PART ONE:

Medium’s UX is hostile to small creators. — A website once intended for everyone has quietly become painfully exclusive.

To be honest with you, it’s been awhile since my last real post here on Medium. I’ve essentially made my self-help experimental project Journal Kim my full-time writing exercise at this point. So, I haven’t been neglecting writing entirely, but I’ve neglected writing on a range of topics, and I miss it.

It would ridiculous to blame the platform for my lack of posts (in this case Medium), but the small changes and tweaks that have occurred over the past year have made my desire to write here essentially evaporate. I’ve written previously on how changes to Medium’s UI/UX were hostile to smaller creators and writers, now however, it’s become exponentially worse.

This isn’t a list of personal complaints and qualms, rather it’s a warning to new and budding writers for pitfalls to watch out for when first starting out with using Medium.

For starters, Ev Williams announced an aim to create a “more relational” Medium — this is a great idea, in theory. The aim was to change the shift of focus on people’s feeds and homepages from catchy headlines to the people and publishers themselves.

There is one obvious drawback to this: Even though you have a homepage now filled with writing from people you actually read and follow, it’s almost impossible to find material from new writers and creators. As I wrote about in my last article, the search function has taken a back seat and is a second-class citizen.

The selection of things you can even write about, which can be found at https://medium.com/me/following/topics, is both limited and heavily curated. If one were to want to write about something that doesn’t particularly fall into any one of those categories, how are others supposed to find it, exactly?

Following this, it was also announced that there would be a brand change in general (again) that would emphasize shortform articles, and ultimately minimize the way users can interact with other people’s profiles.

The domain that was personally yours was also changed from [**https://medium.com/XYZ**](https://medium.com/XYZ) to [**https://XYZ.medium.com**](https://XYZ.medium.com) which initially can seem completely cosmetic, but actually is detrimental to the search engine optimization of people’s writings — yet another way it makes the ability to find new writers more difficult.

Overall, Ev Williams himself has stated that there’s importance to stay relevant in a Gen Z world, and that’s a great idea, but the changes made make it essentially impossible to view Gen Z content. The way things are set up, it’s almost entirely luck-based and random for a new writer’s work to land on a potential new audience’s eyes.

These are young, extremely creative and driven people. However, a lot don’t know where to start. The large majority don’t have connections to get their voice out into the world easily. Particularly, those of this generation that are marginalized already by society — who’s voices are the most important for us to hear.

It is important for Medium to shift focus from major publications which can get clicks and readership without Medium, to instead prioritizing ways to actually make it easier for smaller writers to breakthrough and develop an actual community on here.