Medium’s Awful New Home Page

After refining my Medium feed for quite some time, it has been turning up nice stories that I like and want to read. The feed was really working for me.

This evening, I found that Medium has redesigned its homepage, and I was excited to try it.

Now that I’ve used it for a short time, (a very short time, admittedly), I’ve realized quickly that I strongly dislike the changes. My dislike comes from one simple fact: it puts much more control into the hands of the Medium Staff.

The control that the Medium Staff had before this change already bothered me. In fact, I wrote a (sort of whiny) article all about the unwelcome influence of the Medium Staff.

On the new homepage, things are worse. At the top, I must either select from some ‘curated topics,’ or live with a bar at the top of my page begging me to do so. But I don’t want topics curated by Medium Staff. I don’t share their taste, and besides, I’ve spend a long time tuning my feed so I can see things I like. Now, I have to go to the For You section.

Okay, I’m whining again, I know. It’s just one extra scroll and one click, and then it’s back to my old feed. But that scroll + click is non-trivial. Now whatever the Medium Staff picks for everybody will get so much more attention. In my opinion, that is quite a bad thing. I’ll just quote myself:

By allowing a small group of homogeneous insiders to be tastemakers, merit-based success is undermined

and again:

Innovation and diversity of ideas go hand-in-hand. The lower the variety of thoughts we think, the lower the potential for radical, life-changing innovation

The Medium Staff, however hard they try, will never be able to produce a diversity of thought that rivals that of the entire Medium community.

This change really turns me off.