Four Changes that I Believe can Improve Reader and Writer Experience on Medium

My response to a canned email from Medium.com’s CEO

Hey, Ev.

I realize the email you wrote was canned, but I still appreciate you giving readers and writers an opportunity to offer feedback to help make Medium a better platform. Here are a few suggestions I believe may do just that:

1. Implement additional formatting options.

It doesn’t have to be anything overly complicated, but a couple of things that I find frustrating when I’m writing is the inability to center my text.

Just the other day I was struggling with how I could create a subtitle with bullets but have the indentation match all paragraphs underneath. I couldn’t do this without the paragraphs butting up to each other.

The article was about the lack of freedom in the US and I had a section in it called “Personal Property.” Underneath that, I wanted to break the thought into small sections: self, vehicle, cash, guilt (example). I was attempting to create something like this:

This was formatted within Gmail but formatting did not transfer when copy/pasted

This is as close as I could get on Medium:

Notice the lack of space between each paragraph under the bullet point? If I shift+enter again to add an additional space, it creates a new bullet point, preventing me from creating the desired visual effect.

​I believe creating more formatting options such as the one above ^ would be very helpful and would improve readability. It would also improve the differences from one style of writing to another (or rather, style of formatting).

2) Allow writers to change the background color (and also the reader)​

Allow writers to change the default background color (only pre-selected colors should be allowed to prevent extreme colors/contrast). But, if done, the reader should also be allowed to change the color back to the default or to any color of their choosing. This gives both the reader and writer more options based on his/her own preferences.

3) Make comments threaded

One part of Medium that I love is the ability to comment on articles and discuss various points within said article. However, when I click on a comment, it opens the comment in a page of its own — this is frustrating.

​4) Allow differentiation between comments and “stories” based on word/character count or give us a choice

For whatever reason, every comment shows up as a “story.” This clutters up the stories page and some of us — myself in particular — dislike having our comment counted as a story. There should be a difference between the two.

One suggestion might be that anything less than a certain number of characters is automatically deemed a comment while longer comments can be published as a story on its own (which would open as a new page).

Or, you could allow commentators to choose whether a comment should be published as a story or as a general comment. Some comments deserve to be their own stories, but most comments should simply be that: comments.

These are a few items that I believe can improve the writer and reader experience. I understand that Medium’s goal is to make everything as user-friendly and simplistic as possible but I believe the aforementioned items fit within the goal of simplicity.

Hopefully these suggestions find you well. I may even publish this as a story on Medium for all to see and comment on … errr … publish stories on.

Thanks very much,

[redacted]