The Medium Home Page and How to Find things on Medium
UPDATE: MAY 2021
Having signed up with Medium in November 2018 and being interested in what is on the Medium Home page of a desktop computer, for the passerby or for the General Public (so to someone who has not signed up with Medium), in March 2019 I took 2 screenshots. The one below shows part of the Medium Home Page when I was signed in, on the same day (29/3/19).
Medium itself states:
On your Medium homepage, you can find stories featured by our staff, stories from people and publications that you follow, popular stories, and more.
Reference: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012586467-Your-homepage
Here is an excerpt from the Medium Help page referenced above.
When you are signed into Medium, it is pretty clear that you can access new stories from your network, via the section on the right with the heading on a light-blue background “New from your network.”
Under this heading are a few Story Titles but you can click on “New from your network” and find a great many more Medium Stories categorised under All or People or Publications. I like to click on People and scout for stories that I’m interested in, written by various individual people.
If you go to the People or Publications page, at the time of writing this, the pages are set up with infinite scrolling, which means you can just keep scrolling down until all new items have come up. You might never get to the end if you are following hundreds or thousands of people or Publications.
From time to time, I will see stories of people whom I am no longer really interested in reading their Stories (sorry) so I will hover my mouse over the person’s name, which actually brings up a snippet of their Profile and I will then click on the green “Following” button, which will toggle off following.
On the left, now as it was back in March 2019, you will see story titles categorised or grouped under some or all of the following captions.
Based on your reading history
Editor’s Pick
Popular on Medium
[ Topic Name: examples Environment or Math ]
.
Some stories picked by the Editors in the Featured sections (top section of the Home page for the public and when one clicks on SEE EDITOR’S PICKS, formerly SEE ALL FEATURED) are in Medium-run Publications and some are in Publications which have a partnership with Medium, such as Gay Mag.
Stories under Topics are for those Topics which you have chosen under “Customize your interests” in your personal Settings (by clicking on your Avatar or the little round picture/icon representing you at the top right).
Alternatively, when you click on New from your network, you will see a Customize “button” on the right, which you can click on to choose your interests to follow.
How do you know it is a Medium-run Publication or a partner Publication or not? You click on the Publication name and if it is run by the Medium company itself, it will clearly tell you so either at the top of the Publication home page, in the banner image, OR on the “About” page.
Gradually, Medium changed the mix of Story Titles in the “Featured” section at the top of the Medium Home Page, from including some stories in non-Medium run Publications and Partner Publications to only those in these latter two. In other words, the Featured section used to include stories in privately run Medium publications.
In fact, if you research the story by Brendan Nyhan in the first screenshot at the top of this article, you will find his Story was published in GEN. At that time, March, GEN was new and it seems Medium stuck his article in the top Featured section (but without telling us it was in GEN), to see how well it was received. The point being that soon after I joined Medium in November 2018, the company moved to featuring only its vested content, i.e. Medium-run Publications and Partnership Publications content (ostensibly to increase their share of the revenue).
Medium now has so many Medium-run Publications (meaning Publications which they have started or created and which they have Editors for who may invite submissions from run-of-the-mill Medium writers or who may only commission writers they know or who are with publications they know, to write for these Medium-run Publications), that the top banner (or links) now includes only Medium-run Publication names. It used to include Topic names.
For example, OneZero to Modus are all Publications started by Medium.
It looks like MC at the end of the strip at the top but I think it is supposed to be MORE but the word has been truncated (meaning the Medium Programmers haven’t checked that more of the word MORE is displayed in the browser that I use, which is Chrome).
Clicking on what looks like MC (for me) will take me to the page showing all TOPICS or INTERESTS to tick the ones that I wish to FOLLOW, of which a few Stories from all the items that I tick will appear on my personalised Home Page.
The 5 so-called Featured stories now at the top of my Medium Home Page are just story titles from my “Network” which means the people and publications that I follow.
Now, on the Facebook Support Groups for Medium, up to now, most Medium writers discussing this change, approve of or actually like this set-up of Medium, saying they now see more story titles of people and publications that they really are interested in.
