Do You Hate Medium’s New Feed? Here are Some Workarounds

It’s time to tinker!

***Update 12/17/2020: Now that Medium has changed how ‘Shortform’ articles appear on the feed, you have to make sure the solutions here are at least 151 words long!***

Mediumites are up in arms! Their views are down all over the place, and no one seems to quite know why.

Well, I’m sure Medium does, but so far they’re being a bit cryptic on the subject.

One reason most of us suspect is the new expanded profile feed. Stories now have a few paragraphs showing before users have to click ‘read more’ to go into the article itself.

No one knows if these previews count as read time or views yet.

But one thing is certain, showing expanded stories on the feed means users are less likely to see more available stories on that page.

Attention spans are fickle beasts in the modern world.

I’m sure Medium has a plan they are slowly implementing, and I truly hope it does result in a better platform for writers and readers.

But in the meantime, my views are down dammit! And since the algorithm is so magical even Gandalf couldn’t pass a guess at how it works — we need to look elsewhere.

Here’s a few ideas on how to do exactly that!

1. Keep writing and improving

Only kidding, of course. This goes without saying.

2. Create an article list

What do I mean by this? Well if you’ve become familiar with the new feed structure, you’ll have realized you can ‘pin’ articles to the top of your feed.

People will see your new profile first (assuming you’ve played around with the just-released customization features). The next spot will be occupied by whatever your most recent pinned article was.

If you’ve pinned multiple articles, you (and your readers!) can quickly become confused by the order these articles are displayed in.

Your feed could look something like this:

1. Last pinned article
2. 3rd pinned article
3. 2nd pinned article
4. 1st pinned article
5. Last article published and not pinned
6. 2nd last article published and not pinned
7. The motion of your computer flying out your window and narrowly missing your neighbor’s dog

Possible Solution:

Create a pinned article with a list of your recent favorite articles — and don’t pin any others.

The idea is you update it every time you release another article that you want to promote for readers coming to your profile page.

I just released a version of this today which I’ll be keeping track of and updating as I go along. More importantly, I’ll be paying close attention to how much activity it gets and if I need to adjust it.

Here’s the simplistic style I chose (which I’ll tinker around with):

No title for the article, no picture, just a list of 9 recent articles. I’ll probably play around with how many I show there later on as well.

These things usually perform better statistically with only 1–3 links — just like in a newsletter. So I’ll have to keep that in mind.

For another idea along these lines, here’s the Medium-famous Tim Denning’s:

A bit longer but it still serves the same purpose. He’s chosen to direct potential viewers to his most-viewed stories of all time rather than recent articles.

And he also had a fancy cartoon figure made up of himself. (Or Zack Morris?)

I feel my own choice is a good start to this experiment. It kind of looks like a simplistic Table of Contents you’d find on a website from the 90s.

We’ll have to see what the results are later — which I’ll be sure to share.

3. Make a Table of Contents

Another idea I’ll probably toy around with in the future is collecting my articles all into one distinct table of contents.

It will look like my style above, but I’ll only display 5 or 6 links with enticing category headlines such as ‘Business’, ‘Medium²’, and ‘Why I Sometimes Think I’m a Pseudo-Autistic Alien’.

I’ll then create a separate article for each category, where I’ll include every relevant article link.

To be sure I don’t lose track of those ‘category articles’, I’ll have to save the link in an Excel or notepad that I’ll keep handy.

In this way, I could create a workaround table of contents giving easy access to all 300 of my articles. Plus, I’ll probably use it for my own future stats dives when I’m tinkering or obsessing.

This might take me a while to create and I also want to see how option #2 performs first, so I’ll probably try this in January.

After digging around a bit on Medium (AKA creeping), I found the praiseworthy Danny Forest has an interesting version of this:

It’s a nice combination of an intro, links to other sites, and a collection of articles.

I have a feeling this style might catch on more and more as time goes by.

Make it easy for your readers

Whatever Medium is up to — I’m sure they have good intentions behind it. I’m also quite sure there will be a few more changes rolling out in the coming months.

Hopefully, that includes a way to get our views back up to higher levels — but we’ll see.

I still suspect their motivation behind the recent algorithm changes was to spread the potential views around in a more equitable manner. It’s time for the newbies to shine more, relatively speaking.

If you ever looked at the money distributions on Medium, you could see why they’d want to do that.

Either way, I’ll still be here reading, writing, and trying to improve on a daily basis.

I hope you will be too.

J.J. Pryor

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