Has Medium Pulled the Plug on Its Curation Program
Is it true that curation is no longer important
Some of the writers on Medium are saying that curation is not important anymore. But the explanation given by Medium staff is vague and confusing.
First, we’ll explore what is relational media and then we’ll dissect the explanation to reach a conclusion about whether Medium has really pulled the plug on its curation program:
Part 1: The main question is: what is relational media?
This was explained by Evan Williams in one of his posts:
“Among other ways, the internet has changed media consumption along a spectrum that you might call relational to transactional.”
In simple words, the readers on the internet don’t care who has written the article they are reading. They just read it — a one-time transaction — and forget everything about the writer — they fail to create a relationship with the writer.
Evan Williams believes that you develop a sort of relationship with a publication or a writer as you read more and more from him or her.
He thinks that you’d like to read whatever that publication offers you to read or whatever a particular writer writes. He believes that the decision of the reader depends on his or her relationship with the writer or the publication.
The other view is that millions of readers click to read something based only on the headline. Ev Williams thinks that only sophisticated readers pay attention to the source.
He says, “Navigating from homepage to homepage — the digital equivalent of picking up a magazine — feels very antiquated and inefficient when the headlines can all be aggregated and presented to you, personalized. Or, depending on your need, when you can search for a specific topic and be led directly to a reasonable set of answers by the authority of Lord Google.”
He implies that it can hurt the creation of a relationship between a reader and a writer or a publication.
He writes, “The relatively limited number of outlets and the gatekeepers who controlled them in the pre-internet world let a very small number of perspectives be heard.”
Sometimes, when you are just looking for a recipe or a way to fix your computer, the relationship does not matter. This would be an example of an information transaction.
A purely transactional world has a ton of downsides. ~ Evan Williams
If you do not care to read a publication or a particular writer, then you’ll rely on the “headline+image” mix. If you are looking to read something that helps you in life, catchy headlines cannot be the way forward.
Consider television as an analogy
Evan Williams thinks like this: “Different consumption modes drive different content. If you’re flipping through channels, you’re not going to stop at a show where you need to have watched the 12 previous episodes to appreciate. Or even the whole episode. The worst of TV today (and there’s still plenty of it) optimizes for no context required — recaps after every commercial break and teasers before to keep you tuned in, which you probably won’t, because you don’t care. It’s transactional.”
He says, “the way to succeed in that world is to make something so good people tell their friends about it. You hear people obsess about GOT enough, you have to subscribe to HBO. That’s the game.”
His point of view is that when a reader builds a relationship with a great writer or a publication, she may read fewer articles but she may read much more consistently. The reader will not read randomly here or there. It’ll be 100% or zero: good writers get all the reads and other writers — despite clickbait headlines and appealing images — get no reads.
“Our reading has gotten more transactional while TV has gotten more relational.” ~ Evan Williams
He says that newsletters, podcasts, tweets, and even Instagram/Snap-style Stories are relationship-driven media.
Blogging is a form of relational media
“One of the things I loved about blogging back then — and that people enjoy about writing newsletters today — is the feeling that you’re publishing to a relatively consistent group of people who care what you have to say.” ~ Evan Williams
Even though it’ll take time before your readers develop trust in your writing, you’ll have more freedom and confidence that you have loyal readers waiting for your masterpiece.
“Your success is less dependent on your latest headline and more on delivering on the trust your readers have given you by showing up”. ~ Evan Williams
He says that a blog is a place where you intentionally go. Over time, when the readers keep visiting your blog, they develop a relationship with the writer and how he or she thinks.
How to make sense of it all
According to Evan Williams, the original idea behind Medium was to equip the writers with an easy platform to publish their detailed thoughts and points of view — without knowing the technical details about blogging.
Medium believed there were millions of people who had excellent stories, knowledge, or ideas to share but they didn’t have a home for their stories.
Some of the viral stories on Medium have come from people who had only one story to tell. Medium made it possible for these occasional writers to find the audience.
But Evan Williams believes that Medium is not doing as good of a job for those writers who are regularly publishing content.
Our distribution system encouraged a one time read more than building a relationship between the writer and the reader.
In simple words, when the readers focus on curated stories more than evaluating the quality of work done by a writer, they are less likely to follow a particular writer.
The overall vision of Evan Williams is to create a robust network of thinkers and perspectives. He wants both the content and the network to evolve into greater density and complexity over time.
The new mobile app is also more follower-driven and less algorithm-driven
This will encourage the readers to read their favorite writers again and again. If the readers know who to follow, they can stay away from headline-driven stories.
The new focus is on the author or the publication, the readers choose to follow, and you go to their profile — before you know what they’ve written about:
Part 2: Dissecting the Changes in Medium’s Curation and Distribution System
“Our goal is to create the best of both worlds: An open and simple platform where anyone can publish allowing for deeper connections between readers and writers.” ~ Evan Williams
Here are the three assertions about the changes:
1. Every post published on Medium is eligible for further distribution
This makes you think that curation is no longer important. But it would be wrong. Even if a story was not curated, it was always visible to your followers.
Medium says that the writers no longer need to submit their stories for curation review. But the writers never “submitted” any story for curation, it was an automatic process.
