Hot Mess
As for the re-’design’ of the site … words fail me.
Headers/(Sub)Titles aren’t bolded/emphasised on the profile/feed (defeating their purpose) and it’s seemingly random how much of an entry is displayed before there’s the option to ‘read more’ … some hidden behind a picture+title, as before … some published in their entirety … so, there’s effectively no demarcation between entries/posts/articles/stories/whatever … meaning the look and feel of your Medium presence (you can’t call it a ‘brand’) is neither consistent nor within your control.
Only italics are maintained after you publish something (there’s no bold/emphasis for the likes of you).
Controls to edit posts, change their settings, etc. are inconsistent and inconsistently placed in different views.
Reading ‘more’ seems to autoscroll to some indeterminable (mid?)point past the featured image … which is very feng shui (less is, after all, less), removes any impact it might have had and takes control of the look and feel of a post out of your hands.
Short of scrolling through your entire posting history, how you’re supposed to know that someone has commented/highlighted/whatever something eludes me … and there seems to be no way to track responses you’ve written other than looking through your Stories list … which contains everything you’ve ever posted in one, long list, because that’s so much easier than separate lists for posts and replies (so, good luck finding out whether anyone replied to a discussion point you wrote more than a month ago) … or it does, if I right-click on the Responses link on a tab I opened before my Medium updated to the new design, but, if I open the user menu and select Stories from there, it doesn’t, it behaves like it used to (you have to additionally select Published stories to see them all and, furthermore, not everything you post is even listed in the Stories/Published list — it’s incomplete); the only other way I can find to even see notifications, let alone track past ones, is to open my user-menu, right-click of the Settings option and open it in a new tab, where the bell icon/menu is still visible (for now) … or by editing a post, which (again, for now) reveals the same bell icon/menu … or in the results, after performing a search — but it’s anyone’s guess how long it’ll be before even those clumsy workarounds cease functioning.
Replies are followed by an (outdated) ‘more by’ list that has no relevance to the topic under discussion and (take it from me as both a psychologist and an educationalist) absolutely no business being there.
When you’ve finished replying, you’re taken to your profile page, where you can’t see your reply and have to go hunting for it again. Why? Who does that? When I’ve finished replying to something then, at worst, I want to go back to where I was before I saw the thing I decided to reply to (so, my Medium ‘news’ feed), not navel-gaze my own posts (I haven’t simply already read all of them, I f**king wrote them!) … so, what value is there in taking me there, losing my place in my reading? Seriously … who ever thought anyone would want to do things this way and how did they get a job in UI/UX (were they dragged in off the street with “Hey, you, wanna make some easy money architecting our web site’s access structures for an afternoon”)?
As for the main News/Feed page … I’ve been reading increasingly fewer posts (by increasingly fewer of you all) since that was redesigned to resemble a mobile interface on my laptop/desktop (with its ickle badges and counts for toddlers who want to stab their pudgy fingers on the pwetty icons … ooooooh, a new post by the Teletubbies!) … because, instead of being able to scroll through everyone’s posts in chronological order and read the ones that catch my eye in my feed, I’ve got to dip in and out of each of your profiles and hunt for the ones that are new since the last time I looked.
Whatever I want to do here, the new design ensures that I need to take ever more steps to do ever less of it.
Meanwhile, whilst they’ve been solving problems nobody actually had, none of the things that needed fixing have been.
Who … I hesitate to say ‘designed’ … brainfarted this idea? It bears all the hallmarks of design by (an HR led) committee brainstorming session (during which everyone’s ideas are, quite literally, taken on board, so that no-one feels left out) ¹ … after which Kelly was given the task of implementing them.
All things considered, it’s just a hot mess and … mark my words … it’s gonna make Geocities look good!
The truth of the matter is that Medium has been pushing users in the direction of using the app rather than the desktop site for a while now … meaning that we can be tracked and traced in everything we do on the site, because they have complete control over it and prevent the use of mitigations like the browser extensions I mention here:
The new design is simply yet another step along the path of rendering the desktop site unusable for anything other than browsing what Medium deigns to present of someone’s posts to the point of there not even being the option to ‘read more’, if you’re not signed into your account in the app — Big Brother owns the majority shareholding in Medium and is calling the shots.
Moreover … as I mentioned a while back … Medium is being driven by the Marie Antoinette brigade: people who have no experience of stopping to consider whether anyone else’s life experience might differ from their own; they use mobile exclusively, so it doesn’t occur to them that anyone else even doesn’t let alone would prefer not to — ‘Web browser’? Never heard of it … what’s that then? Just use your phone/tablet instead!
It can only be a matter of time before people can swipe our posts out of existence, curating their own version of our writing as they see fit — although the Readers Digest version of War And Peace might not be such a bad idea, I admit … at the end of the day, intolerant, censorious mob rule ‘cancel culture’ applied to everyone is surely just around the corner now:
Medium … inconsistent, incoherent publishing by, and for, the vacuous-judgey-little-shit-with-ADHD generation.
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¹ Everyone’s project meeting participation trophies won’t arrive until a week on Friday, however, because Chardonay (note speling) couldn’t place the order in time ² … so, feel free to bring your emotional support animal/blankey into the office in the interim, guys.
² She wasn’t able to bring up the order form on her phone and, of course, the idea of speaking to someone never occurred to her (or anyone else in the department).
