Addressing Your Grievances About Medium

We had our first day on Medium! And yes there were some “first day of school” bumps. We’ve made note of your complaints and are putting together a list of things to improve, including:

Writing Comments and Following Conversation Threads Is Terrible!

We agree with this. There is a lot of clicking needed to read responses! In fact, Ev Williams, the CEO of Medium, has written about how the experience of reading response threads on Medium “sucks” (as he put it). Medium says they’re already working on improving this and we’ll hopefully see some changes around this sooner rather than later.

The Billfold RSS Feed Is Now Truncated

We’ve made note of the number of readers who’ve mentioned the RSS feed doesn’t work the way it used to and will talk to Medium about it.

Notifications Are Insane!

I know, mine were too, so I adjusted them in my settings. You might want to turn them off if they get too overwhelming and opt for a daily or weekly email with stories written by people you follow (like me!).

It’s Difficult to See What’s New on the Site!

Getting used to our new homepage will take some time. We use the top section as a way to promote a handful of stories. The next section should have latest posts, and the rest of the site will feature popular series. If you just want to see a reverse-chron blog-style of the latest posts, you can simply go here: thebillfold.com/latest.

How You Can Help Us (And Medium) Be Better

If you have additional suggestions on how your experience on here could be improved, make a list and email them to notes@thebillfold.com or respond with them in this post below so we can collect them all in one place (there was a scattering of grievances on posts that had nothing to do with the post itself; it’s easier to keep track of what you’d like to see change if we have a central location to do so).

You can help our site get discovered by a wider audience simply by clicking on the little green heart icon at the bottom of every story and recommending us. It looks like this:

We’re happy to see you guys still active in posts (like the conversations happening in Nicole’s gag gift post), and also writing such thoughtful things that can standalone as its own post (like this response by Alex Tunney about working on call shifts). Thanks for sticking with us! Small publishers need to experiment and try new things to survive in this crazy media landscape. We’re always working to make things better, and the team at Medium wants to make things better for us and you, as well.

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.