Tony Stubblebine, congratulations on your new position as CEO of Medium, and thank you for the opportunity to let you know what is important to me about the platform. I’m interpreting your invitation as a kind of suggestion box.

So, my suggestion: Have an up-to-date list of active publications. This could be accomplished by requiring a prospective owner, before creating a publication, to add it to such a list, after which the functionality to create a new publication would be available. Publications inactive for a set period of time could be updated with a Medium message indicating their status and eventually could be sunsetted, with their stories still on the writers' profile pages.

Much of this could be done programmatically but could be done manually until coding is complete and testing has been successful. I would be willing to help with such an effort.

Benefits:

• Writers looking to submit to publications would not have to wade through inactive ones and could spend more time honing their writing skills.
• Readers would not be disappointed when they come across pubs that are no longer accepting new stories and would be less likely to think of Medium as a largely-defunct platform.
• Medium would be perceived more often as a vibrant and dynamic platform promoting exceptional writing.