Curation No More
Medium gets rid of topics in favor of tags. That’s not a coincidence.
Medium announced that they’ll get rid of topics altogether and will solely focus on tags. For a seamless transition, they’ve already been transitioning existing topics to tags. That means you don’t have to change anything. Good news!
This move has various reasons, I would imagine. I’m more interested in the implications though.
A bigger move
There’s a bigger move I’m expecting to happen pretty soon. One that relies on this change from topics to tags.
Medium will completely remove curation.
Instead, they will introduce, or more precisely improve, an auto-curation algorithm. I say improve because I’m positive that this algorithm has already been in place and working for quite a while. Why do I think that? Because many of my stories were curated instantly after publishing. I doubt that human editors were that fast.
Also, some big publications have an auto-curation feature. Right when your story gets published with one of those publications, it gets distributed as well.
Why auto-curation
Think about it! Before this, curation meant human editors curated stories in fitting topics. Those topics were a closed list. With tags, however, this list will increase exponentially, making it virtually impossible to curate “by hand”.
Hence, an algorithm will curate and distribute stories on tag pages. The tags will be based on the 5 tags you use in your story editor.
But I can also imagine that Medium’s algorithm will select its own tags through keyword density and keyword phrases, similar to search engines. Which will lead to more discoverability because your posts potentially fit more tags than the 5 you selected yourself in the editor.
Good or bad
This auto-curation algorithm makes distribution quicker, broader, and increases discoverability. Not to mention that it will cost Medium less money because it makes the human curators obsolete.
It comes with a few potential downsides as well.
- It might be less accurate than human curation, meaning quality could decline.
- It won’t be “controlled”. Only the algorithm picks. Hacking the system will be an issue in the future, I’m sure.
These are two reasons why I think curation and distribution as a whole won’t have the biggest impact anymore.
Does it matter
We’ve already seen and experienced this, haven’t we? Distributed stories — however great the feeling — won’t automatically lead to higher views.
I’m the perfect example of this. My two recent popular stories have both NOT been curated because they’re about Medium, but the views are 2–3 times higher than the views on my curated stories, even the ones in prestigious publications like Better Marketing.
In essence, curation won’t matter much going forward. What will still matter is the “trending” and “popular on Medium” sections, as well as “Editor’s pick”. How these will be handled in the future is a story for another day.
The bottom line
So, curation no more is what this move by Medium away from topics to tags means. Well, human curation no more, that is.
Whether this will be a bad thing for us writers or a good thing in terms of discoverability and reach remains to be seen. I’m always optimistic.
And if we know one thing, it’s that Medium can quickly change their minds when some things turn out to be wrong or worse than expected. So, let’s see how this goes.
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