Does Anyone Even Know What Curation Is Anymore?
Curation or Chosen for distribution are differently targeted now
People get confused a lot about things Medium-related, and it’s a good idea to keep up with changes on the platform via Emails sent out by Medium (currently the regular email newsletters are “The Edition” and “The Top Edit”) and by visiting Medium’s official blog, the 3 Min Read. The latter can be found by scrolling down your Medium homepage and clicking on “Blog” in the links at the bottom right.
Curation means the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest, usually with the intention of adding value through the process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition.
In January 2019 Medium piloted or tested human curation or selection of stories meeting curation guidelines, to be shared/posted under dedicated Topic Pages. In February 2019 all people writing on Medium who put their stories behind the paywall (i.e. locked their stories so only paying members could read them) were eligible to have their stories looked at by human curators for possible curation.
When it started there was a lot more information about it, specifically, the label or labels for the Topic Page or Pages were given on the Stats page for the story, plus the writer would get a Notification on the platform, plus the writer received an email. The historical article below demonstrates this.
Since then, all writers’ stories have become eligible for curation.
Also, the Medium homepages have undergone many changes, and along the way a link to a directory of all TOPIC NAMES was removed.
I guess this was done because Medium wanted to de-emphasise curation, due to the following reasons.
(1) People flooding them with emails asking why their stories weren’t curated.
(2) Medium wanted to make curation more cost-effective and thought about removing or ceasing curation altogether, or otherwise changing it.
In my opinion, removing access to the Topic Pages caused confusion because the whole point of curation was having one’s story appear on a special Topic Page.
And if it was hard for you, the writer, to find the directory of Topic Pages, then how the heck were your readers going to find it??
Now the mystery may be about to be solved. Whether or not curation increases earnings or not is impossible to say overall for everyone, and is not the subject of this article.
BUT in September 2021 when Medium announced officially in their “3-Min Read” blog that TAGS are replacing TOPICS, alarm bells rang in my head.
If Topic Pages were going into the “sunset” i.e. not accessible anymore at all, then technically and logically that meant there is no point stories being curated under Topic Pages, so I thought.
Is There Now A Key Change to “Distribution” [ under Topic Pages ]?
Distribution means many things, as explained here, and includes “chosen for distribution” or curation, as appearing on the Detailed Stats pages of stories chosen for distribution under Topic Pages. 😆
I was surprised to find my non-Medium related stories still being “Chosen for distribution” though, and then my independent investigations revealed a perhaps new meaning of CURATION also known as (AKA) “distribution.”
It looks like, for now, stories are still being “chosen for distribution” in terms of being curated under Topic Pages, with a significant caveat here. The Topic Pages are able to be read or are accessible /viewable ONLY by either the passerby or by people signed into Medium, who are non-paying members.
Why would this be, you may well ask? Well, non-paying members and the passerby can read a maximum of 3 locked stories per month, before having to sign up. But there ARE lots of stories published on Medium which are NOT LOCKED, and as all stories can be curated, some of these appear on the Topic Pages which a non-paying member or a passerby can access!
If you’re signed into Medium you can sign out to become a passerby, OR open a different browser and go to Medium, and you will see “labels” beside story titles. When you click on them, some will take you to a TAG PAGE and some will take you to a TOPIC PAGE, and although most stories will have an asterisk * next to them, indicating that it is a locked story (behind the paywall), SOME will not.
All in all, I am happy with this arrangement if it is what curation is now and will be for the forseeable future. This is because it is as good as it gets for now. At least the way I see it is, “distribution” in terms of curation under a Topic Page has not died yet.
Hopefully the non-paying member will get the whoops when she/he sees hundreds of enticing story titles on the Topic Pages (including your curated stories) but she/he cannot read them ~~ because she/he is not a paying member. Then she will join! Even better, is the fact that I discovered that once the non-paying member has read all her free 3 stories, she will see an automated message from Medium to “sign up to read more — -” with a link ~~ that actually goes to your referred Members landing page!
The non-paying member can go to “Control your recommendations” under their Avatar and go to the directory of Topic Names there, to tick those they want to follow. Paying members used to have access to the Topics directory under their “Control your recommendations” setting too, but that has been removed now (for paying members).
To dive deep into my analysis of the change “Topics to Tags” please read my article in “Curation Matters” below. 😃
Update: It looks like non-paying members can no longer access the “old” Topic pages. So “chosen for distribution” on our story stats pages probably means our stories may be promoted or distributed more, by being “fed” onto readers’ Medium homepages ~~ under “Because you follow [ “topic name” ] or under “Based on your reading history.“ They may also have more chance of being selected by Medium to appear in the Medium Email Digest or another Email type or in the “app” homepages on mobile phones.
Hi there peeps, I love to write about Medium, to help YOU ~~ so if you want more gold nuggets of information, don’t forget to bookmark my list of articles all about working with Medium, at the link below!