Medium’s release notes are known for their trolls, with previous updates including jokes, song lyrics, and even a faux pasted Slack conversation. Now, the team is back at it again with update notes that parody Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of Congress this week.
The notes detail an exchange between a representative and Medium, where the representative asks about specific bugs like bookmarking leading the page to refresh or “ignored post IDs aren’t being passed down in GET requests.”
In 2016, The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton took a trip to the Medium offices to drink and write iOS release notes with the team. The team told him at the time that they were cognizant that some of their sillier notes didn’t discuss what was new about the app. “The most common blowback we get is from people who want to know what’s in the release,” Nick Fisher, who was a social media manager at Medium at the time, said. “They hate these because they have no idea.”
Overall, today’s Medium iOS release notes should be considered a success, if not still lengthy. The update manages to poke fun at some lawmakers’ tech illiteracy, with the line “I have a ‘Twitter’ from Frank,” while also conveying what’s new in Medium’s iOS app version 3.33. It also includes a kicker that pokes fun at the 43 instances Zuckerberg said his team would follow up.
By now, there are dozens of jokey Medium release notes, and you can read the highlights here, which include an Encyclopedia Brown mystery part 1 and 2, a limerick, a Westworldscript, and more. The notes are on iOS; Android’s character count for release updates is much smaller and doesn’t leave enough room for some of these more creative renditions.
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