Medium: A Feature Wishlist

Insight: Enhancing the Reader and Writer experiences.

Photo by Andreea Popescu on Unsplash

Author’s note: This article was first published on Medium and last updated on October 5, 2023

The Medium platform is simple, intuitive, and incredibly focussed on helping writers and readers alike. I like that. But some basic activities are rather hard to achieve on the platform. What could Medium do better? Here are some suggestions:

1. Managing Follows: Currently, writers can’t curate their list of follows to better reflect their interests over time. Asking them to unfollow each person is not realistic when they may have 1000’s of follows that may be contributing to a cluttered reading list! It seems logical to give them better control of managing them. Some features to consider: a bulk unfollow all, organizing follows by interest/tags (similar to lists) and searching for a name in a simpler fashion.

2. Managing Followers: For writers with a large number of followers, a search and organize function would simplify life and allow them to better engage with their audience and community. Wouldn’t it be also nice to have a category of ‘Readers’ so you can separate the followers from readers? Right now, everyone is a follower, but only some read. So it’s an extra incentive for writers to engage with other readers rather than merely followers.

3. Managing Comments: How about enabling readers to search comments by keywords rather than just Most relevant/Most recent? Also, why can’t we @ mention the author’s name in a comment or link another Medium article that may be relevant without copying in the link ? How about enabling @ and adding a “link icon” next to ‘B’ and ‘i’ so we can let the words do the talking?

4. Managing Lists: Lists are a great feature. We can use it to maintain our articles by topic but then, wouldn’t it be cool to have readers be able to follow the specific Lists of interest per writer? This would enable writers to engage readers with the topic they are interested in — it’s a mini-follow to the main following of writers.

5. Discovery of Publications: Finding the right publication to apply as a writer is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. It is manual, overly complex, involving lots of searches, clicks, and hacks like ending publication names with /latest. Does it need to be so hard? How about a simple search for publications that allows us to find it not just by a macro search, but specifically by country, follower size, interest, recent post dates, editor, etc.?

6. Feature Requests: How do we submit feature requests for consideration? Is there a feature board you can maintain so that rather than duplicate them, we can add our vote to similar requests already submitted by other writers?

7. Common signature or footer for all the articles: How about letting writers keep the same signature for all of their articles and editing it once in Settings instead of per article?

8. Refine recommendations: Currently, readers cannot organize the recommendations list, only add or delete topics. Why not enable this function and let the topics of interest be ordered from most interested to least? If we have 10 topics, they appear in order of addition now rather than in order of interest or recently read or most read. Readers have to manually scroll right to the end of the tab list to get to all topics now. So, ordering it is helpful. You can choose to keep some fixed — for example, For you, Following, and Trending. Optionally, how about a two-line tab list rather than a single horizontal scroll bar? Isn’t ease the goal here?

9. Managing Submissions to Publications: Currently, when a writer submits to a publication, the only menu choice is ‘Remove from publication.’ This choice is misleading as the publication may not yet have accepted or rejected the article— it is still in progress. Rejections are received by email so it can get confusing fast especially if writers submit to multiple publications and each publication has its own timeline. It would be useful to add an intermediate indicator for an article that has been submitted to a publication but has not yet been accepted or rejected. Why can’t notifications also include acceptances/rejections?

10. Grouping of Articles: Some prolific or long-term writers on the platform are trying to help their readers by publishing “Most popular” articles, “Most read” or creating Lists to group their articles. But this is confusing as a design on the home page when it is easier to simply see the articles as written. How about adding a Sort Menu to enable readers to sort an author’s articles by ‘Most Read,’ ‘Publication,’ and ‘Topic’ as customized by the author? For example, “Tech,” “Motivation,” “Environment” and so on set when an article is published. This would allow readers can see all articles on Tech in one place rather than sift through them all or use writer-generated hacks to view them.

11. Organizing Pinned Articles: Writers can only pin upto 5 articles on their home page. But the pinned articles cannot be ordered — it follows a simple last pinned first rule or first pinned last rule (hard to tell). Why can’t writers order these in any way they wish ? Also, it is tough for readers to identify pinned articles unless they search the fine print under each article header. If 30 seconds is what readers have, couldn’t writers direct them to the 5 pins faster? Options are: separator dots (…) for pinned v. rest of the list, or to be adventurous, use an above the fold space that hosts the pins, as icons, or as a horizontal scrollbar. Provide a reorder menu option as well.

Since the goal is for writers and readers to actively participate in the community, getting them additional tools to better manage the sprawl would help them connect better, and engage in a focussed way. Especially, as writers develop a writing niche and refine their muses!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Of course, Medium may have a roadmap — just hoping my voice will help raise the visibility that it needs more effective search and data management tools for its readers.

Do you have a feature you want to see on Medium? Please share your experience!

---

Like the article? Feeling generous ? Please consider buying me a ☕! Mucho Gracias!