Medium Rolled Out a Stricter ‘No Duplicate Content’ Rule Today
No more unlisting — or deleting — and republishing.
Medium is nothing if not ever-evolving.
I had an email today from Kawandeep at Medium that let me know I’d been breaking a rule about duplicate content.
Maybe you got something similar. If you did, you might have some questions. If you didn’t — well, you still need to know this stuff if you’re writing on Medium.
Since I’ve been advocating for republishing older posts and unlisting the originals, I thought I’d do my best to figure out the answers for you and let you know what I’ll do about republishing going forward.
The rules were updated today.
Here’s what the policy says:
(Please go read that whole set of rules.)
And here’s what a slightly more in depth Help Center article says:
There are a couple parts that stand out to me as important.
Starting with these:
Taking a published story to unlisted, then re-publishing the same content into a new post.
And
Deleting a post and republishing it.
Those of us who have a back catalog of posts often delete or unlist our old posts and republish them. That’s not allowed anymore, as of today. Medium is only allowing brand new posts on their site.
This little bit is interesting:
. . . whether from a single account or across multiple accounts. . .
What that means, as far as I can tell, is that you cannot open a brand new account and move old posts over to it. If you want to start a new account and you want to stay within the rules, you’ll need to write fresh posts.
And then this seems especially important as well:
Accounts in violation of this rule will be suspended from Medium until they are brought into compliance. Repeated violations will result in permanent suspension.
The consequences for not following this rule are pretty crystal clear.
What This Means For Us
Medium does not want you to publish your work on their platform more than once. Period. Ever. Which is their privilege.
The really tough thing here is that republishing was the only we had of trying to get our work in front of curators a second time if they were passed over the first time. Until recently we could email Medium and ask for a second look, but that’s not allowed anymore.
Instead of taking another look, Medium started sending out this form email.
It’s now highly important that you put your absolute best work out immediately. There’s no chance to take it down and try again. No revise and resubmit, in other words. You get one chance.
If your post is not curated, you’ll need to remove it and significantly rewrite it so that it’s not just a republished post if you want to try again. Without any indication of would constitute a new post and pretty dire consequences for breaking the rules, you’ll have to use your best judgement.
If republishing has been part of your strategy . . .
You’re going to have to rethink that. Me, too. I’ve been republishing at least one new post every day. I’m a little shellshocked right now, to be honest. I’ll have to evaluate the way I do things.
Instead of just reusing a post — I’ll have to write another one on the same topic.
And I’m not sure what to do with posts that aren’t curated when I think they should be. Medium has taken away every avenue of trying to get a second look for those. Historically, I was able to get about 90 percent of my posts that were passed over curated on second look (either by emailing or republishing — neither of which is viable anymore.)
Putting out your best work right from the start is more important than ever. There is less space for getting it wrong now than there was even yesterday.
Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter and Instagram and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation, and The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.