Looks like Medium has had a redesign recently, with recommended posts now being featured more prominently. Instead of appearing at the end of the post, they’re now in a right-hand sidebar, which doesn’t scroll, that is directly below the author of the post you’re reading.

And let me be clear: as far as I can tell, these are not recommendations from the same author. They can be from anyone, covering any topic that I can only assume Medium algorithmically thinks you’d be interested in. It reminds me a lot of the anxiety supplier that is Twitter Trending Topics.

Thank goodness. Here I was, reading someone’s post on UI design, without being made aware of, or being constantly reminded of whenever I move my eyes slightly to the right, of another post by a different author informing me that NFTs have been superseded by “Super NFTs”. Thank you for that, Medium. My reading experience has been dramatically improved! (Sarcasm test complete)

Honestly, I’m still wondering why people choose to use Medium for publishing long-form writing. And yes, I acknowledge that it could be worse: their “post” could just as easily been a Twitter thread1. But from this latest redesign, it seems to me that Medium is doing it’s best to close the reading experience gap between the two services.

  1. Please don’t publish your long form writing as a Twitter thread. ↩︎