Why You Shouldn’t Read Medium

If you want some news, or a technical article, you should expect that the person writing that article is trusted, peer reviewed, or has some way to have the article removed if the person writing it is unqualified or the content is misleading.

Articles on Medium are not peer reviewed, not open for editing, and have no mechanism for downvoting. It’s just an open forum for people who don’t know what they’re talking about to spread misinformation.

Of course, you should always do your own due diligence. Medium has an area for comments. So an article with 4k claps might have a dozen comments, half agreeing with the article and half disagreeing (or some other ratio). It’s up to every human to fact check things, look for peer comments and be responsible.

But that isn’t how the world works. We don’t just let anybody submit supposedly factual details to technical documentation, scientific publications, or the news (sans “entertainment” news, which still have SOME accountability), without a system for enforcing remediation or bringing attention to the misleading or incorrect details.

Medium needs to implement a downvote mechanism and/or a system like StackOverflow (or even YouTube) which allows you to see how trusted a person is, how many total downvotes/upvotes they have, or create counter-articles which are listed under some kind of “response article” section.

Of course there is a lot more to say, but I’ll keep this brief. Medium should not be a source of information. I have yet to read a single Software Engineering article on Medium that is accurate and not misleading.