Why Medium Does not and Will not Support Math Formulas

I’ve come across several stories on how to write mathematical formula on Medium. For instance, stories like How to write mathematics on Medium, and How To Write Mathematics on Medium have attempted to solve this issue. However, as of 2024, there still seems to be a lack of a satisfactory method to seamlessly embed mathematical formulas in Medium’s stories. This led me to ponder why Medium hasn’t ventured into developing such functionality, and here are two primary reasons I’ve identified.

Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash

The Direct Reason: Story Editor isn’t Based on Markdown

As I understood, Medium’s built-in story editor follows a minimalist design philosophy, offering only essential features by default. While this approach simplifies usability and caters to the majority of users’ needs (see the next section), it lacks many functionalities provided by similar products like Markdown.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that is widely used for blogging, online forums, documentation pages, and README files, etc. If Markdown is supported in Medium, then it would be much easier to embed formula, code and other multimedia resources. A comparison between Medium’s story editor and Markdown functionality shows that Medium editor supports only 56.5% of Markdown’s features.

Why hasn’t the Medium team opted for Markdown, like other platforms? Here is my answer.

The Fundamental Reason: Not All Needs Have to be Addressed

The reality is, among the vast community of Medium writers and readers, the demand for mathematical formulas is exceedingly niche. Even within popular topics like data science, the requirement for formulas is also relatively minor.

Here are the top 50 most popular Medium tags in 2024, based on the number of related stories based on this story. Take a try to point out which topics necessitate mathematical formulas by yourself.

1. Life (2.9M+ Followers & 909K+ Stories)
2. Startup (2.4M+ Followers & 602K+ Stories)
3. Blockchain (1.4M+ Followers & 780K+ Stories)
4. Poetry (1.2M+ Followers & 725K+ Stories)
5. Life Lessons (1M+ Followers & 680K+ Stories)
6. Politics (2.4M+ Followers & 521K+ Stories)
7. Health (3.5M+ Followers & 668K+ Stories)
8. Love (493K+ Followers & 553K+ Stories)
9. Travel (2.5M+ Followers & 474K+ Stories)
10. Technology (7.6M+ Followers & 719K+ Stories)
11. Entrepreneurship (2.1M+ Followers & 451K+ Stories)
12. Self Improvement (4.4M+ Followers & 669K+ Stories)
13. Education (2.4M+ Followers & 515K+ Stories)
14. Writing (3.9M+ Followers & 659K+ Stories)
15. Business (4.2M+ Followers & 638K+ Stories)
16. Cryptocurrency (2.5M+ Followers & 738K+ Stories)
17. Bitcoin (671K+ Followers & 392K+ Stories)
18. Design (3.8M+ Followers & 356K+ Stories)
19. Social Media (2.3M+ Followers & 357K+ Stories)
20. Music (1.8M+ Followers & 320K+ Stories)
21. Relationships (3.3M+ Followers & 434K+ Stories)
22. Coronavirus (130K+ Followers & 118K+ Stories)
23. Sports (1.2M+ Followers & 285K+ Stories)
24. Mental Health (3.5M+ Followers & 445K+ Stories)
25. Productivity (3.4M+ Followers & 320K+ Stories)
26. Programming (5M+ Followers & 367K+ Stories)
27. Food (1.8M+ Followers & 247K+ Stories)
28. Leadership (2.2M+ Followers & 252K+ Stories)
29. Javascript (1.3M+ Followers & 251K+ Stories)
30. Art (2.5M+ Followers & 247K+ Stories)
31. Fiction (1.3M+ Followers & 247K+ Stories)
32. Humor (2.6M+ Followers & 227K+ Stories)
33. Artificial Intelligence (3.4M+ Followers & 355K+ Stories)
34. UX (1.4M+ Followers & 192K+ Stories)
35. Books (2.5M+ Followers & 339K+ Stories)
36. Culture (2.6M+ Followers & 238K+ Stories)
37. UI (347K+ Followers & 57K+ Stories)
38. Photography (2M+ Followers & 181K+ Stories)
39. Creativity (2.6M+ Followers & 222K+ Stories)
40. Data Science (3.9M+ Followers & 290K+ Stories)
41. Psychology (4M+ Followers & 288K+ Stories)
42. Software Development (1.8M+ Followers & 253K+ Stories)
43. World (833K+ Followers & 54K+ Stories)
44. Investing (652K+ Followers & 193K+ Stories)
45. Innovation (1.2M+ Followers & 151K+ Stories)
46. Science (3.8M+ Followers & 181K+ Stories)
47. Parenting (934K+ Followers & 150K+ Stories)
48. Gaming (1.4M+ Followers & 168K+ Stories)
49. Self (356K+ Followers & 187K+ Stories)
50. Family (980K+ Followers & 171K+ Stories)

What I speculate is that math formula may appear in the topics of Technology, Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Science, and their rankings are 10, 26, 33, 40, and 46. I have to admit that these information technology related topics have much lower rankings than I thought. Furthermore, even in these topics, text, images and codes often suffice for explanation and demonstration, and math formulas are not the bread and butter for them.

Conclusion

As a commercial product, Medium must prioritize addressing users’ core needs and not focus on minor details. While Medium has updated its code embedding features in November 2022 in response to increased demand in data science and coding contents, the inclusion of mathematical formulas doesn’t seem to be a pressing necessity for most users. Therefore, I believe that it’s unlikely that the Medium story editor will support this feature in the foreseeable future, unless demand significantly shifts.