Medium is only trying to prove that the writers should not worry about curation but focus on writing something that their readers would love to read.
If curation is no more, then Medium should say that they would not be pursuing quality articles in selected topics even in the background.
2. Only writers enrolled in the Medium Partner Program will have the option to place their stories behind the metered paywall.
It is exactly the way it used to be. The writers placed their stories behind the metered paywall and Medium curators worked to see if the quality of the story was good enough.
3. We have simplified the notifications and labeling of your story’s distribution status.
Medium has removed all topic tags — that showed the topics where your story would be available for readers to find — on the stats page of a story and for previously curated stories, a general message says: “Chosen for further distribution.”
Medium says that the intention behind making these changes is “to accurately portray our distribution system to writers.”
“We know we have more work to do.” ~ Medium Staff
Dr. Mehmet Yildiz has been saying that the Medium curation process is not efficiently serving the writers. Now Medium admits it by saying that the editorial curation had some value but they recognize that their system did not always serve writers as well as it could. This is why the new publication, ILLUMINATION-Curated was created and it is now rapidly becoming popular among the Medium readers.
Medium says that they will discover and promote stories behind the scenes. They are trying to improve their system of discovering quality stories.
While we will continue to use topics behind the scenes to improve our recommendations to readers, we will no longer show topic designations to writers.
The above statement proves that the curation process is still there. The new writers will not be encouraged to focus on curation but on building their fan base. That’s because Medium topics are just one way of getting readers on Medium. This is the reason for the phenomenal success of ILLUMINATION publication.
The top 12 questions of Medium writers
Question 1: If Medium is going to be more relational, then why are the names of the writers missing from stories on the home page?
Answer: I think Medium should consider this question very seriously. If the name of the writer is missing, it means that Medium is encouraging the relationship of readers with publications only.
Question 2: Why didn’t Medium ask the writers before implementing the changes that affect their daily work?
Answer: Medium should have asked for some input from writers. Usually, curation is more of a pat on the back for regular new writers.
It is secondary for large publications like the Forge, the Ascent, the Mind Cafe, or ILLUMINATION, but new publications — like my publication Positive Minds — get many new readers with one curated story.
Curation may not matter for Thomas Oppong or Sinem Günel after the new changes — though it was important for them in the past — it matters for someone who has less than 10K followers — and that means 99% of the writers on Medium.
Question 3: Why were the topic tags on the Stats page removed from the stories?
Answer: If the objective is to improve the relationship between the reader and the writer, then Medium can choose to hide the topic pages from the reader. But the writer has to know what is happening behind the scenes. It is going to make things more opaque for the writers.
Question 4: How is giving writers less information about their work going to make the writing experience better?
Answer: This one is simple. It is not going to help new writers at all. The big names are going to be the beneficiaries. Medium has — unintentionally — made the process more difficult for new writers.
Question 5: How is the new update useful for the writers?
Answer: The three distribution categories are:
- When Medium staff features a story,
- When Medium staff makes it available on the topic page as trending,
- When Medium curators curate a story.
It may make a vast majority of writers happy that curation is gone forever, but that would be wrong to say this because it is still working behind the scenes.
If you are a reader, it’ll make things easy for you. All you have to do is to read articles from the top three publications and the top ten writers.
Any less popular publication or new writer will have to fight harder if there is no support to find new readers.
Most probably, it is going to make the role of Twitter and Facebook more important for marketing your stories.
Question 6: Aren’t these changes designed to help Medium partner publications with massive followings?
Answer: It does not matter whether a publication is a Medium partner or not, if it has a huge following, these changes will help the publication.
But Medium partner publications indeed have the largest number of followers.
Question 7: Should the new writers move their work to ko-fi or substack?
Answer: Ko-fi is based on donations of a cup of coffee. Substack has a subscription model for newsletters.
New writers will have to wait for a long time before they can develop their readership — these two options are similar to the new relational model of Medium.
Question 8: Does it mean that the marketing of a writer’s stories is now solely the responsibility of the writer?
Answer: It means that you have to write well and bring your own readers to Medium. Medium will provide additional help only to Medium partner publications or the top writers.
Question 9: what are the new key performance indicators — KPIs — for the writers?
Answer: The only KPI is to write often and try to increase your followership.
Question 10: Is Medium trying to pull the plug on the curation process because they don’t have enough curators and they can’t afford to hire more full-time curators at this time?
Answer: This may be the main reason — they can’t afford more curators at this time. When they’d be able to hire more curators, they’d bring it back.
Question 11: Does it mean that the new writers must submit their stories to the big publications?
Answer: It means that new writers have to get into big publications to get more reads.
Question 12: Is it a cosmetic change to make all those writers happy whose work was not curated and they complained about the curation process?
Answer: It may be true. If Medium is still going to “discover and promote stories behind the scenes,” then curation will be there but nobody will be complaining about the curation process or its details.
This means that publications like ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated are going to be the best places for new writers — as these are the only democratic publications — as Dr Mehmet Yildiz has always insisted on creating synergy through cooperation and helping each other to become a better writer with more earning.