MEDIUM
Do You Ever Read Those ‘Index to My Work’ Posts That Medium Writers Put at the Top of Their Profiles?
Me Neither
If you go to a Medium writer’s profile, you’ll find everything they’ve ever written here, in reverse chronological order.
So, for instance, if you want to check out who Roz Warren is, you can turn up on my Medium Profile Page and read my latest post, and then the post I wrote before that — and then read every single one of the 600 things I’ve posted on this platform, all the way back to my very first post in February 2019. (I don’t recommend doing this, by the way. It would probably make your head explode.)
You can easily do this — unless, that is, I’ve pinned something else to the top of my profile. Medium writers have the power to pin any post they choose to the top of their profiles. In fact, they can choose to pin lots of stuff up there.
The good thing about this is that they can use this feature to showcase their best work.
The bad thing is that if you want to read their latest work, sometimes you’ve got to scroll through lots of other stuff to get to it.
A lot of writers pin an index to their work at the top of their profile. Sometimes it’s an index to their best or most popular work. Sometimes it’s an index to everything they’ve written, arranged topically.
So here’s my question. Does anybody actually use these indexes? Do readers ever consult them in order to select a post to read? Or, like me, do they always skip the index and just scroll through the writer’s work until they find something that looks like it might be worth reading?
Am I alone in doing this? Is everyone but me happily consulting indexes to figure out what to read? Or does everyone ignore them?
For those of you who post an index to your work at the top of your profile — do you have any evidence that readers are actually using it? Do your stats indicate that folks are reading your index? Are readers flocking to obscure posts that you’ve featured there? Are they posting responses to your index that thank you for it and tell you how useful it is?
You never know until you ask. So I’m asking.
Share your answer as a response to this post. Why? Because we all might learn something about how Medium actually works. And that’ll be good for everyone.
Writing Coach and editor-for-hire Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, can help you improve and publish your work. Drop her a line at [email protected]. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)
