CONSISTENCY WOULD HELP
This sounds all very nice… but oh so premature! Medium really needs to get its act together. I’ve only been a paying member for several months but nothing — I mean nothing — is consistent!
As a paying member, I sort of expect to see, at first glance, articles that reflect:
- a) the subjects in which I specifically expressed interest; and
- b) articles by those people/writers who I’ve elected to follow. For example, a friend told me she used to get a sidebar which listed pieces written by her favorite writers. I don’t see anything like that. However, two weeks later, my friend told me that her sidebar of favorites disappeared. Inconsistency.
Then there’s the matter of devices. I’ve read lots of complaints that the Medium app is different for different devices. Why IS that? This is not rocket science! Why should those who use a smart phone with Medium get hearts only, but those of us who use other devices now just get “claps”?? Inconsistency.
I personally prefer to use my iPad Air 2 when on Medium. So on my iPad, I get the new version showing appreciation for others’ work — CLAPS — but there is no Clap Guide to indicate how the Clap System actually works. There should be, since hearts are gone now. This article below, your new Medium piece to which I am responding, covers Claps, but only in part. Nevertheless, I find it extremely confusing and not really applicable…
NOW when I go to view my “stats”, it doesn’t show number of “claps” for each of the things I’ve written but, instead, it shows the number of “fans”! What the hell does that mean? Inconsistency.
Additionally, my iPad is evidently not honored when I want to read a Medium Series. I just get an error message saying “Series are not available for iPads”. But…but…I’m a paying member. Inconsistency.
I then decided to set up Medium on my iMac Desktop Computer. After having done that, everything on my iPad changed! I no longer get “Morning/Afternoon/Evening Edition”. Now I just get “You might like…”. And most of the time I don’t. Inconsistency.
I have a friend, a published author of five books, who I told about Medium… talked him into joining. He downloaded the Medium app onto his iPad and then wanted to know how I had a much longer list of subjects of interest from which to select. He’s a biophysicist so, when he saw I had Neuroscience as one of my choices, he wanted to select it as part of his customization. But it was nowhere to be found. I suggested it was because I was a paying member. So he went to “Help” and asked how he could become a paying member. He was told that he had to be invited. Really??? What’s that about! So now I actually have to email him links to those articles that he can’t get on his own setup. Inconsistency.
And on another subject, the actual writing and posting of articles on Medium. Writing articles using the Medium Draft option is as minimal as one can get. I get more formatting options when I write an email! So I asked Customer Service what app most writers use to write a professional looking article and then export it to Medium. I was told this could not be done. They suggested that I write elsewhere — an application of my own choosing — and then copy/paste it into Medium Drafts. That may work for some pieces but it is unworkable when, for example, you write in Microsoft Word — a piece with multiple images and/or graphs — copying and pasting is just not an option.
In conclusion, I strongly suggest — for those of us who do not regularly publish in large magazines or blogs — that Medium make a Medium Users Manual available to the many, many writers who just want to publish on Medium with professional looking pieces.
Thanks for listening!
