Discover the Topics for your Curated Stories on Medium
Medium doesn’t want us to know anymore — but it can help grow your writing
Before the last big round of platform changes in October 2020, when stories were curated you’d receive an email, also informing you which Topics your stories were “filtered” through via Medium’s complex distribution processes. The email (pasted from my own email) would read something like this:
Hi there,
Our curators just read your story, The Burning One, that you submitted for review. Based on its quality, they selected it to be recommended to readers interested in Fiction across our homepage, app, topic page, and emails.
As part of the changes, Medium stopped sending out emails for standard curation (now called “Chosen for further distribution”). They also announced that although distribution through Topics would still occur, there would be less focus on this and more focus on making Medium “relational”.
Many of us are still trying to figure out exactly what that means, as they took away features that assisted relatability — like being able to easily see our Followers. Cue a furore of frustrated writers writing impassioned articles about the changes, endless complaint threads in social media groups, writers and publications leaving the platform. I can’t imagine the volume of complaint emails the Help Centre received over that time, but eventually we got some of those features back.
However, the curation emails with information on Topic distribution haven’t returned. To uncover that information, you have to get a little bit techie and peep behind the clean user interface most of are used to writing and reading on to examine the source code.
But first, let’s look a little closer at the way Topics work on Medium — so once you know what Topics your work is being curated in, you can leverage that knowledge.
Where to find Medium’s List of Topics
Remember when you first joined Medium and from the Home Page you were prompted at some point to “Customize your Interests”? Well guess what — that list is also the Topics List. (I know — it would be great if Medium would refer to it as one thing — but on this Page, I guess they’re framing it from the Reader’s perspective) Here’s how to get there:
- Go to your Home Page. (Hit the big, blobby three dots Medium icon for the newbies)
- Look on the right-hand side of the Page, below your Latest from Following section. You’ll see a section called Topics you Follow — if you’ve customized your interests. Below the little boxes with Topic names you’ll see a plus sign (+). Click on that to take you there. UPDATED 08/11/21: This section now top left on Home Page.
- (If you haven’t customized your interests click on your round profile pic — the drop-down menu should include “Customize Your Interests”) Here’s mine:
4. Click on any of the listed Topics and you’ll be taken to the relevant Topic Page. So whether it’s Finance, Relationships, Feminism, Lifestyle — they’re the Topics.
Another way to find the entire listing of Topics is to type this into your browser:
medium.com/me/following/topics
How the Topics Page Works to Feature Curated Stories
The Topics Page is also where you’d see your story if it’s recently been curated through that Topic. What I’ve noticed is through a 24-hour cycle, story positioning on this list moves around — presumably based on the progression of views or reads.
When you’re consistently curated through the same Topic (it seems from experience, that the magic number is 3), you may also see yourself chosen as a “Featured Writer” on the Topics Page. This happened to me twice recently on the Poetry Topics Page. You’ll have your own little section where they show your profile pic, your Bio, and feature your last three curated stories.
I’ve found getting this “Featured Writer” spot really drives up your number of Followers and number of views. So, it’s worth keeping an eye on the Topics Pages you write regularly for, as it’s another kind of feature Medium doesn’t notify writers about. I found out via a writer-friend, who’d noticed my profile on the Poetry Topics Page.
Now we understand a little more how the Topics work, let’s move on to the steps to locate those Topics.
Curation 101: How to Check if Your Story has been Curated
Most of us know this, but I’m including it for the newbies.
- Have your individual story on your screen.
- Right click on the little three dots icon (…).
- Select: View Stats (now called Story Stats)
- On the stats page, under your story title, and above the words “Lifetime summary”, you’ll see this message: Chosen for further distribution.
- If you look at the actual graph, you’ll also see the word Distributed at some place on the graph. Congratulations!
Now we can discover the Topics it was curated (or filtered) in.
A couple of caveats: Firstly, I don’t have an information technology background. I’ve worked as a market research Team Leader and a trainer for a large media company. Both jobs required trouble-shooting user functionality and sometimes liaising with the tech team, so I understand all interfaces have a back-end and I’ve since trouble-shooted some of my techie problems using Google. Oh and I had a boyfriend who was a software architect. Believe me, he used Google too. That’s the sum total of my expertise. So no complicated techie questions, please!
Update 03/17/21: These steps were verified as correct in both Mac and PC, using Google Chrome as the browser by Paul H. Harder II, who a has a software engineering background. (Thanks, Paul!)
Secondly, this works for a PC. I collaborated my steps to find the Topics with my colleague Aimée Gramblin who uses a Mac. You can find her article link at the end of this story.
