Control Your Recommendations on Medium

Let the Medium Algorithm know what you’re not interested in

The “jury” is still out over how popular or useful this latest function of Medium will be. When you click on your Avatar (the round picture representing you) on your homepage, you’ll now see “Control your Recommendation” in the drop-down list.

The Medium programming will take into account Topics, Publications, and People you are following, as well as take into account the types of stories that you have read on Medium, in showing you “recommended” stories to read on your own homepage.

The thing is that the stories in my Reading history are the types of stories that I like reading (hence that’s why they are a part of my personal history).

I won’t be going to my Reading history often to remove stories related to certain issues or categories that I don’t want the algorithm to regard.

Having said that, I appreciate that the function is there, in case one day I have a “moment” and I suddenly don’t want to see the usual types of stories on my homepage, that I like to read.

If that happens, I will have the luxury of ousting the offending story types under the “Reading history” of my new Recommendations Control Console.

hahaha

Out with the old, and in with the new. What do you do then?

You then start re-populating your Reading history by reading things you are interested in right at that moment.

And …. maybe let the cycle continue, if it does.

Picture the following scenario.

Oh no, I’ve had enough of Medium articles about unicorns.

I’ll remove stories about unicorns and fairies from my Reading history.

From now on, I’m only going to read Medium stories about cryptocurrency, and voila, those types of stories will be recommended.

Then….another month when I’m tired of bitcoins and steem, if I have the time and the inclination (not likely) …..

I’ll head over to my shiny new Recommendations Control Console to demote the new offending story categories.

Pheww. Glad I know how it all works. Can’t trust myself to only read stories that I really want to read, in the first place.

A Rose by any other name still smells as sweet, Medium

Honestly, I really wish that Medium would stop changing so many things, and that they would un-do the watering down of curation, which they started doing by changing its name.

Curation is still that, but just called “distribution” now.

The new punters and purveyors of Medium will be introduced to the innocuous function of “distribution.”

It sounds normal, and it’s Medium’s plan to normalise Medium writers and dissuade them from wanting their stories to be put under Topics.

But don’t worry about being told you’ve won an Award but it doesn’t matter what category it’s for, which is what curation is like on Medium now.

We’ve got “Control your Recommendations” now.

Yes it’s a great way to be able to fine-tune or amend the Topics / Publications / People you are following, and to un-mute Publications that you are muting.

But when is enough Enough, Medium?

The more you do, the more confused we get.

How about giving us a choice between having the Topics of our curated stories under the Reader interests of our Story settings (or back on the story Stats page) OR “Control your Recommendations”.

If you had asked me, I would vote for not fixing what wasn’t broken.

Bring back the Topic tags on the Stats pages or at least, for crying in a bucket, put the Topic labels on the Reader interests settings.

Why?

Because it makes sense.

If you are being more relational, well then, let the dedicated Medium writers know what Topics their curated (aka distributed) stories are being curated under.

Let them know please, so that writers can tailor their future writing for the topics their stories have been curated under, if they want to (bearing in mind that the Topics are not always the same as the Tag names, so one can’t just say keep writing on the same issues if you want your stories curated under certain Topics that you think they are being curated under).

What if your story was curated under Relationships but you thought it was under SCIENCE and looked for it under Science, and would tweak your future stories to make them more scientific if you knew they weren’t quite scientific enough for the curators??

Medium, you are starting to lose the plot with many of your members. Maybe some time you will listen to the recommendations of your tried and true “old membership”, those who signed up years ago and have stuck with you …. for now.

Thank you for your new “Control your recommendations” function, but no thanks for removing Topic names of our curated stories, and no thanks for removing the ability or function to see other people’s responses and highlights (which by the way, actually helped make Medium more relational when we did have them).

And last but not least, a message for the Reader of this article.

Thank you for leaving this story in your Recommended Categories of Reading.

( if you have )