Medium: Read & Write Stories Ratings and Reviews

A delightful Addition To My Day

I recently purchased a subscription to the platform. Normally I wouldn’t pay to hear peoples’ “opinions” on various subject; however, articles kept popping up on my iPhone and my email inbox which I found to relevant. The more I read, the more I enjoyed. So far, I am quite pleased with the content and fell that the value matches or exceeds the price paid. Most beneficial to me has been reading about topics that can help my career such as the technology related articles. I am old school and technology isn’t one of my main interests yet I know I must try to keep up or be out of a job. Normally I find it boring to read about, but the articles I subscribe to on Medium are interesting because they are down-to-earth and not full of jargon I don’t understand.
It also does not seem to lean either way politically for the most part and I like that for a change. For every article I DO feel has a political connotation one way, I can find another written from a dissenting view to equal the scales.
Thanks, Medium, for providing interesting content that is relevant to the present, helps me to be more productive, and is refreshingly not completely “woke.”

The app asked for a review so here it is:

First off I love what Medium is doing here. From a consumer of interesting writing, this is exactly what I want; no ads and very often articles that are interesting to me. The articles surfaced are improving as I use the service which is a good sign that what these people are doing with my usage is working.

The app on the other hand has some nagging issues for those who use an iPad in landscape or simply prefer landscape mode regardless of device. This app is clearly designed to be used in portrait mode... yes it works in landscape but the layout doesn't really fit the screen most of the time, and has huge white margins on both sides. It's as if the designers decided rather than reflow the text, we'll just keep the same text width and add huge margins on the sides. Large pictures that are embedded within articles tend to be cut off when in landscape, but are sized nicely to fit within the screen in portrait. Even worse, as of the last update the app shows a blank white screen when switching from portrait to landscape. I know that this may come off as a bit of a quibble, and it is, but a large iPad Pro just isn't very comfortable in portrait, and anything with videos really should be in landscape anyway. Besides, the app did pester me for a review, so here you go...

All in all, a great service and an app that is more than usable, just not 5 starts great... yet.

Updated review!

A few weeks ago I left an unfavorable review highlighting a number of bugs and design issues with the Medium app. However, with a recent update it seems that many of the issues have been resolved! Just wanted to say thank you to the developers and everyone involved in listening to and applying my feedback. These changes really have made my experience better and the quick turnaround was also impressive. Thank you so much 🙏🏻

If I could make one last suggestion, there doesn’t seem to be any direct way to give feedback or bug reports for this app outside of leaving a review on the App Store. I would’ve happily sent an email with my feedback and given the devs a chance to fix them before leaving a poor review. It’s also just easier and more efficient to communicate that way if you need more info or screenshots or anything like that. Setting up such a feedback channel can help protect your illustrious App Store rating and keep the business folks happy.

Cheers again for building a great app and a great community and for valuing your user’s feedback 👍🏻

Developer Response ,

Hi there, thank you for the review and the exhaustive feedback! Our team is currently looking into the issues that you reported, and you might see some of them resolved in one of the upcoming app updates. If you have any more suggestions or need help with anything else, please let us know by contacting us via the support form at help.medium.com.

Surprisingly, I like it. It crashes every time I use it more than five minutes, though

I've only been on Medium for two months. I was pleasantly surprised by the content. It wasn't all clickbait. I went to a Medium live writing session and the teacher was charming and funny. So I decided to stick around.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro and no internet issues. Not sure why Medium crashes like this. Maybe tracking? I don't know. That's why i didnt get a membership before. The site is built, be to track your reading and I didn't like that lack of privacy. However, some writers I loved were on it, which legitimized it. I need to find more writers of interest to follow. As much as I probably could use the "I made $$$ this month from writing here's how" articles and how relatable that journey was, I get resentful of clickbait titles and worse, the consistent typos on the especially clickbaity ones that manage to snag me. I am interested in productivity, etc, but it's hard to tease out what's real and what's just a content creator maximising his brand.

By the third click or so, the app freezes for me. I would love for this to change so I can see the direction Medium is growing. I think they mean well and have lofty aspirations. For me, not crashing would be a good start. Thanks.

Voice reader excessive battery drain

One of my reasons for subscribing was the voice interface, however this feature must consume an excessive amount of cpu and causes the battery to drain quickly. It also cannot be sent to the background or will stop. In fact, the cpu is so severe that my Apple magnet charger with a 20 watt adapter cannot sustain a charge with this feature in use. The battery continues draining, albeit at a slower rate. The caveat here is that I was using the reader with a lengthy article that was estimated to take 100 mins to read, but isn’t this a perfect use of the voice reader? Idk if this can be rectified but I won’t be resubscribing if there isn’t some improvement. The conditions for use completely overwhelm my iPhone 15 pro max with all other apps swiped closed.

