This is my stats page. This is not helpful.

Much like today’s other causes of cultural constipation such as race relations, government, cold medications, etc., etc., ad nauseam, the page you see above appears functional, but is not.

Sure, you can click on things and you can see numbers and charts, but none of it is functional to the point where you can derive real, usable data regarding any of the indicated data points.

Take the chart above for example. The Views chart only shows you how many articles were “viewed”, but not which articles. It’s just a number. The Claps indicate how many times the Clap button was clicked, but not by how many users. You need to click the number of claps (as seen in the image below. Yes, it’s that tiny, gray thing at the bottom right corner of the screenshot.) on the article stats page to see that information. Pointing at the clap icon unnecessarily informs you are unable to clap your own article. Just make it all open the list of clappers, Medium, or put the data on the stats page. Astonishingly, readers are allowed to Clap as many times as they like, so those 10 claps for the first Mac OS piece are from two people. TWO!

Click, click, click, instead of all on the stats page itself. Annoying. Confusing. Unhelpful.

In order to see story stats, I need to open another page which opens in a new tab, like below, and it only shows stats for the single, selected story. Why?


This is the top of the article stats page for the Mac OS piece.

Finally, some stats that make some sense? Well, somewhat, if it weren’t buried. Take a look at the following image:


The call is NOT coming from inside Medium’s house.

Traffic source is crucial! Why is it at the bottom of a secondary stats page? We may never know, but it’s quite incompetent, in my estimation.

Medium clearly has the data, and they previously displayed it on the main stats page. Take a look at my most read story:


Not all instances of certain internet memes qualify as “nice”.

As I just mentioned, this data, or at least a form of it, used to be on the Stats page. It was taken out sometime last year when Medium changed their Partner Program to open it to all, and has been terrible ever since. It needs to be fixed, Medium. We need to see our stats in an easy-to-consume manner. This mess hampers our understanding of what is working with readers and what is not.

It’s not like it’s rocket science.

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