- Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades.
- I read an interesting blog post, so I clicked the author's name to go to his "profile page". I expected to see a list of his posts, but I found them interspersed with his comments on other posts, posts he recommended, random snippets of text in other posts he highlighted. Again, every other blog gets this right — go to the top-level page of the blog, and you get a list of posts in that blog.
- Commenting is bad. To sign in to Medium with a Medium account, it emails me a link to sign in. For every single comment I post. I don't want so many emails. Ideally, they should just use Disqus, so I don't have yet another account.
- In any case, after logging in, the box where I should type a comment wasn't clickable.
- When I opened a second Medium post just a few minutes later, I was again signed out, so couldn't comment.
- There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. Scrolling in a smaller screen area is irritating.
- Comments and posts are mixed up. I'm reading the comment on a post, and it says there are two responses, so I click that, and I'm suddenly taken away from the comments I'm reading. I never know on Medium whether a click will yank me away from what I was reading.
As you can see, Medium breaks a lot of things that were working with every other blog for many years. Please, if you want to innovate, make sure you don't already break what is the norm. That would be like making an "innovative" car that doesn't have seatbelts.
If this is considered "idealistic", I don't mind them failing.