How I Decide What I’m Reading When I Open Medium

(And do your followers ever really see your stories?)

Medium Without The Mobile App is Different

These days I’m reading Medium articles off a slow laptop because my phone isn’t working.

This makes a huge difference to my reading behaviour because I don’t scroll much on my laptop. Instead I go to my reading list first. I’m enjoying Medium a lot more this way. It feels more like reading and less like being on social media — where as you know, we spend more time scrolling than anything else.

Now I don’t mean to frighten you but I have 2835 bookmarked Medium articles in my hoard. I’ve amassed them through scrolling over the last six months or so, with the most recent added earlier this week.

That means I won’t find your shiny new article unless I go straight to my publications and open the ones you write for. Or, you interact with me, or an article I’m reading and I’m curious enough, for some reason or none, to look at your profile.

(Now why do I have 2835 bookmarked articles anyway?)

Well that’s a question for another article. A bit later I’ll tell you how I select articles from my hoard but first, let me tell you about the Medium behaviour I’m not practising now, in my state of phone-less-ness.

Scrolling and Saving

I scroll and save a lot when I use the Medium phone app.

Top of the page, its algorithms offer me a daily read. I may save or read one of those five articles before I hit that Done for Today button.

Of course I’m not done though! I go right on scrolling, saving the many articles catching my interest as I go along and reading the few that beg to be read right away. In my settings I’ve opted-in to most topics, so Medium has a lot to offer me, even before it throws up selections from just over 300 writers and over 150 publications I follow.

How do I decide which writers and publications to follow anyway?

If I’ve come across a piece I like, I often take a closer look at the writer profile and the publication. If they seem likely to publish more I might value reading in future then I’m happy to follow along and see what comes up.

In checking out a new profile or publication, I’ll see other pieces I’m interested in and either read them right away or add them to my stash of thousands to-be-read. That’s also how I come across many non-curated pieces.

Just as on Twitter, I don’t automatically follow writers and readers who follow me. You might think that’s unkind but think twice. No writer wants to have 1000 followers who don’t even notice their writing. You’d rather have 200 who are genuinely interested. So I wait till I have some time, then I check new followers’ profiles and if they seem to sometimes write pieces I’d enjoy stumbling upon, then I’ll follow them. It’s a reader/writer platform not a Pied Piper tune.

Not having a lot of followers or claps won’t stop Medium’s algorithms from throwing your article in my direction and it won’t stop me from reading it. I see articles from writers with small followings all the time.

But will your articles ever come up for me?

The trouble is, if 50 of the writers I follow write an article daily and half of the publications I follow add at least two articles daily, that’s 200 new articles Medium can show me on any given day! Add that to the hundreds of curated articles from Medium’s topics that could end up crossing my scroll.

(When my phone is fixed and during periods that my Medium app is not in Time Out of course!)

So what are the odds I’ll find your piece?

A good piece takes work, even more for less experienced and practised writers such as your humble servant. Work takes time and time is …money. Or is it something else when you’re being paid in readers’ time not writing time? It’s their time that’s being counted, not yours.

Despite Medium’s tally of millions of readers, even curated articles may not find their way to more than forty eyeballs. (Careful with the arithmetic there writers. Forty eyeballs equals twenty people. 40 divided by two …)

And Will Your Newsletter Help?

That really depends on the reader.

The email account I get my newsletters on went down with my phone. Ordinarily I think I open 1 percent of my newsletters. But with my phone out of order, I’m not accessing these newsletters at all. I already have so many saved articles to catch up on, why bother to log in to find more?

My newsletter reality is worse than it sounds. I adjusted my settings to receiving publication newsletters a few months ago — only because I was curious about what I might receive and knew, with a separate email account, they wouldn’t be going into my regular inbox, weighted down with over 100,000 unopened emails as it is.

As a publisher, do you think me not opening your newsletter shows a lack of support or interest in your publication? Not at all. I’m reading 0–15 Medium articles a day. I’d say 5 is my average. Your newsletter is one of many ways to reach me. It may be much more effective for other readers with different reading habits. Surely readers don’t follow one mold.

And your every method increases the odds of your article appearing in view. There’s no guarantee. It’s a busy marketplace full of digital noise and clutter.

Opening my world to your newsletters has helped me though. Here’s another shameful secret on par with my hoarding habit:

When I overuse Medium, reading and scrolling when I know I should be sleeping or getting my daughter to bed or cleaning the kitchen, I delete the app to prevent myself overusing it in the future. (Gasp!)(And I promise you I didn’t break my phone on purpose as a more extreme self-punishment!)

