Medium updated publications with common sense features, touts them as powerful upgrades

It’s so funny: a navigation bar! Links to stories! Use stories as static pages, wow! Writer profiles 🙂 And wow, check this out:

Starting today, you’ll be able to customize the URL slug of your publication’s stories on Medium. Slugs serve as a strong signal in SEO, so you’ll be able to control what you optimize for.

Did you know the slug is important for SEO!?

I don’t know, maybe its stupid of me to think like this but I couldn’t help it notice how magic works, as in wrap age old things into PR and community management speak and present them as new great “features”.

I mean is a navigation bar a powerful feature for a CMS in 2016?

Are writer profiles a powerful feature for a commercial, enterprise grade CMS in 2016?

Of course they’re not. But no one cares because the rush of recommends and viral distribution will cram hordes of publishers and writers to use sub par systems and hack them out. And it’s OK! I am here doing the same thing.

But it does point out to a huge flaw in the Silicon Valley system of MVP and fast time to market:

Everyone reinvents everything.

The good part is that, just like SpaceX’s rockets, the new Medium CMS resulting from reinventing decades of knowledge should land vertically.

The annoying part is that they don’t moderate their announcements and yell in our inboxes about innovative, powerful features. A navigation bar that hides itself on scroll. Imagine my wow!