Dear Medium

With the recent changes to the Medium Partner Program, it would be a good time to update the Search function on your platform.

When  a reader does a search on a Tag, she/he is presented with the “top 10” stories with that Tag, over all time.

The writers who have published stories with that Tag will not have their Stories read via the Medium search function, UNLESS the reader starts searching by Year, and then by Month and quite likely have to drill down to the Day of the Month.

It is really disconcerting for a writer to have a new quality story on Medium, but nobody can find it. Not every Medium writer has a circle or group of friends, family & acquaintances, or social media avenues, to promote her/his Medium stories to.

We know that our Stories are NOT being found because we have looked for our stories by the month that they were published, under a Tag, and they have not appeared, because ONLY THE TOP 10 are shown.

Even when searching Stories by a Tag for a month, sorting by latest or oldest, STILL only the “top 10” are programmed to show, i.e. the TOP 10 stories which received the most views and claps. 

When you go to the Day of publication of a Story under a particular Tag, then the story appears there, i.e. there are more than 10 stories shown.

The point is WHO is going to laboriously manually go to each day of each month of each year, to search for a story that they want to read??

You need to program your Search function so that more stories show for a MONTH, or for a DAY and have ALL stories in chronological order appear, not just the "top" stories!

We know that there are 28 to 31 days in a month and lots of stories published each day, however if Medium wishes to retain its quality Writers and paying members, the company MUST improve its search function.

At the moment, the antiquated Search function helps those who are already getting high or top views (and Claps).

How are those who have not got as much feedback, actually going to get it, if nobody can find their Stories??

Is Medium, by having the TOP TEN ONLY viewed stories found, just making a token search function and pandering to the writers whom make them money, via supposedly top content drawing in new paying members???

Well, the aforementioned is definitely the perception of many frustrated Medium writers, who are astonished that the Search function is so poor.  Compare your Search function to that of WordPress where you can search a Keyword by Date with infinite scrolling.

If anyone in your team thinks that readers don’t or won’t scroll to find something that personally appeals to them, they are behind the times.  Fast-scroll through is the way to search for things online these days, and having only TEN STORIES being displayed is an affront to all Medium writers.

Please take this opportunity to request your Programmers to program at least up to 100 stories displayed per MONTH under OLDEST or LATEST -  and importantly -  NOT BASED UPON TOP VIEWS but purely date based.

Better still, cannot a return of all stories under a Tag for a MONTH and for a DAY be returned with infinite scrolling??  Yes there may be hundreds, even thousands of stories, but Writers will fast scroll through just like they do on the TOPIC pages, and a Story Title or a Writer’s name will “leap out at them.”

In this way, more writers, and not just those selected for popular Publications or already well-known, will have their content found.

If Medium really is honest or genuine about having great content found by readers, and having a level playing-field for all writers, the Search Function has to be improved.  Failing to do so will prompt many would-be members and current Writers to not join Medium or to finish up with Medium and take their work elsewhere, where their content can actually be found.

Thank you, from the undersigned Medium Writers and Readers