Also, why isn’t there a reading history that allows me to return to incomplete articles? If I leave the app it inevitably resets and my reading place is lost.

Lastly, and less importantly, are writers not compensated? I read an author who writes long-form technical insight and she says she gets no compensation from Medium. That seems illogical unless this is a database of struggling writers wanting exposure to make it big elsewhere.

One of my top 5 favorite apps!

This app has so much info on anything and I mean ANYTHING you could want to know or need to know! Subjects and stories aa out all ages, walks of life and ways of life. I started using this app to get more info on work from home jobs and making free money online! I was so excited when I litterly found out need articles and info! They have writers for any and every subject you can dream up and it’s very business minded too if you want to go that direction! After using this app for many many years I now write MY OWN money making Blog called Come earn FREE MONEY With MEEEEE 100% guarantee If u follow simple list and info…free sites and get paid to jobs and sites (plus much much more) You will have CHRISTMAS COVERED! or I will personal pay u $150 I’ve use these messages for years and no they work ! What’s to lose…. A free $150 from me YES I SAID IT AGAIN:) or learn so MANY legit wayS to make free money from home every single day or night :) #ComeEarnTheReal$WithHaley
MY FB IS HALEY RANAE CURRIE FEEL FREE TO PM ME OR FIND MY WORK PAGE UNDER SAME NAME GOD BLESS AND THANK U MEDIUM!

Good Blogs, iPad App Needs Work

There is some really good and interesting writing on the site itself, and you can subscribe to what you like and mostly ignore what you don’t.

There is definitely a political bent here, hard left. There are conservative viewpoints but you have to go looking for them and they seem to draw the most fire, by far. Just be aware of it. I mute a lot of the “Trump is Satan” authors but they still manage to show up in my weekly email, which is irritating. No way to customize that.

The app itself is weak and I’ve now deleted it because navigation is so bad. You can read article and responses well enough, but if someone responds to something you say, you’re hard-pressed to go back to your original comment or the original article because there just is no navigation for it. On the website you can always go upward in the thread; on the app you can only go downward. I comment a lot so that’s a deal-breaker for me. Also Dark Mode when commenting gives you a black background with no change in the text color, i.e. you can’t read what you’re typing. Come on guys, this is not even a QA failure, this is just a total lack of dev testing.

It was my survival guide to my Rebirth!

I appreciate everyone who participates on the website and shares their expertise in every aspect of human life. It keeps me fighting for my health, my life, and recovering my self-worth and self-love; I lost helping others and almost lost my life The best website helped me by providing tools to take control of my health and my life. I stopped listening to the hurtful verbal abuse by a narcissistic personality disorder, got me corner between my terminal illness and the controlling my movement, financially powerless to free myself, and dared to accuse me of his ungodly conduct. I had been fighting for my health and stopping him from keeping me trapped inside my body and four walls for more years; the outstanding success in corporate America, I hid darkness beyond the darkness. One hundred percent Isolation, No one ever asked or came to see me, I ask, for people and people ask for me, but he was the Middle Man for ten years, and everyone believed everything he has have been saying It took me 13 years to get out of the Wolf den.

History is necessary for accidental page close outs.

I must admit having been a medium member for the past few years I can tell you I’m never let down by quality. Writers on this app have their own unique way of connecting their audience. I can only hope that this corporation continues it’s journey of innovation for future of us writers.

One area in particular I would like Medium to consider looking into is allowing users to be able to have a history log of what they just read. I was reading a story this morning and accidentally backed out the article. I spent a good 25 minutes looking for it. Luckily I enjoyed the article so much I was able to remember the writer of the article and search him that way. Yes! I booked marked him. *So for those of you enjoying a read...”STOP” and bookmark it. I just recently purchased an iPad so still adjusting.

Thank you again for the quality of reading material you allow the world to enjoy and here is too many more decades of advancement. Not only have you impacted my life personally, it’s allowed me to grow through others experiences. You can learn a lot of valuable life lessons on Medium.

Great content

I rely on Medium for high quality reading about product design, AI, climate change, history, and much more. It’s easy to follow reliably high quality authors, and weed out the weaker ones.

In terms of issues, well, I’ll put them here because I can no longer find the way to submit feedback in the app. I’ve had challenges managing my subscription, vis-à-vis app store vs website. And I’m always annoyed by the in-story ‘clap’ and comment buttons; I nearly always miss and wind up on the author’s article page. These buttons are really poorly designed and prevent me from engaging as much as I’d like. Another thing that I’d like to see improved is the voice on the read-aloud feature. It’s too robotic and rather unpleasant. The highlight feature, which is used for…something… is hard to deselect and it’s purpose is as not intuitive as I think they believe.

That said, Medium is a key source of writing for me and I strongly recommend it for people that want to enjoy a torrent of solid articles, without ads, to engage with every day.