Gee, Thanks Medium!

But I think your algorithm needs tweaking

The nine index stories that I recently created for my master index on my profile page were all chosen for further distribution. In fact, every story I write is chosen for distribution.

Now, I probably shouldn’t be complaining, right? But the trouble is, that three of the indices were plopped into the strangest of topics. And some of my other stories have too. Furthermore, I don’t think some of my writing was worthy of distribution.

Medium faux-pas

My story ‘The Kiwi is Not Just a Fruit’ was distributed into the topics of ‘Science’ and ‘Climate Change.’ It is about the kiwi bird native to New Zealand!

Apparently, my ‘Advice’ stories are humorous because that’s where the index landed.

Admittedly, one of them is a jovial look at choosing a name for your child, but the rest are very serious — one on my failed marriage, another on giving birth and the final one on encouraging adult student success.

Both my ‘Thought Bubbles’ and ‘Nature’ indices were distributed into the Poetry topic. There ain’t one verse of poetry in any of the stories within those indices!

Worse still, my master index where all my stories are linked through a grid of photos has been distributed in Comics!

How do I know this?

You may be wondering how I know where they have been distributed? A couple of months back, I added an extension onto my laptop that shows me which topics my stories were placed in.

Here is the link on how to do it if you are interested:

The extension is 95% accurate — I go and stalk the topic and most of the time, the story is there. The Kiwi story is not in the ‘Science’ topic and the ‘Climate Change’ topic only has a handful of stories for June, but I do recall seeing it there.

Sometimes it takes a while for the topic to appear where it has been distributed to. My ‘About Me’ index is not assigned a topic as yet. Maybe it won’t, but I’ll keep a beady eye on it.

How does the algorithm work?

Part of me knows I am lucky to be distributed, but the other part of me now wonders how the process actually works. I have watched closely what happens after I have a story published and immediately each one has those magical three words appear.

Clearly, it is automated and looking for keywords and tags — and maybe favours particular writers regardless of the quality of work. I certainly wasn’t expecting a boring index story to be further distributed.

I am wondering if my master index story ended up distributed in ‘Comics’ was because its format is a photo grid. Two of my ‘Nature’ indexed stories were short-form, so the algorithm assumes them to be poetry? I’m leaning towards this inference given all the stories in my ‘Thought Bubbles’ index are short-form too.

Regardless, I am hoping fellow readers don’t think I put them in the wrong categories. I feel like a bit of a plonker — but it wasn’t me, I swear!

Final thoughts: topics and distribution.

I’m not sure if anyone else has this issue since the Medium home page has been updated, but I can only see the topics I follow or that Medium recommends I do. I cannot even search for a topic as it only offers four categories to do so: Stories, People, Publications and Tags. Just because something is tagged with a topic doesn’t mean it was distributed.

For me to find the ‘Climate Change’ topic, I had to go into three other topics to see what was recommended at the side of their page before I could click on it.

Not exactly user friendly.

With the volume of stories published on Medium daily, I personally would prefer the ones that are shared into topics to be top-of-the-line, high-calibre reads.

It may affect visibility, but if fewer stories were distributed the ones that are become more prominent. Quality should always come before quantity.

I would certainly be interested to hear if anyone else has these issues. I look forward to reading about your distribution experiences.