All Medium Members’ Stories Are Now Eligible For Curation — Medium Curation Changes

From Medium’s official 3-Minute Blog.

1. Every post published on Medium is eligible for further distribution. Writers no longer need to submit their stories for curation review.
2. Only writers enrolled in the Medium Partner Program will have the option to place their stories behind the metered paywall. If they choose to do so, their stories are eligible to earn money. Medium will no longer put posts behind the paywall in exchange for distribution.
3. We have simplified the notifications and labelling of your story’s distribution status. This involves removing the topics listed on your stats page (for new and previous stories), in favor of a more general message.

Our intention with these updates — and the ones to come — is to accurately portray our distribution system to writers. While we will continue to use topics behind the scenes to improve our recommendations to readers, we will no longer show topic designations to writers. That’s because topics are just one avenue, of many on Medium, for readers to connect with your writing.

Source: https://blog.medium.com/updates-to-mediums-curation-and-distribution-system-9f131fde00f8

So non-paying members can still sign up for the Member Partner Program (MPP) and accrue member reading time and get paid (even though they don’t have a paid membership). Recall that you don’t have to be a paying member to be in the Medium Partner Program.

It’s fine with me that all writers can have their stories eligible for curation as long as Medium has enough curators to be able to curate above 50 percent of all stories published every day (which it currently doesn’t).

As at now, in reality, what this means is that there will be more competition for curation

I know a lot of people say curation isn’t needed and high quality value-added stories will get reads, but I beg to differ. Speaking for myself, if readers can’t find my Stories, how the heck are they going to read them!!

There is already an astronomical amount of stories published each day on Medium, and now ALL of them will be available for curation, not just those which have been put “behind the paywall”, which happens when a non-paying or a paying writer has ticked “Meter my story so it’s eligible to earn money” when publishing or submitting a story.

In other words, those who are not in the MPP are now eligible to have their stories curated, whereas before this change, only those members in the MPP could have their stories curated.

With 25 curators and possibly ten thousand stories published a day on Medium, obviously not every story published each day is going to be read.

From a Medium-centric point of view, their following statement shows that they believe or are focusing on a level playing-field of attractors or connections to writers’ stories. Readers can connect to your stories through the woeful Medium search function (if you’re lucky) and through building up a loyal huge network of Followers, who actually read all of your stories (if you’re lucky enough for that to happen also).

Topics are just one avenue, of many on Medium, for readers to connect with your writing

We writers have to get savvy now and save our emails or table out or list the Topics that our stories are curated under, if we care about that, because the topics no longer appear on our Stats pages. Having them on the Stats page made it easy to know which Topics which stories were curated under.

This new move is a shock to many of us, including me, because unless Medium is going to employ a lot more curators to deal with the reality of the high-volume of stories published per day, they are watering down the usefulness of stories being curated under Topics. If Medium isn’t bumping up its number of curators, the ratio of curated stories to the total number of stories published will stay low, and maybe even lower, with all Medium members having their stories eligible for curation.

Some say you don’t need your stories curated, but they can’t speak for everyone. I have around 900 followers but none of them show they read any of my stories, by way of Clapping or applauding. And with 900 followers I would expect a lot more member reading time than my stories currently have.

Personally speaking, when my stories are curated, that brings a lot more eyes or views to my stories, which boosts my readership. I’m not one of those who publish every day or have risen to the heights of the Medium writers who earn $100 per month, let alone thousands of dollars per month.

As writers and readers we can vote with our fingers and our money. In the meantime while deciding whether you will stay with Medium or not, or how you will continue your journey with Medium, you can share your curated stories in “Curation Matters” and get exposure that way.

That’s if I stay on Medium myself. The 3-Minute Blog states that Medium has a way to go. Well, Medium staff if you’re reading this, PLEASE improve the searching capacity on Medium. I joined Medium in November 2018 and back then when you searched upon a word or words, a tab or page for “Latest Stories” came up. This now doesn’t appear until you “drill down” several layers, so one has to navigate to year / month / day, which most of us won’t because it is tedious and time-consuming, and especially is unnecessary.

Every other social media platform gives the posts in strictly chronological/date order, so why doesn’t Medium when you click on a month, and why doesn’t the list of story titles from most recent to latest scroll through on infinite scroll? How are readers going to find just published stories otherwise?

If anyone reading this wants the Medium Search function improved, please sign this petition.

And by the way if you want to find out what Topic your story has been curated under, without checking out your emails, open up your story. Click on the 3 little dots at top, then click on Story Settings, then on Reader Interests.

I have been writing on Medium for about 2 years now, but maybe it’s time to hang up my hat. If Medium doesn’t improve its search function, and now because curation is open to an impossible number of people to achieve a healthy sampling of curation for incentives to keep publishing on Medium, it may be time for me to close the door.

Thanks for reading this. These are solely my thoughts and if anyone disagrees, good for you, but please respect my opinions and situation. You may be interested in the following excellent appraisal by Jennifer Geer too.