Medium Should Add This Feature
A Message to Medium Developers
About a month ago, Medium added the tipping feature and I praised it as one of the first steps to making the platform more equal.
To summarize, the tipping feature can be used by anyone even if they aren’t in the MPP. It was sort of a donate feature, as they have on Twitch.
Either intentionally or not, this helped mitigate one of the largest problems on Medium, the inequality of earnings.
Their payment method, Stripe, is really good for businesses but not that much for creators. The payment method is only available for a few developed countries, so creators outside of them were providing value to Medium without any compensation.
While it’s not perfect, I think it at least showed that they are making an effort to please users.
So that got me thinking, what other features should Medium add?
Here is my list, feel free to let me know what you think they should add or if my ideas are garbage.
Sort Feature
Similar to Youtube, where you can click on a creator and sort their videos by newest, oldest, or most popular. I want something like that on Medium.
There have been many times when I wanted to know a creator’s most popular story or wanted to see their earlier work. It is something I almost expected Medium to have and would save me a lot of time from scrolling to find their earliest work.
For most popular, they should most likely base it off of claps since that’s public information. Some people might not want to have their article views to be known and how they relate to their other articles.
More Customization
I think that the Medium story editor is great! It streamlines and only gives essential features so writers and especially new ones don’t go overboard. It gives it a good cohesion and clean aesthetic.
However, one of the things I want is more customization on profiles.
Currently, you can change your profile picture, bio, header, and colour of your page, as well as pin certain stories to the top.
It’s fine, gets the job done, but it always feels like something is lacking. I think more ways to express personality and organization like publications would be great for creators.
Being able to do the grid layout would help highlight some of your best stories. It would add dynamics to your profile as well.
Thumbnails Kinda Suck
Sometimes I have the perfect image in mind for my thumbnail, however, I have to throw it away since the subject is not centred, so they’ll get cut off in the thumbnail.
Medium thumbnails are small and crop a lot of the image.
I get why they might crop it, it would look weird to squish and squash rectangular pictures, but the problem isn’t the picture, it’s the thumbnail.
Going back to my previous feature, making the grid layout like in publications would help solve or at least improve the situation.
Also, I just want to say how much better publication thumbnails look. I much prefer to have the image be the background and format the heading and subheading of the story on top of the image.
I could see a potential issue with this where the picture could obscure the heading. But there can at least be a compromise.
Anyway, let me know if there are blatant flaws with my ideas that I haven’t spotted, in a creative and technical aspect.
What is something you want to add?
Write What You Love, Love What You Write
