Why Does Medium Always "Fix" What's Not Broken?
Happy Friday
Know something? For a smart person, I can be hella dumb sometimes.
I guess we all can. But cripes. lol.
Last week, I wrote a piece on Medium asking why my “following” feed is full of people I don’t follow, don’t know, don’t even recognize.
See — I wrote that because Tony (the CEO) made a really BIG deal about saying they changed the feed and it’s now a “true” following feed. He said something about Medium making the change because of the grumbling about the home page.
My homepage sucks better than my vacuum, so I was excited to see my brand new shiny feed, all filled with the people I really follow.
I hurried over to look — only to find it full of faces I didn’t recognize. I opened them in new tabs and sure enough, I didn’t follow ANY of them. So how is that a “true” following feed? Color me confused.
So I wrote about it. Asked if anyone else is seeing people they don’t follow on their following feed. Tons of people responded to say, wtf — same thing is happening to them.
One person suggested that maybe the feeds are crossed and it’s showing “recommended” posts instead of people we follow.
Nope.
Color me absolutely obtuse. lol.
It’s publications.
Sigh.
Once upon a time, our feed had two tabs. Like now, but the two tabs used to be People and Publications. There was no “recommended for you” feed. So we could tab back and forth and look at posts by the people we follow or the publications we follow.
I could see people I liked reading under the people tab. And the publications tab was where I found new writers to read. Worked like a charm.
That was around 2018, I think?
So I guess somewhere along the way, they combined people and publications so they could add the “recommended” feed. I didn’t notice it while there were the faces at the top of the page because I clicked those instead of looking at the feeds.
Once they deleted the faces, I had no way to find the writers I wanted to read.
So I was excited about the “true” feed. lol. Prematurely, it seems.
Why do they always fix what’s not broken?
Honestly, it didn’t occur to me that it might be publications messing up my feed but turns out they are. I never see the WRITERS I want to read. Not one familiar face in there. Just everyone who writes for a publication I follow.
So I’m trying something a little radical.
I’m going to unfollow a ton of publications.
Not everything, no. But I’m going to be super picky. I will handpick a few small publications with great content to keep following and dump the giant ones.
Better marketing? Gone. Better humans? All the big ones — poof. Done. Any publication that publishes dozens of stories a day — gone. I want to see if unfollowing the big pubs will free up space in the feed for the writers I want to see there.
I don’t think Medium intended to throw publications under the bus when they rebuilt the “true” feed without the ability to filter between people and publications. But that might have been what they did.
Guess I’ll find out. I’ll let you know what happens.
Is your feed a mess, too? Or do you actually see the writers you want to read?
More reading…
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xo,
Linda
Through some ineptitude on my part, and a poorly implemented "Sign In with Apple" feature, I wound up with two Medium memberships - one paid and one unpaid. Strangely the unpaid one has better recommendations than the paid one, and because of cookies, phase of the moon, or maybe climate change, I can view anything I click on in either list. I will give Medium credit for putting me on to some very talented writers, but as they struggle to see any revenue from their writing, I fear they may give up. Substack is much better for writers, and is doing a reasonable job of introducing new authors in the "Substack Reads" newsletter. Being a pensioner (thanks UK for a great term), my budget for reading material has limits and at some point my list will need trimming. Meanwhile I enjoy great content, and have the satisfaction of knowing that my money is actually helping the people who produce the content.
I think the People and Publications tabs were there until 2020 at least. I agree that showed what I wanted to see. I much prefer that to the current version of what is being shown to me.
I deleted quite a few publications about 2 months ago after reading that suggestion and I still get things I'm not interested in reading. Might need to do it again and see if it helps.