3 Ways Medium Could Improve Right Now

A conversation we must keep having.

We’ve all noticed how Medium has slowly been distancing itself from what we all signed up for. We’ve complained about it, discussed it, become frustrated at how little Medium and Ev Williams seem to care about the dialogue we’re having on their very platform. I guess this is one of those posts. But I’m not about to list everything I think is wrong with Medium. What I want is to start a conversation about what specific steps Medium could take to get back on track. A mini-manifesto, if you will.

So, here are three things Medium could change right now that would let us nay-sayers breathe easy for a little longer.

1. Give authors an author page.

Medium is not Facebook, but it isn’t Twitter either; a simple bio is not enough. Vico Biscotti has expressed this sentiment before, and I think it bears echoing: we want to engage with other authors, and an author page is an indispensable facilitator of that engagement. Currently, if I want to find out what an author has been up to, I hope to dear God they don’t write too many responses to other pieces—because, if they do, there’s no way for me to conveniently separate the wheat from the chaff and I will end up giving up my scrolling efforts midway. Funny. For me to better engage with authors, I end up hoping that they don’t engage too much with others, making it harder for me to engage with them. That’s kind of backwards. But it is inherent to the structure Medium has chosen to adopt.

My workaround for this has been to create an Archive story and put the link in my bio, spending many of my precious characters. I did it because it makes zero sense for me to not have a place where all my posts are neatly—and scrollably!—listed, but I shouldn’t have to. If you’re not letting us have a customizable author page, have the decency to embed an archive for each author that will make it easy to find that author’s posts. Don’t even get me started on the search feature.

2. Promote random articles.

I’m not sure if Medium has become a gigantic echo chamber or just another magazine, albeit with many many contributors. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Either way, it seems that what started as a place where anyone could serendipitously find great content of many different genres has become a place where we are all bombarded with the same stories, picked by an editorial staff, about some topic the staff believes we care deeply about—even if we really don’t. What’s up with that?

Diplomatic as I am, I won’t pretend that whatever I think Medium should be like is actually the best strategy for a budding startup. But what is happening doesn’t benefit us, the clients, so I’ll offer a simple suggestion: with some regularity (say, every day), promote one totally random free story on the front page. You can even have a teeny tiny curation process if you really want to, to make sure that whatever is promoted is actually readable text. I don’t care. But let us know what is out there. Open up the tangled web of posts we see to let fresh content in. Allow us to find things that didn’t pass through your precious editorial hands; things you could never dream we would resonate with; silly things, serious things, stupid things, beautiful things. You gave us claps, now let us use them—if we don’t like something, we won’t clap! You needn’t shield us from the dangers of a democratic and open blogging platform.

It also probably couldn’t hurt to give a little bit of Medium back to the hands of its users—who, let’s face it, are all Medium is—and save some money on the salaries of editors we don’t need. This is similar to argument Mark Humphries makes for randomizing who gets research funding. It wouldn’t solve the deeper issues, maybe, but it would be a step in the right direction.

3. Stop the members-only madness.

Yeah, yeah, membership is how Medium makes money. All good. But do we pay Medium because we only want to read locked stories? Nuh-uh! We pay because we believe in what Medium says it wants to be. Medium is, in a way, our baby, and we want to feed it, nurture it, watch it grow into a beautiful—well, the metaphor ends there, but you get it. I recently joined the Partner Program after being a member for some time, and decided to try my luck at locking some of my stories. Boom: instant surge in interest in my stories. They weren’t even featured, as far as I know, but stories that had been almost dead for months suddenly woke up from their coma, revitalized and ready to rumble. Good for me!

But at what cost? And who pays the price?

“Non-members” do. Those people who do not pay 5 bucks a month but who still make and are Medium. Those people like Craig Phillips who can’t read half (or any) of the stories Medium spits at them daily are the same people who breathe life into Medium with their stories, responses, and claps. And we love them; don’t you?

Then stop it. Stop prioritizing locked stories, and for God’s sake stop filling “non-members”’ home pages with stories they can’t read. Give us back the joy of logging in—all of us.

These are three different ways Medium could become what we all hoped it would be. And they boil down to two principles: stop being patronizing (facilitate reading, help us find great stories, but don’t dictate what we should read. Hint: that’s why we’re here) and give us more autonomy as writers. Surely, these two principles could be used to evaluate any future changes Medium intends to make. So, whatever it is you do, oh Medium, ask yourself: Are you being patronizing or giving us more choice? Are you increasing the autonomy of writers or taking it away? Are you making it easier to find great stories or polluting our feeds with what you think we want?

I said I wanted to start a conversation. So I’m now going to do something I’m not proud of. In the next paragraph I will tag many authors who have expressed their thoughts and grievances re Medium and who might have something to add to this conversation. If my tagging you unduly disturbed your day, I am very sorry. Otherwise, I hope you’ll share your two cents.

Vico Biscotti, Louise Foerster, Tim Rettig, Burak Bilgin, Roy, marjorie steele, White Feather, Brian Brewington, Maarten van Doorn, DHH, Henry Wismayer, Quincy Larson, Alex Valaitis, Bridgette Adu-Wadier, Judy Yero, Aleksandra Smelianska, Radu Raicea

To all of you and to whomever may stumble upon this post I ask: What do you think? Is it all bollocks? Not enough? Is Medium lost forever; or perhaps you love the recent developments? Let’s talk, even at the risk of not being heard by the powers that be; let’s at least find out where we all stand on this.

We may not be able to change Medium with the conversations we are having, even though they are happening right under the Editors’ noses. But we can do something to make Medium more like what we want it to be. One way is to be mini-curators ourselves, like Vico’s “You may have missed on Medium” series and my Psychology Highlights. More efforts like this would certainly be welcome. Are there any other ways we can co-creatively shape the home we love so much?