Dear Medium Publication Editors: This is why I don’t accept your requests to add my piece to your publication.

Quite a few times now I’ve been asked by various editors of publications on Medium to add my latest piece to their publication. The emails come from a template and the publications are similarly generic: I get the sense that some of them are using bots to auto-email anyone who’s published work in a specific tag, regardless of quality.

But the genericness isn’t why I haven’t accepted these requests. Rather, it’s due to a major security hole:

Editors can make & publish changes to your piece without you knowing.

This isn’t clearly written in any of Medium’s FAQs, but it does show up in the request email:

Both you and your editors will be able to edit, save changes, and view notes on your story. You will not receive notifications of published changes.

I don’t know these editors from Adam. Why should I trust them to not mess around with my work without my knowledge?

What stops an unscrupulous editor from completely overhauling my piece, writing incriminating information, filling it with spam, or worse — deleting everything in it? What recourse do I have to revert changes? How would I prove to Medium’s safety team that a mangled piece is not the same as the original version — is that even a thing you can report?

My Medium pieces are not Wikipedia articles; hell, even those have edit histories and options to revert to older changes. Google Docs at least lets you know when someone tries to edit a collaborative document (I was able to salvage a piece that a careless person tried to delete huge chunks of this way). With other publications, usually the editor lets you know about the edits they make, and the edits are a collaborative process. Here? It’s a recipe for disaster.

(update: Alexainie discovered that Medium does have a Revision History option! So there’s at least some recourse if editors make a mess of your piece, which is good news. Thank you!)

If these editors were people with solid experience who can be somewhat trusted to keep your piece as is, and the publication doesn’t just seem like a collection of everything vaguely related to that topic, that would feel a little safer, but trust can also be broken. These are people whose provenances are unknown, who are nearly indistinguishable from spammers.

Until Your Friends @ Medium provides the means for original writers to be notified about edits and have some recourse for when the edits are unwanted, I’m going to ignore (almost) any request to add my piece to some random publication.

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