Six Suggestions For Coach Tony

Based on the YouTube interviews with Medium writers

Screencap from Entrepreneur’s Handbook Video Interview // source

Hey Tony, congratulations and hope we haven’t worn you out yet.

I listened to the interviews you did with Zulie, Sinem and Amardeep and I have some thoughts.

I know, me and everyone else.

As I listened, I made notes about things you mentioned and how they play with the way Medium functions and came up with a list of suggestions.

No rambling preamble, I’ll just dive in.

1. Can you bring back “dismiss this story”?

We have a quality problem. I know that’s why you put the “show less like this” option front and center.

I don’t use the show less feature because it means an algorithm decides what’s “like this” in the first place. I don’t want an algorithm hiding chunks of content because it thinks it’s like something else.

I just ignore what I don’t like. No everyone seems to be able to do that. Hence the people writing meta posts about banning meta posts.

We used to have a “dismiss this story” option. There’s nothing for an algorithm to figure out. It’s basically “get this off my homepage.” It lets the user decide. I used that feature a lot. Made the homepage awesome again.

But now it’s gone. Would be real nice to have that option back. Maybe there’d be less complaining too. Wouldn’t that be a bonus?

2. Adding tags on writer profiles might help writers focus on fewer topics instead of collecting top writer accolades.

screencap by author

In the interview with Zulie, she asked about the dogma on succeeding here. Like, “what does it really take?” she asked.

You said “you can’t write on all topics.”

I could argue that a good writer can write on anything. Ask any copywriter. Hell, I’ve written about soffit and fascia for a client. lol But this place isn’t filled with copywriters who research…