Medium Publications Have One Fatal Flaw…
I got an email the other day regarding one of my Medium articles, and I was pretty chuffed…
Fake McFake wants your story in their publication on Medium
Cool! I’d never heard of Medium publications before, but I was pretty excited to see that apparently someone gave a damn about my internet ramblings!
After that, I went to learn a bit more about Medium publications…
In short, they’re pretty cool. Basically, publications are collections of articles generally following a similar theme. Users can subscribe to them to discover content they’re interested in, and writers can submit their articles to get more visibility. Sounds good!
So, why didn’t I submit my article?
Actually I did, but then I read the email again…
Pressing the button above will submit your story to ‘A Fake Publication’ and add you as its writer. The editors will be able to publish your story into the publication, and edit the story at any time (you will not receive notification of these edits).
Woah, hold on a second… You mean someone can change the content of my article at any time, without even notifying me?! Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t be too happy about someone editing my content without my knowledge.
What if 6 months down the line I direct a potential employer to some Medium articles I wrote, only to find that important parts had been changed without my knowledge?
There are of course some valid reasons for editors being able to do this (grammar, improvements, whatever… ), but at least notify me of the changes. That way I don’t have to read my own articles every few months just to make sure somebody didn’t mess with them!
Now maybe I trust the editor of the publication not to tamper with my article…. But do I trust everyone else that may potentially be added as editors to the publication in the future?
Solution Time
It would be nice to see some sort of configurable permissions for editing — so you can optionally choose to give a publication the power to edit your article or not. At the very least, a notification system in place to let you know when someone has changed your content would be nice.
Otherwise, we might see quite a few writers refusing to submit to publications — which doesn’t seem like a win for anyone!
TL;DR — Medium publications can edit your content whenever they want, and you won’t even be notified. Crazy!
