is “expected”. For me, who has not been here all that long, and clearly for a few who have arrived since we did not get what wasw expected. Those expectiosn for my part was simply that it was a place for stories, because that was what they claimed in references I saw here and there provided by them.

So what did I find? Lots of non-fictional posts that were clearly not stories, even if Medium calls them that. I’m not saying that’s not good in terms of content, some of them provide very valuable information and I read them with pleasure, but is does cause at least one problem. That is that the ratio of those posts to those of actual stories is very high, so the actual stories are largely ignored, being somewhat lost in the crowd, as it were. My suggestion to remedy this problem was to make another root folder just for the stories.

That would have the advantage that the fiction people would use that and they would make effort to draw readers to it, all on their own. One class of stories is fiction. There is currently not much satisfactory provision for writers of fiction, most newbies complain about the lack of views, which brings us back to the previous para. More signifcant, is that longer term, Medium will gain a reputation amongst fictionwriters as not being a good place to be. Ergo they will no longer be a network of stories, but a network of something else.

So what is lacking for a fiction writer? The notes sytem is SUPER for matters relating to text, expression, grammar, etc. What is lacking is a place for what you might call social exchange about the story itself, or for discussing ideas about a composite story, and similar matters.

The current repsonse system for that is not suited. If I compliment Arin or others on their post thrn OI put it as arepsnose, because I want everybody to see it, so they might be rmepted ot read. People who do not read the whole subject often will check replies, I do it myself. When a 1 or 2 line compliment appears as a story on it own, it looks ridiculous, it should appear with the post it applies to. Its place is not in the notes, thats for dealing with specific text items. Its about the story as a whole and is the right level is the response level.

If the note system was duplicated to be able to use as a response system, with some modifications, that would be fine. Pissing contests, as you vulgarly put it, between fiction writers do not occur, or at least so rarely as not to be a problem. Usually they try to help each other.

In short I have frustrated expectations and anybody whose ever been in a dating relationship where that occured knows what effect that has on the relationship. Medium, by its silence on this subject, is not considering where its likely to take them. Of course they are quite within their rights to do whatever the hell they want, but you don’t fidelise users with that attitude, nor do you build a sense of community. My expectations were based on what Mediuam put across, it not me that dreamed them up by navel gazing.

A sense of community is impotant, it attracts traffic to the site because people like that. Humans are basically gregarious animals. They will support the site if it runs into diffculties, they will even contribute money. I personally bought a computer and monitor for a benevelent mediator who fell on hard times and hers broke and I was happy to do so. You don’t get any prizes for guessing what my response would be if Mediuum had that problem, lol.