Some Medium Questions, Answered

On beta deficiencies, bundle economics, and blogging

Last week, I posted a call for questions. I got many! Thank you for writing. There’s no way I will keep up with answering them all, but here’s a start.

Many of them were about recent Medium updates, which is not surprising. I’ll batch some of those answers here. Next time, I’ll do some non-Medium questions.

‘A concerned Medium fanatic’ writes:

Why did anyone at Medium think removing basic navigation and the existing layout options for publications was a good idea in the Beta rollout?

Our new version of publications — which are now available to everyone (if you have a publication, look for “beta” in your pub settings)— have a bunch of new functionality. Most visibly, the ability to change the look of your publication — colors, fonts, etc. They also don’t have all the old functionality (specifically, more layout options and navigation). As the word “beta” implies, this new product is not done (not that software ever is done — unless it’s dead).

Some of the things we removed in order to simplify, but some we just haven’t gotten to yet. This is because, in addition to adding functionality, we actually rebuilt these pages on a new front-end stack.

The good news I can tell you is that we are bringing back the option to add navigation to the top of your pages — to both on-Medium and off-Medium pages. Look for that soon.