Why Medium needs to have their own login and password
I do not know if Tony Stubblebine will get to see this post or if any of the members of the Medium Engineering will take note of it, but I’d like to register my recent bad experience of not being able to access Medium, not because Medium blocked my access, but because an email service provider, perhaps by accident, blocked my access to their service, and in turn, I was unable to access Medium. Albeit this experience is rather unusual for most people, but on the basis of what I have undergone, I’d urge Medium to seriously consider their own login and password based gated access for the members rather than relying on third party providers of gated access.
My story begins last Friday, the 9th of August. I was working on my laptop, when all of a sudden the preferred email service that I use to connect to a lot of services (I am not going to name this email service and leave it unnamed, if you are interested, ask me in private and I may consider revealing the name but I may not) logged me out of their service and instead sent me a message that my service was blocked due to abuse.
Abuse? What abuse did I do? There was no explanation, no prior notice, none whatsoever. One sweet late afternoon just before the weekend, the service was blocked and I was left in the lurch. As life would have it, I had banking services, my internet hosting services, and more importantly, in this case, my Medium account email was associated and linked to this email service. Which meant, that if I were to lose my access to this email service, I’d lose access to Medium as well, and that exactly happened (how I finally got an access to Medium is another story, read till the somewhere to the end).
I have been a Medium member for as long as I can remember, perhaps starting around 2012, when posting here was on the basis of invitation. Then, as Medium expanded, so did my association with Medium. From “subscription” to becoming “Friends” of Medium, I have subscribed and become friends. At the same time, I have published Bengali language books, translations, essays in Medium, hosted publications, and inagist, Medium is my “go to” place, sort of one’s “happy places” on the Internet. All this was about to break apart because I could not gain an access to my favourite site on the web.
I do not use X or gmail to access Medium (because I do not use X, and while I have a gmail based account to access Medium, that is a non-paying account and I have not used it that much, if at all). I have an email based access to Medium. Now, with an email based access, here is how it works:
- You type in your email address
- Medium responds with a message on the page that it has sent you a link that can be clicked in the webmail (if you have) or copy paste the link to access Medium
- You open your email (webmail), click the link and off you go to Medium and read stories
If you have cookies activated, as I did in my Vivaldi browser, this would not be an issue, but otherwise, the routine is the same. You access medium.com → Medium directs you to your email → you click the link in your email → access Medium. Except, in this particular case, I was unable to access Medium because I lost access to my email. Contacting Medium staff on the weekend was useless, because while Medium posted the following message to my preferred email
But the help never came.
Because the email service provider locked me out, I could not access Medium at all. I could NOT view not only the stories, but my Medium viewer stats, stories, earnings, none of it. Since Medium does not provide an alternative way to access the subscription panel, if you are blocked by your email provider and if you are dependent on an email based access to Medium, you are stuck. It could happen if your email service provider blocks you, restricts your access for whatever reason, or imagine (in the worst case scenario), disappears some day. You will lose access to Medium. I wanted to switch my email address in Medium from my old address to a new email address, and Medium promised to respond but this did not happen. I understand that it was perhaps because of a weekend, but after the weekend was over, there was no response (perhaps that is in a queue somewhere, some day someone will respond … but that day is not today)
Eventually, luckily, this morning I tried to open Medium from one of my browsers and it somehow opened Medium for me. I changed the email address, while still being locked out of the old email address and this is how I was able to write this story. If I had logged out of Medium or had not had that window open, I’d not be able to access Medium, not because Medium were to lock me out, but an email provider would lock me out for whatever reason, and in turn, I’d lose my account access to Medium.
Moral of the story: an appeal to Medium
Medium, can you please consider introducing username and password for accessing the service please? I unerstand depending on third parties may be convenient. At the same time, there is a problem if access to the third party providers is lost, access to Medium is lost as well, and that may not necessarily is a good thing. For many of us, a personalised access and use of Medium is a desirable thing, particularly with the subscribers with paid access, where stories are metered and not everyone has access to all stories for free (had that been the case, or if Medium were 100% free to read and write, a separate login for write access might not be that big a deal, although, there too, loss of the database of writings would be devastating for some writers). For a paid service, may we please appeal that Medium has its own gated access with usernames and passwords and indeed other mechanisms that would not depend on external parties to allow access to this important social medium?
(p.s. At the time of writing this, the email service provider has restored the service and has removed the block, without any explanation as to what was the abuse, or how or why the “abuse” happened and where, or without any apology whatsoever. I may not stick with the service, but it has shown how vulnerable we are to the vagaries or whims? of the technology sector players)
