Medium : What did you do?
How Medium Broke Collections
So Medium.com this is from a fan. You have managed to really drop the ball and break the whole idea of Collections rather completely.
Look, I know what you were looking to do. Before you had these wide open collections that everyone was submitting to willy nilly. There was a problem.
However, your solution just managed to make the life of someone managing a collection really, really hard.
I used to get a lot of submissions… then they stopped completely. Today, Ian Schoen contacted me on twitter wanting to include a great article he had written in my Good UX/Bad UX collection.
I was reading his article… but couldn’t include it in my collection. He was seeing my collection… but couldn’t submit to it. I went to the edit section of my collection… and managed to be forced into a new layout without wanting it. That was annoying, but this next part is ridiculous.
I read your help article and realized you were now requiring me as a collection owner to add every single person I may ever want as a writer… otherwise they can’t even submit a story to my collection AT ALL?!
So I take time to go back to the wonky edit section of my collection and find that I have to open a second tab of medium to get the guy’s name I want as a writer… Why isn’t there a Add as a Writer button on all profile pages?
Such a button could be context sensitive and only appear if I was an editor of one or more collections. A simple interaction could make it easy to chose to make any Medium user a writer on one (or even multiple) collections I manage.
Even if it is someone who has already written for me, you force me to skip back and forth between two instances of Medium and copy and paste all the names of all the people who have ever written for my collection? Even if I get that far, the interface for adding them is buggy and double posts their name. Why is this so broken?
The worst part is the negative effect it has on the entire Medium experience. As a curator, I now have no way to discover new writers who can make my collection better. Even if I do discover new writers, (without any help from Medium) I will have to open up Textedit to copy and paste their twitter handles into so that I can add them as writers later in the buggy collection edit section.
Really, really disappointed Medium
Come on, you made authoring great content on the web easy and beautiful, don’t throw that all away by making that great content so difficult to curate, Please tell me this is a work in progress and not a final draft.
P.S. The Manage Editors panel has a bug that makes it impossible to remove an editor. (Mac OSX 10.8.5 and Google Chrome version 36.0.1985.125)
