Medium Curation: It Ain’t What It Used To Be
Are we slaves to the algorithm?
In the past, it was known that Medium employed a group of humans that curated stories and recommended them for the home page, emails, newsletters, etc. In this era, getting chosen for further distribution was a big deal and made a huge difference in how your stories performed. People wrote articles on how to get curated and even held entire classes on the subject.
However, at some point, curation changed and the rumors were the humans were gone and stories were now chosen by an algorithm.
No more “chosen for further distribution”
Amid all this, a post recently appeared by Medium’s Scott Lamb attempting to clarify our questions. This announcement seemed to confirm that yes, it’s a computer algorithm and has been for some time.
To quickly sum up Scott’s post, for one thing, you will no longer see the message “chosen for further distribution” on your stories. Basically, Medium removed a defunct message that no longer meant anything anyway. Here are some excerpts of what Scott said.
- “By default, most stories published on Medium are now eligible for distribution across the network.”
- Also, “stories do not need to be curated to be distributed.”
- And finally, “The vast majority of stories are eligible for algorithmic distribution upon publishing, and most stories now receive some level of distribution via our recommendations algorithm.”
So, why is this confusing?
It’s confusing because of mixed messages. In his post, Scott referred us to the “updated” Medium help page on distribution for further information.
It was on reading this that my thoughts became severely muddled, because, check this out:
- “We also have a team of human curators searching for the very best stories in order to share them with readers.”
- “If selected by our human curators, your story may also be featured in promotional spots across Medium.”
- “We will also remove low-quality stories from distribution to Medium’s network, though they will still be distributed to a writer’s audience.”
Okay…what? Is curation gone? Is curation here but invisible? Is curation coming from a computer algorithm or from a human curator?
There’s more to the mystery
In a recent wildly popular article by Jessica Wildfire, among the hundreds of comments, I noticed one from Medium CEO, Tony Stubbline. On curation he said the following:
“We removed a notification about what was curated or not. The message had become severely outdated and was wildly misunderstood. But the changes that made the message outdated, namely a swing toward algorithmic curation decisions, happened well before my time. Nothing in this change of messaging should affect your page views or earnings.”
So there you have it, there has been a “swing toward algorithmic curation decisions.” And it’s been going on for some time now.
Will there be more changes?
Most certainly. Tony’s comment was long and you may want to check it out for yourself. You’ll just have to scroll a bit because Jessica’s article has a lot of comments. Here’s another excerpt from Tony:
“Now, that said, I do want to make changes to what we recommend, especially in advice categories. We have a lot of very credible writers who get swamped by under-informed, but more virally crafted content. The <5% change above is human driven. But it’s too early to go in depth on that and you can count on me making an announcement on our blog when it’s ready.”
Human curators still exist, but mainly the algorithm distributes our work
It appears to me that — it may be possible Medium editors will pick up and more widely distribute a small selection of articles, but it’s not something the majority of us are likely to see.
It’s also possible to have an article removed from distribution if an editor deems it “low quality.” But followers will still see it.
So mostly, yes, we are slaves to the algorithm.
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