Congratulations, Tony.

Thank you for sharing this great news with us. I believe your vision and passion will take Medium to another level.

I have always enjoyed your visionary and inspiring stories on this platform. Your unique leadership of the community so far is beyond reproach. I have every confidence in your capability.

Medium's success depends on writers and readers. Therefore, finding innovative solutions to make these two groups will sustain our success.

As a writer and reader, I love Medium as it is a unique platform giving freedom to both writers and readers.

My feedback as a reader, writer, editor, and pub owner is related to the distribution of stories to readers and supporting independent publications. I briefly articulate the concerns, and I will be happy to provide more info if required later.

1 - I admire Medium’s policy to protect the platform from harmful material, e.g., defamation, porn, conspiracy theories, etc.

However, restricting non-conventional, cutting-edge, and controversial content for society's benefit and depriving the readers of original thinking is risky for the growth of Medium.

Unfortunately, this happened to me and other inspiring writers I follow as a reader. The algorithm stopped distributing visionary perspectives on the platform, hiding them from the readers. These ideas are not mainstream, however, has the potential to be so in subsequent decades. Supporting original thinkers might be an excellent strategy for growth as readers look for valuable content.

This restrictive behavior upsets the passionate writers and concerns curious readers, creating a lose/lose situation for Medium’s future. Many readers choose Medium to find fresh ideas from global citizens, not just from elites.

2 – As a publication owner, I noticed that Medium’s support significantly dropped in the last two years. Rather than support, there seems to be a discouragement to pubs.

For example, I own a pub contributed by 15K+ writers, but Medium restricted only 30 editors even though 100+ writers volunteered to support the publication. It is impossible to manage such a large pub with 30 volunteers. These editors are protecting the platform from harmful content, inspiring writers to find their voice, and doing a favor to the growth of the platforms without being paid.

So removing restrictions will increase collaboration among publication communities. Some readers prefer community publications, and writers perform better with readers' support.

In addition, improving the technical features of publications might contribute to further collaboration. For example, publication Q is not searchable, and we cannot even sort the Q based on submission times and types, wasting the time of volunteer editors.

So fixing distribution issues and empowering independent publications can significantly contribute to the growth of this wonderful platform.

Thank you for listening, Tony.

I wish you the best in this challenging role.