My one (1) Medium secret

When I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography. People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was proud of the tight drop caps, the underlines brought me some notoriety, and we even supported ligatures at a time when not only this wasn’t the default, but it also had some mildly scary performance consequences. But for every two things that worked well, there was also something that in retrospect proved to be me trying too hard, and had to be quickly undone. I was really excited about resurrecting pilcrows, but many users saw them as rendering or escaping errors. I briefly added vulgar fractions to all the places where Medium rounded numbers, but that made those numbers confusing and weird in practice. (And I already mentioned the strange, rare bug with system fonts,…