What I like about Svbtle (and what I hate too)

The only thing that’s really cool about Svbtle is its “works like your mind” idea. That is simply too good, and I must admit, it does really work exactly the way we think – then write.

Although I’ve tried writing on the go, and publishing as soon as I’m done with an article, I’ve always produced better pieces of writing by constant editing over a period of time, making small (but significant) changes, the most important of which is deleting sentences (and sometimes whole paragraphs). The second most important thing about editing is rewriting. It helps me express myself more concisely, and put things across with greater clarity. Additionally, it simplifies my sentence construction quite a bit, so I don’t come across as too formal.

I also like the fact that I can write posts in Markdown, but there’s a slight issue with implementation too (I’m coming to that).

Now, on to the things I hate about Svbtle.

Firstly, it doesn’t show me a live (parsed) preview of what I type. How am I supposed to know how headings would look like without clicking the “eye” in the bottom-right corner. I want live preview, updated client-side, just like Ghost.

Secondly, the font size on the editing page is too small. Maybe that makes me write longer pieces, but I should be able to set it up under Settings. At least this much customisation is expected. Just look at another similar internet thing: Medium. It’s font size is larger. Make the font size on Svbtle exactly as large as it’ll appear after editing (excluding Headings, which should appear in the live-preview side-by-side).

Please allow the ability to un-kudo. Although kudos once made cannot be taken back, and will therefore never decrease with time (maybe that’s the point, and perhaps it may be a good thing), it’s still not fair to not tell people about this inability to un-kudo without them testing it on a blog post. This leads to abnormal statistics. The “Don’t move” thing, while serving to instruct people on how kudos work, doesn’t help in the slightest possible way.

There’s no auto-scrolling as I continue writing. I have to manually scroll down in order to continue seeing what I’m writing. Please fix this. This can easily be fixed with some clever non-JavaScript solution (don’t ask me, I don’t know exactly how).

There’s no auto-save. Saving every ten minutes is not called auto-save. This should be easy enough to implement, provided proper changes are made on both the front-end and server-side. It’s not such a big thing, but it’s the svbtle* things that make all the difference.

*That typo on “subtle” was intentional.

And now the big disadvantage: no discovery, and no female writers. Seriously, all I see are males. Given that I’m a male too, I like to read things written by females too. An inequality of terrifying proportions exists. I couldn’t even find **one* post written by a woman.* Apart from this, I still see the same posts on the Svbtle Magazine (which is supposed to sound like a cool place to find new posts written by interesting people). There should, in addition to having a “tab” for popular posts, be a section for random posts (that keeps changing, say, everyday, but can be manually refreshed at a click of a button too).

In conclusion, clearly the disadvantages (at this time of writing) outweigh the advantages, especially when the disadvantage of discovery is factored in. In some services, sharing and discovery is left as a choice the user makes. The user can share the post URL on their favourite social network, public bookmarking site, or a personal or professional blog.

I can’t do anything about it, and I don’t want to write a Chrome extension for something that can be implemented within a maximum time of three weeks (and that’s pushing it, actually).

Please please please fix this. Medium is good, but I hate the fact that nobody reads my posts at all. I don’t want to be forced to think the same about Svbtle, which I’ve sort-of grown to like more than Medium (and I don’t know why).