DMD in Beta Testing

Medium’s new layout options.

You may have noticed Dan’s Media Digest looks a bit different now! That’s because I’ve enrolled in Medium’s Beta test of their new publishing tools. I’m already not a big fan, as the “blogging” style of the layout looks too old-fashioned (rather like DMD looked back in 2006), and it’s lost the useful navigation header.

I think this new Layout makes things harder for readers to find specific content, or explore DMD’s archive in any meaningful way. I also don’t like not being able to set where the “Read More” link appears for articles on the homepage.

I can create a few workarounds for the changes, like ensuring all content includes links to similar types of article, but I won’t bother — for now.

This is only a Beta test, so I’m sending a lot of feedback to Medium (and having a grumble on various other publications) in the hope it has an impact. But I am struggling to see what’s an unequivocal improvement here! Even the footers of articles no longer display articles that were recently curated by Medium, which is annoying.

To be fair, all I require is the option to use the old Layout styling and include a navigation bar… I can just about live with the other changes.

It’s baffling Medium have rolled out changes that are clearly a backwards step in so many ways (and easy to predict would be so), but there’s possibly a business argument for it — from their perspective. The downside of being hosted by Medium is you’re at the mercy of whatever they decide to do with their platform, to generate more reads and tempt people to subscribe.

But if these changes are permanent and DMD becomes difficult to use because my feedback didn’t have an impact on Medium’s thinking, I obviously have the power to leave Medium.com behind and upload DMD elsewhere.

I’d be interested to hear YOUR thoughts! Chances are we agree on a lot. But if you bring up a new issue or suggestion, I can feed that back to Medium and hopefully get it looked at.