Where is Marie Kondo of Medium when we need her?

Lincoln W Daniel presents a very interesting approach in a goodwill attempt to make Medium useful to editors and writers (some writers who crave for audience and rant here). I am sure this will be popular and useful for publications.

BUT.

What about readers of Medium?

I am concerned that these great add-ons may ruin our experience of reading Medium on a clean, no frills interface where we can concentrate on the reading. No canvassing (or limited canvassing), no town criers to attend to. Enter a space of text filled with Times Roman typeface on a white background, read, mark up, and discover. That is the attraction of reading on Medium for me.

For how long, though?

What’s next? Advertisement and social media sharing pop-ups, like the ones that ruin our web page reading everyday and force me to add another app like readitlater or something (more clutter?) With breadcrumbs and collections, Medium has already become more cluttered than I like it to be. All these add to more clutter of my reading space. I wish someone came up with a “sweeper” app to get rid of the junk I get to read on Medium.

Where is Marie Kondo of Medium when we need her?

To me, till this edition, Medium presents a reasonably clean (but already somewhat cluttered), white, nice typefaced reading zen. I do not want to receive mails from editors and writers canvassing their wares. That interferes with the right and previlege of others to share their work on Medium and directing readers to read only what some people would want them to read. Undemocratic.

As a reader, I want to visit Medium and read a variety of authors and publications organically. Let everyone flourish. Medium provides me tags, and that should be enough in theory for me to traverse this. Sadly enough, Medium, with its focus on Publications and ignoring indie authors have already started ruining that experience of free reading. Do we need an amplification of that process to distraction and manipulation? I am not sure.

Please give me back the old Medium!