Finding the Topics for your Curated Story
- Open your curated story. (Please note: I used Google Chrome as my browser)
- Right click anywhere in blank space on the page. A menu pops up.
Select “ View page source”. A new tab should open with oodles of techie code-sprawl. Take your cursor there. Next, you want the universal “Find” command. Select the CTRL key on your keyboard and the “F” key. A search window opens up in the top right corner of the screen (as screen shot shows below).
Place your cursor in the search window. Type: TopicId (exactly as I type it here — no spaces, capital T, capital I). Hit enter. If you look at the little number to the right in the search window, that indicates how many times the term appears — and that corresponds to how many Topics your story has been curated in. (See below screen shot).
UPDATE 9/09/ 22: The code has changed, so the “hack” has changed. All steps are the same — except instead of TopicId here, type “Topic”, (include the double quotation marks and the comma — no spaces). This will filter out other mentions of the word (Topic) that aren’t relevant to what you’re hunting for.
The relevant terms in the code sprawl will appear highlighted. There will be at least one TopicId. I’ve had stories curated through anything from 1–4 Topics so far. In this story, you can see I’ve been curated in the Topics Books and Writing.
Between the term “TopicId” and the actual Topic name there is a bit of code. This is what one looks like:
“topicId”:”1fda751b6d4e”,”name”:”Books”}
The word you can read after the word “name” is your Topic: Books
Congratulations — you now have the key to the secret code cave where the powerful Topic dragons dwell. Now, here’s ways to use this information to provide focus and insight to your wrting journey on Medium.
Another note: did you know ALL stories, whether curated or not, are filtered through Topics? So, even if you aren’t getting curated yet, you can still use these steps to see what Medium thinks your stories are about! You might get a surprise — I’ve been filtered through “Humor” for a non-curated melancholic break-up story. I guess Medium has a sadistic sense of humor at times.
A final caveat: as Medium constantly implements new changes and upgrades, what worked two months ago may not work today. A different strategy I’d used up until a couple of months ago no longer works. I imagine it’s because the layer-cake of meta-data and the complex ways code works behind the scenes changes with updates. With a bit of experimentation and deductive reasoning, I found this strategy. However, it probably has a shelf life.
Topics : Sign-Posts to where your writing Shines
Whether you’re a new writer, or a more seasoned one, knowing our Topic strengths can guide us enormously, helping us decide what to write about next, or to navigate where we focus our reading and research. Here’s two simple reflective exercises around the idea of topics.
Exercise 1: Use the Topics page to create a shortlist of subject interests for your writing
Head to the Topics Page and write yourself a shortlist of the Topics:
- You currently write about
- You want to write about
Pin it above your desk or do the electronic equivalent to encourage your mind to start paying more attention to ideas around those subjects. As you understand your interests better and develop as a writer, obviously this list will evolve.
Exercise 2: Create your list of curated Topics
Go through all your curated stories, find the Topics and create a list. That list is invaluable to direct your future focus in term of subjects. Why?
Imagine you could hire a panel of experienced writers, editors and publishers to read a selection of your work, and you could then consult them for an overview of your writing strengths in terms of subjects and genres.
Imagine them waxing lyrical about your original productivity strategies or your insights to Start-up strategies or freelance writing.
Sounds pretty cool?
Once you have, say, a minimum of ten curated stories, and you can evaluate your Topics, that list is essentially the end result of the above scenario — all for the price of your Medium subscription.
For example, from evaluating Topics my work has been curated in, I now know some of my subject strengths are:
Writing | Poetry | Fiction | Creativity | Books | Mental Health | Self | Nonfiction | Feminism | Sexuality
I loved the idea of writing for many years without producing much beyond my journals. Why? Because I particularly struggled to identify my subjects and to a lesser extent, my genre strengths. If I’d identified those faster, I’d have been more productive and confident as a writer sooner. I wrote an article about how to work creatively with subjects and themes — check it out for some more right-brain free-associative approaches to working with your Topics.
Knowing the subjects you write well about will not only allow you to focus your efforts here, but also help if you’re pitching or submitting to publications off this platform. Being aware of your subjects strengths improves how we define ourselves as writers in our Bios and other self-promotion material, as well as where to direct our energies when planning future projects.
I’ve written an email to Medium, imploring them to reintroduce curation emails — or some other more accessible ways for writers to uncover their curated Topics. We can only hope they’ll listen.
Melissa Coffey is a Melbourne-based writer, editor & poet. Fascinated by creative process, her short stories, creative non-fiction essays and poetry are published in numerous international and Australian anthologies.
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Steps for Finding Topics for Mac Users:
More from me in Curation Matters:
