I have been writing here now for a few weeks, and I hate it. A lot. The writing method is fun to use, and the interface is great — except when it fails, which is regularly for me. I am a technical consultant and an experienced author. I have been teaching people how to use technology since the 1980’s. Medium fails me regularly, and sometimes in ways that are really, seriously aggravating.

I have been avoiding it since last week when, while writing here, I tried to add a cover image that Medium changed the color of in such a way as to render it useless. Instead of writing, which I was really into, I spent literally 40 minutes in photoshop attempting to undo the unrequested and unholy changes to color and exposure that Medium imposed upon me without my permission.

FAIL.

This piece is another example. I have ten things I need to write here. I am writing this instead. I am pretty sure nearly no one will ever see it. But I am so sick of how this place abjectly fails while appearing so ‘cool’ that I need to just vent.

Without bragging, some of the stuff I write is good. Sometimes excellent. I know because I get feedback and work with other writers, and I am capable of telling if something has pop. My posts here die unread, and it requires me to submit them to ‘collections’ that largely suck, and have few if any followers. Those that have followers do not get my pieces read. They get them ‘popped’. That means that, for a brief moment in time, 10-50 people will read them. Maybe. My posts disappear here like they do on FB, where I work to change how people think and use that medium. I hate the submission model, and there are not enough categories with readers.

So most of what I write here, while fun to create in the interface, just buys farmland, and lays there, accomplishing nothing, unseen, and robbing me of precious exposure, connections and opportunities. The main way I get views here is by posting to facebook or sharing there… which… is absurd. It’s also a bit of a pain that to share a draft … those who want to see it have to have a twitter account.

FAIL.

Now, all that would be enough. But it isn’t. Because on a number of occasions, and here I mean more than 20, the whole interface just absolutely fails to do something completely ordinary that should never, ever fail. What do I mean? I once spent FIVE MINUTES attempting and FAILING to be able to simply DELETE AN IMAGE. Literally, like 50 tries! I reloaded the page, quit and restarted my browser, I tried everything I could think of and NOTHING useful happened. It would delete the paragraph above the image or it would do nothing at all. I would select the image by dragging, hit the delete key… and NOTHING would happen. Nothing. Ever. After about 30 tries I was ready for the funny farm. Literally. I wrote to ‘yourfriends@medium.com’ and, really, I wanted to see gore. I wanted a police scene. I have never been thusly abused by any piece of software, let alone a word-processing app. It was absurd.

And then there was the time when, desperately attempting to get an image to simply appear in the proper size and aspect ratio that I needed, (fifteen minutes of failure, after failure… photoshop, prayer, demon-summoning, sacrifices, amputations… weeping, hair-ripping…) I accidentally deleted my story… with the few recommendations and views I have ever received here. Gone. My story. Just gone. Because the image handling sucks so ferociously that black holes come over here just to get hints on sucking. Literally.

See the image at the top of this piece? MEDIUM RESIZED IT INTO USELESSNESS, AGAIN!

FAIL.

I forking HATE MEDIUM (at least, when I was writing this, I did). I hate it. It has ruined me again, and again, for no good reason, and its submission profile is a seething mass of abject stupidity. Collections? Are you kidding me? This place is just a new circle in Danté’s hell, and while it really wants to look like heaven, something is rotten in Denmark, and the stink of it has become AN ENTIRE PLATFORM.

Someone burn this down. Please. Please.

{ or at least repair the dern thang }.

Postscript: Ok, ok. I don’t hate it so much anymore. I am learning how to use it, but some of the parts that are broken really still seem busted. I get to have a rant. What I went through merited it. Some aspects of this place don’t work, and the basic model is a bit bizarre. What do we get for building this pyramid? Who gets paid, and in what coin? Can we even tell? I remain interested and active. I am learning what this might become, for me.

Post-postscript: No, I hate it again. Medium has other problems I have recently discovered. The first involves using keystrokes to initiate or cease bolding or italicization. Medium’s response to these actions is bizarre and inconsistent in Firefox 27.0.1: to wit, it sometimes initiates the bolding or italicization, but only for a single character, or sometimes a word, or sometimes nothing or... sometimes it drives me insane because, again, I am sitting here dealing with how Medium fails instead of writing or publishing there. That’s just wrong.

I have edited this post a few times, as I learn more about how to spread content here, and new incredibly frustrating problems. The most recent reply from technical support was hilariously useless:

Greg Gueldner: Spacing and images are something we continue to work on. The engineers are looking at it right now.

The second is that it recently just obliterated one of the images I posted today on OS X 10.8.5. but on OS X 10.6.8 it appears to work fine, and, again, I am here hating medium instead of creating art. This sucks. Hugely. And even more strange, sometimes it just stops taking carriage returns. No special reason. It just refuses. It’s aggravating.

My ruined image:

Aaand the actual post.

A few things that would be useful:

1. *Image handling that works.
2. A way to add tags to posts and more tags to collections.
3. A way to browse and find collections far more easily.
4. *A way to selectively add a little ‘about the author’ section at the end of every post that was editable in a single location, but could be applied to or removed from any post.
5. A way to return a post from published status to draft status without having to delete it.
6. A way to extend the lifespan of ultra-man’s bleeping heart.
7. Cool icons and ‘dingbats’ that can be used to beautify call outs or quotes.
8. Better visual options for call outs or quotes.
9. Footnotes with ease and style