My Experiment With Short Form on Medium Just Failed
By: Vico Biscotti
Tags: Publishing, Change, Blogging, Ｍedium, Short Form

As it always happens, as soon as Medium has a good idea, it also immediately finds a way to turn it into disappointment.

In my opinion, openness to short-form can be a good idea, even if not easy to handle. Longer forms need reading context and attention. Mixing short form with more-than-one-minute posts is dangerous. We don’t want Medium to turn into Facebook. So, this thing needs special care.

I’m not much into short form, but I’m into poetry, so short form is indirectly a thing for me. And seeing the text of my poems in sunlight in my profile didn’t make me happy. To be precise, it pissed me off.

Alas, that’s it. More than 150 words truncated, less than 150 words fully visible in the profile. Why not adjustable by the author — since they now affirm to care about customization — is one of the usual Medium mysteries.

By the way, someone started to gently report a negative impact on earnings, especially for the short form.

But Mediumers are champions in adaptation, and they adapted.

Obviously, one of the first reasons to experiment is to revive old stories, since Medium usually buries them faster than light and without much ceremony.

And that’s what I decided to do today.

Surprise, surprise, I got that:

Wait! That story is 105 words. Why is that truncated?!? Where did I go wrong?

Well, as it often happens in my life, I’ve been late to join the game.

Under that story, one of my poems, looking like this:

What happens?

One of the positive changes on Medium as of late is, luckily, that they now speak:

So I discovered that they discovered that there’s an issue with the short form. Had they asked, we could have enlightened them before.

You can imagine they can now solve by letting you customize how the story will display in your profile but again, they decide a forced solution. Until they’ll hopefully realize, someday, that it has other drawbacks.

The solution is now that short-form (under 150 words) is truncated at around 30 words. “Long-form” (over 150 words) is truncated at 100 words. If you want your short form to be visible up to 150 words, you must unmeter it (bye-bye, money).

Now, why on Earth not letting authors decide? Story options are there for this. Let us decide: auto, truncate at 30, truncate at 100, title/subtitle only. Or something like that. So simple. So customizable. So ultimate. You don’t care? Leave “auto”. Do you want to customize? You can.

But since it sounds like the right solution, I’m afraid we won’t see it.

So, I unmetered my short story. It’s now fully visible but, at the end of it, I still get the “read more”:

Why “more”? It’s all visible. The reader will be confused. “Should I click and read more? It’s all there or there’s more? Okay, I click. Damn, there’s no more text than in the preview, and I just wasted my precious Medium time on a 100 words story. This author plays me tricks with this baiting short-form.”

I know they need to click “read more” anyway, if they want to highlight, because that doesn’t work on the preview, but this is a technical problem. Solving it by adding “read more” is not the solution. It’s misleading. Should be “Read the story on another window because we’re not able to provide highlighting on this. Your Medium engineers. Xoxo”.

Not counting that authors who already experimented with short-form, based on what told by Medium itself, now see a mess in their profile.

Please, Medium, let us decide what to truncate. If there’s a problem with earnings, the same problem is there if you decide, automatically and rigidly.

Some of us love short-form and it can be a good idea to have it on Medium, but why messing around with solutions that can hardly meet the intent of the author nor improve the experience of the readers by an inch?

In the meanwhile, Mediumers adapt, as always.

I’ll continue to experiment, wanting to hope that things will change. The moneyless short story already received appreciation from some of my most patient fans, and I certainly recommend experimenting, keeping in mind that the short story must provide value by itself.

But this first experiment didn’t really taste good.