Like a nicotine addict picking cigarette butts up off the street, with Medium deleted, I head for my inbox full of Medium newsletters. Because restricted access is better than none! By clicking on an enticing article from my newsletters, I open the web version of Medium on my phone to get a reader’s fix!

My phone is a bit old by techie standards. And the web version doesn’t allow me to highlight or comment but at least I can read and I think I can clap.

Wish me luck in getting the old phone fixed soon.

Step Into My Mind: How I Picked A Story To Read This Morning

I opened my Medium reading list on my laptop, just as I’d done before going to bed last night.

Once again, I didn’t read what was laid out at the top of the list. I relied on titles and subtitles to pick my story. Here’s how it played out:

#1 and #2 weren’t chosen today. Both are long and technical. One is packed with relevant, relatively urgent information and the other is interesting and informative. I’m sure they belong on my reading list. I’m not ready for them though.

#3. I’m not curious enough to open it. I was curious enough to save it and I have no urge to remove it.

#4. I think I already know what the writer will say. I’ll give it a quick scan to see if she can teach me anything new, either in evidence or anecdote. Maybe tomorrow or while I’m having a coffee. Not urgent.

#5. Interesting and important subject. Not urgently relevant to me and I’m not in the mood but will read eventually.

#6. Already persuaded overall but might learn some more when I do open this one.

#7 and #8. Same as #3 and #5.

#9. Ah unusual here! Generally a feature photo doesn’t make me look twice but every time I see this photo I look again. The subject is super interesting but the article is longer than I have time for right now.

SIDENOTE: the titles and subtitles of #1 to #8 communicated clearly to me, so their feature photo wasn’t relevant to my decision making. Nor did their photos catch my attention. #9 was fine for title and subtitle too but it’s photo piqued my curiosity. Generally though, to what extent does a feature photo influence me when I’m scrolling? Much less on my mobile where the image is tiny and much more if I’m viewing publications on my laptop.

#10. A mix of my reactions to #4 , #5 and #6. This one has strong writer name recognition which makes me more likely to read it eventually. This writer advises from experience and I enjoy her work.

#11. Oh I read this last night but haven’t removed it yet. Why did it get chosen last night? It felt relevant and important. And I wanted to share it with hubbie, which is why it’s still on the reading list.

#12. CHOSEN !!! I chose it because it resonated.

The article’s title and subtitle were mysterious. Was I about to read poetry, fiction or a true story? Would it be a personal story? Was the writer writing about himself? Did he have AIDS?

Most of my contact with AIDS has been through hospital patients years ago, in an era when the small island government I worked for hadn’t yet made life-saving HIV-suppression medicine available. The social stigma, despair, suffering and isolation victims experienced was overwhelming for them and left an impact on me.

So I read this article. Then I welled up and left my comment on the piece through more tears. Tears I never let myself cry twenty years ago. Tears I can cry now. Thank you James.

Why You Don’t Find My Writing

Well to be fair I’ve only ever written one piece less than six minutes long. I’m expansive and meandering. That means fewer people will read my stuff. The longer the piece, the more it has to persuade the reader of its value, even before they open it.

I don’t publish daily. Many months I manage three pieces a month, so it’ll take longer to build name recognition anyway, even with those who follow me.

I often don’t get curated.

I don’t have a subject focus. So fewer people viewing my profile will choose to follow me as they never know what they’ll be getting.

And that’s fine. I’m a real believer in writing what the fuck you want. Just writing it as well as you can. (I learned that from one of my favourite novelists, Julie Cohen, at a live course. Since this is Illumination, where writers are supporting each other I think it’s okay to suggest here, if you’re novel writing Julie Cohen has a really cool pub you might enjoy).

Agreed though, that if you need to pay bills from your Medium income you might not have the luxury of being as relaxed about it.

Either way, reader behaviour falls into the category of stuff you can’t control.

Do your best work. Put your heart in it. Keep up with the ever changing way Medium works. I can’t make you any promises, other than this: I’m going to keep reading. Because a lot of what I do read here on Medium is totally worth my time.

Thank you for that.

Sincerely,

An Almost Daily Reader

(and Less Frequent Writer).

(Also for your entertainment and insight, this is what my hoard looked like a few months ago. It was half as big and just as interesting. I even wrote about it in this Series… Don’t waste time creating a Series though. Nobody reads them! And you can’t make any money with them either but then again, they can be FUN! And fun counts!)

And here’s Mark Kelly’s take on writing in the gig economy. You might enjoy discovering his writing if you haven’t already: