I Escaped Curation Jail on Medium!
And got thrown right back in 12 hours later
Towards the end of November, I took a deep dive into all of the articles I had written since the end of September. I had covered many topics, with many different styles, and yet I was constantly stuck in curation jail.
It took an even closer look to realize that I had been stuck in curation jail since the very beginning when I wrote just a couple of articles back in June. I didn’t follow the curation guidelines and suffered the appropriately deemed Medium punishment!
Newbie mistake
For those new to Medium, please please please read and follow the curation guidelines! Trust me, you’ll thank me later if Medium becomes a hobby for you. If you want some more useful tips on the subject, feel free to read this extensive guide I wrote as well.
I landed myself in ‘curation jail’ from the very beginning. When I started writing more actively since October, I kind of expected my articles to be curated over time. That wasn’t the case, even with 50+ articles pushed out.
In my extensive dives down the rabbit hole of Medium, I discovered a lot of interesting information about the platform.
Firstly, there was ‘curation jail’, a relatively new term that meant the Medium algorithm excludes your pieces from being manually reviewed by the human curators.
The standard flag hailing those in jail is the following message that usually appears about an hour after you publish a story:
This phrase is all too common to me now, it haunts my dreams of success on this platform.
Escape plan
After reading tonnes of information on Medium and Facebook groups, I discovered I certainly wasn’t in a unique position. Curation jail is a common occurrence on the platform now, likely due to several reasons:
- The under-resourced staff of curators at Medium
- A large increase in writers and article submissions each day
- A lack of more efficient changes to the Medium algorithms to be more inclusive of independent writers
Assuming the above three points are correct, it likely won’t matter how many stories you self-publish (unless you suddenly have 20,000 followers). The algorithm won’t pass you through to a human curator unless it has a reason to.
When you’re brand new, I believe that your first two to three stories are manually reviewed by default. Again, that’s why it’s very important for brand new Mediumites to follow the curation guidelines, as heavily expressed in here:
So how can you escape curation jail? Publications seem to be the only way from my research.
Plan of attack
After I finished my review in November, I decided to create 3 to 5 articles each week with the sole purpose of getting them published. I tried searching through my Medium lists to see which publications I resonated with and chose several as my targets.
My hard work and strategy paid off! After a bit under three weeks, I’ve been published 8 articles now. Not bad for a newbie blogger right?
I had hoped that these would help me get in the good graces of the mysterious Medium algorithm. Many of the publications didn’t help me achieve that, to my knowledge at least. I’m still very grateful for them accepting my pieces of course, and I hope to continue contributing to them!
Results
Of the 8 articles that were published, I saw 4 strange things occur. One of the topics I tag frequently is ‘writing’, it’s one of the 73 subjects that can get you the ‘Top Writer’ award on your profile page.
In my experiments with trying to get the ‘Top Writer in Writing’ designation, I published many articles that I was sure would get me in the top 50, which is based on the frequency of the tags.
Stranger Things #1: Being on top
I never did get it, until one day after I was published in the Post Grad Survival Guide. I had the understanding that you had to be curated first to get the ‘Top Writer’ status in a relevant tag.
The thing is, I still wasn’t curated, but a few hours later I received a notice that I was ‘Top Writer in Travel’. This was odd to me as I hadn’t been pursuing it. I think I had a total of 4 or 5 articles with Travel as a tag too.
I believe that it was that publication that triggered it though, so that’s an interesting point to remember.
Stranger Things #2: Curation
A few days ago, in my continued pursuit to escape ‘curation jail’, I was lucky enough to be published in P.S. I Love You! The coolest thing about this? It got curated!
I was expecting an email and a notification, but I never received one. I could’ve sworn that Medium states they’ll contact you, but I don’t recall seeing one. I can’t find any message in my notifications, and as far as email goes, there is only 1 additional email saying that the article had been accepted into the publication.
For those curious, here is the article that finally got me curated:
Stranger Things #3: Back in the slammer!
That was published the other evening, and about 12 hours later another one of my pieces was published in a different medium-sized publication. I felt this new article was also quite polished and perhaps worthy of curation, and the publication was large enough to help with that I figured.
What I didn’t expect was for it to not even be reviewed!
The article had that very same old nemesis of us Medium writers, the blasted not reviewed ‘due to high volume’ mantra. I thought for sure I would at least have a couple of chances at a manual review after the first curation.
From what I’ve read on similar experiences of other Medium authors, they mostly had at least a few reviews after escaping jail. Some got thrown back in and some didn’t.
But to be instantly back in curation prison right after a curation? That came as an unwelcome surprise.
Stranger Things #4:
There was one final surprise that next day, and not as disappointing as being back in pencil handcuffs. I woke up the next day to find that I was now also a ‘Top Writer in Writing’.
I could see this making sense if I had been curated in writing — I wasn’t. The curators selected my article for ‘Self’ and ‘Family’.
It would also perhaps make sense if the curated article had the ‘Writing’ tag — it didn’t. That article was tagged under ‘Life’, ‘Life Lessons’, ‘Family’, ‘Travel, and ‘Mental Health’. (To be honest, I can’t remember if those were the tags I chose or if the editors later changed them).
So, I’ve now been curated and the article had nothing to do with ‘Writing’ as a tag. My only guess on this point is that all of my previous articles with that tag finally counted as my profile went through the Medium algorithm wall, even if it was only for a brief moment of sunshine.
Takeaway
I’m very grateful that several of these publications were willing to publish my work, and I hope to continue working with them in the future. The results of these last few weeks only made my understanding of the Medium algorithms even more confused. And that’s a shame as I thought I was finally getting a grasp of how it generally worked.
All I know now is that I will keep pursuing writing in publications as well as making pieces for fun that will be self-published, like my silly rhyming odes and a ridiculous quest to get Wil Wheaton to comment on one of my articles.
I’m not making much more than I did last month, even with all the publications. But I will continue to chase them as it has potential and has also driven me to write better.
And that should be the real goal for many of us, writing what we love and loving to write!
‘Rant’ over.