This is a fair comment because they ticked or selected Topics and People (writers) and Publications to follow; and now some stories written under the aforesaid now appear in their “Featured” top section on their Home Pages. This pleases many writer-readers on Medium because they can browse and select story titles of stories they think they would like to read.
Bear in mind that just because your story title may appear in someone’s top section of their Home page does not guarantee that the person WILL read your story.
However, because I can just go to “New from my network” and click on People or on Publications and look through story titles using infinite scroll, speaking for myself (which I’m allowed to do) I would prefer seeing curated or editor-selected stories in private Publications and in Medium-run Publications at the top of my Home Page.
I became a paying member to read curated or assumedly quality “locked” stories (hand-picked by curators) and to read articles in Medium’s anthologies, collections and guides.
The new personalised FEATURED sections of the home pages are apparently now based upon “algorithms” or computer programmes which dutifully find story titles from your interests or topics and from what you are following, and places a random selection of 5 of the most recent ones of those in your “Featured” section.
With infinite scrolling, it is more than enough for me to have the “New from my network” function and furthermore, of course, if you click on “ — — following” on your Medium Profile page, for example “209 Following” in my case, you will be taken to an un-sorted list of names of all the people whom you are following.
That means you can click on the person’s name to go to her or his Medium Profile page ( or hover your mouse and click on the green “Following button” to Un-follow the person if you have changed your mind about following her/him ).
I hypothesise that the change to the top section of the Home Page came about because of many Medium writers complaining that what they saw in the Featured section was heavily biased toward Medium-run Publications and not what they wanted to see. They may have said that they wanted to see stories from “indie writers” and this means independent writers, or the run-of-the-mill writers or the relatively unknown writers, including me.
If I had said anything it would have not been the aforementioned, but that:
- I would like Medium to employ a hundred more curators and to curate a lot more stories under the various Topics AND
- Improve their Search function AND
- Feature a lot more Stories from non Medium-run Publications on their Home page (for the public and signed in writers/readers)
The last, I think, is critical, because I think some writers were jealous of those whose stories were featured in the top section and / or upset that independent writers weren’t getting featured more in the top section. I myself would like to see curated stories of independent writers in my Featured section.
Even above this I would love Medium to improve its Search function so that independent and unknown writers could have their stories found. Members of the Public can only find our stories by seeing them either featured on the Home page OR by searching topics when signed into Medium.
At the moment, the top stories are found, meaning those with a lot of claps or views and reads. How about showing those with the least claps and views so that the writers of such stories have a chance of being found?
It does NOT follow that if a story has few reads or claps then it is automatically a crap story. It may mean the writer has no “circle of friends” to share their stories with, and how can the person’s Medium stories be found if when one enters a keyword or goes to a tag, ONLY the top viewed stories are resulted???
IF you want Medium to improve its Search functions, sign the Petition at the link below NOW and please SHARE IT
I run about 8 WordPress blogs also, and the Search function displays stories by date order or chronologically, regardless of the “accolades” the stories have received!
What the Public sees on the Home Page
This is difficult to ascertain at the moment because Medium keeps flip-flopping between what I call the “M&Ms Landing Page” and the standard professional nice looking landing page cum Home Page that I saw back in November 2018 when I first came across Medium.
In my opinion, this top section of the “Landing page” aims to show those who have been referred to Medium or who know about Medium an enticing range of scintillating topics or issues that Medium writers and Publications write about.
I don’t like this page at all because as an “old-fashioned writer and reader” (meaning I was born in the 60s and I like substance or to see some story titles and to be able to read samples, even if they are only 2 “free” Stories in full a month, as is currently allowed) I want to see and sample before I buy.
If I wasn’t already a Medium writer, if I saw the above, I would not click on “Get Started” to find out what Medium is all about, because I wouldn’t have a clue what the content was like just from the pretty round coloured Topic buttons, which look to me like M&M candies.
