Web Site Accountability

A friend published a long article here on Medium. I hung every word as he bared his soul. So naturally I wanted to respond. First I had to establish an account with Medium. That’s fine. This process went smoothly.

Returning to the original article, I composed a reply, taking about 1/4 of an hour, clicked the publish button and was greeted by the message, “Sorry but we where unable to publish your comment.” All that wordsmithing disappeared like tears in the rain.

Yes, I felt sad and a bit angry. Systems have been getting better and better and making sure you don’t loose anything. Google Docs is a great beacon of reliability, saving my work as it goes along. I see as I write this that Medium has embraced this feature as well.

Having suffered with software that had little regard for preserving my work, I though my days of composing off-line for safety, then copy/pasting the finished work where over. The worst software sin is to loose you user’s data. I often copy my comment copy into my clipboard before submitting it It’s kind of a short term backup. Unfortunately, in this case, I did not.

As an engineer, programmer and software tester, I know that unreported problems never get fixed. I thought perhaps the folks at Medium would be interested in a bug report. So I began to look for a customer service link, feedback link or some way to communicate with the fine folks at Medium.

Where might this link be? On other sites it’s often on the top right … but … no. Other sites have links at the bottom. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, but Medium just doesn’t want me to reach the bottom. It keeps loading and loading and loading. Unlike Twitter I did, indeed, reach the bottom. To my great disappointment … no useful customer support like lurked there either.

My conclusion to this story of woe and the conclusion to this much to long missive is that they don’t want to hear from me. They wish to remain unaccountably unaccountable.

(text saved in Google Docs)