A Joyful Suggestion For Medium
Asking for one teeny tiny change
The recent sweeping changes in algorithms, the home page and the New From Your Network feeds have led to a great deal of frustration among Medium users. Change always brings at least some frustration but the way Medium dumps change on us without notice or explanation only compounds the frustration. Users have voiced their frustration and offered suggestions but there has been zero response from Medium which, of course, only further adds to the frustration.
While I am not very excited about the changes to the algorithms and the home page, I don’t care to talk about that right now. My suggestion to Your Friends @ Medium is about the New From Your Network changes and it is very specific. It is only about ONE WORD.
As everyone surely knows, New From Your Network is divided into one page and two feeds. There are ALL, PEOPLE, and PUBLICATIONS.
I am actually quite happy with the changes to the PUBLICATIONS feed. It seems to show new posts by ALL the publications I follow. I have no complaints whatsoever about that feed.
Through testing over the last week or so I have determined that the PEOPLE feed does not show ALL the new posts published by people I follow although it shows MOST of the new posts. And it shows about 50 times more of the posts by people I follow than the ALL page. I wish this PEOPLE feed showed ALL of the new posts by people I follow so that I don’t have to go hunting for what I may have missed. But my suggestion isn’t about this page.
The ALL page isn’t so much a feed as a page. The scrolling stops after only a handful of posts. So I can’t keep scrolling to see what I missed in the hours since I was last on Medium. It only shows a microscopic tiny handful of new posts from my network that are featured by either the algorithm or curating staff.
But it most emphatically does not show ALL the new posts from my network. Not even close! Not even remotely close! To verify this all one needs to do is click on the PEOPLE or PUBLICATIONS feeds and one will see that there is a ton of new posts from one’s network that never appear on the ALL page.
For Medium to continue to label that page, “ALL,” then that page will have to start showing ALL the new posts (like it used to) and not just a tiny handful of featured posts! The use of the term, “ALL,” is profoundly incorrect, misleading, dishonest, and could be legally construed by some as false advertising.
So my little suggestion for Medium is to simply change one word. Change “ALL” to “FEATURED.” This would reflect the truth of what that page really is. And don’t change it to “LATEST” because that is incorrect as well. There are posts in the PEOPLE and PUBLICATIONS feeds that are newer than the posts showing up in the ALL page/feed. The only truthful way of labeling that page is to call it “FEATURED.”
So my suggestion is to either change the name of that page from ALL to FEATURED or change the feed of that page to truthfully show ALL new posts from EVERYONE and every publication I follow. To label that page “ALL” as it stands right now is an outright lie. Medium Staff, please stop lying to us. One word can make a huge difference and it can help soothe a lot of the frustration boiling over on Medium . Please consider this tiny change.