The above shows some of the home page, i.e. the “esteemed” Featured Section at the top of the page, for my friend who registered with Medium but never became a member and never wrote on Medium. This section is like what I saw when I registered and became a paying member, and until around a month ago this is what my Home Page looked like.
When you click on SEE EDITOR’S PICKS ( formerly SEE ALL FEATURED ) you then go to a long long list of Story Titles, of which all Stories are in Medium-run Publications or Partnership Publications.
Now with the new personalised Home Pages, when you click on SEE EDITOR’S PICKS you will go to the same list as the non-active person above will be taken to. This is weird to me as it can make someone think that the stories they see in their top section of their Home Page have been featured to everyone. Be aware that the 5 or so Stories right there at the very top of your Medium Home Page are only Stories customised via Medium’s “algorithm” or programming, to APPEAR TO YOU ONLY.
I view the new personalised Feature page as a bit of a cover-up in terms of it shouldn’t be thought of or strictly technically called “Features” if FEATURED means hand-picked by Medium curators and editors to be shown to the PUBLIC. The phrase “Editor’s Picks” to me, really means FEATURED STORIES, but as mentioned the Stories at the top of your Home Page are really neither Editor’s Picks or Featured Stories (as in featured to everyone).
It’s important to make a distinction between what’s shown to the public or passerby in a bid to entice them to join Medium and what’s shown to the signed-in Medium registrant and / or paying member.
In other words I assumed that what I see in the “Featured” top section would always be the same as what members of the public passing by who were not signed into (registered with) Medium, would see. That is now not the case, so those who are not technically savvy (as believe it or not, not everyone is familiar with technology) may innocently think that what they see in their Featured section are curated stories, when they are not.
This is especially because Medium did not post about this change on their 3-Minute blog or in their latest Medium Partner Newsletter.
In other words, because I am insanely into details and being organised, if I were on the Medium staff, I would suggest that their programmers change the words SEE ALL FEATURED to SEE FEATURED STORIES.
One word can make all the difference. The “ALL” makes one think that the personalised stories are featured in terms of being featured to everyone, not just to the one person, and are featured or shown to the public.
UPDATE: 30 January 2020 -this has been changed to ‘EDITOR’S PICKS”
Last but not least is the fact that the personalised five story titles on one’s Medium Home Page now CHANGES every 5 or 10 minutes. Try refreshing your screen and you will see what I mean.
Speaking for myself (who else) I find this dismaying and annoying, because I didn’t realise this would happen, plus this is entirely unhelpful if you don’t read all the stories you were interested in within the 5 or 10 minutes!
What if you saw a story title that you really wanted to click on but left your computer then refreshed the page and saw a whole entirely new set of “featured” stories in your top section, AND you couldn’t remember who wrote the story you were interested in and / or what the story title was?
It’s not as though you can Bookmark the story by hovering your mouse over the story title (not yet) so now you know this, maybe you will need to open the story and bookmark it for reading later, if you don’t have time to right now. The personalised stories are dynamically refreshed, I guess, in order to present a dazzling array of fresh interesting stories to the reader, but refreshing them is not all that functional, in my honest opinion.
Of course, these are stories of people and publications that I myself have chosen or selected to Follow; but that doesn’t necessarily (of course) mean that every single story of every single such entity that I am following will be a story of topic or content or calibre or purpose that I want to read (just like perhaps nobody is reading this article I am writing, as many either won’t be interested in this Topic or in Me but will be following me, for who knows why).
I am “sticking to my guns” and saying the “change” is neither good nor bad, but it is a surprise to some, including me; and I wish that Medium would tackle the 3 things that I pointed out above and would only refresh the personalised stories every few hours or even just every day / once a day.
Please, if you are reading this, don’t tell me what I already know, or read mysterious things into this article that aren’t actually written here.
I say what I mean and I mean what I say. If you think the personalised home pages are the best thing since sliced bread, good for you, I am simply trying to share my analysis of things here in a hopefully logical and factual manner.
Thank you for your understanding. 😃
Here is a link to my July 2020 story on how to search for stories on Medium.
