[joshwcomeau]

> But to say that it's not possible for them is clearly a lie.

> Medium, if you ever read this: I don't appreciate being lied to.

> To top it off, they simply ignored the two (very polite) follow-up emails I sent them.

My guess is that Medium has an admin tool for customer-service agents to use, and that tool was likely updated and no longer allows for canonical link updating. As companies mature, the freedom of CS staff tends to diminish, as mistakes are made or privileges are abused.

The email reads "there is no way for you (or us) to set it to something else". I'm guessing "us" refers to the customer-service team, and not Medium as an organization.

In other words, I don't believe the author was lied to.

As for not getting replies, I'm shocked to learn Medium even has an open support email! I'd have to see the author's followups to know if they warranted a reply, but given that the author adamantly believes that deception is at play, it's possible that the emails aren't as polite as the author believes.

[tkrunning]

Feel free to take a look for yourself: https://cl.ly/93ce51946717

I just removed the support agent's name (no need to name names), otherwise the emails are complete.

[Traster]

Well then this is quite simple for us to clear up then - Medium has mis-trained their customer-service team to think that they're not speaking for the company when they're speaking for the company. That can be fixed.

[jnbiche]

Yes, this is what I thought probably happened, as well. The "us" referred to the support agencies, and they likely were no longer able to change canonical URLs (surprising they were allowed to do so to begin with).

[tkrunning]

Medium has quietly removed the support article describing this, but it used to live here: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/227017408-Set-cano...

Sadly, it's not archived anywhere I could find, but it did mention that you could send them a CSV file of up to 50 URLs to update the canonical links for.

[jnbiche]

That doesn't contradict anything the agent said. I believe you that they could previously set canonical links. But it's highly likely that upper management changed that policy (I'm surprised they allowed it to begin with).

[tkrunning]

IMO, it's not too surprising that they tried to be a bit more writer friendly initially (to attract more quality writers and larger publications). I guess it no longer fit with their new business objectives, which is why they quietly removed it this fall.

[pvorb]

That was exactly what I thought.