Two Stories Curated Since the Change!

Let’s face it. Since the October 2020 changes, the rate of curation for stories not in the Partner Publications on Medium (like the Ascent, PS I Love You, the Writing Cooperative, Publishous, and Better Marketing) has fallen. This has been reported here on Medium, and on some of the supporting Facebook Groups.

Curation has been extremely diluted, almost as though Medium is trying to hide curation. It is now a ghost of what it was, with no labels on the Stats page or even on the “Reader Interests” settings of a story. Medium no longer sends you emails or in-house notifications that a story has been curated.

You can’t even find, for sure, from the source code, what Topic(s) your story has been curated under. It looks like all stories are now automatically assigned a Topic name or names (based upon your story title and tags and content of your story). Have a look yourself at the code behind your stories and you will see this for yourself. This means that, contrary to what some people think, the Topic name(s) in the Source Code DO NOT reflect the story has been curated.

You are then led to guessing what Topic(s) your story is curated under, and doing a search on the Topic Page for your story, to verify this.

And that is what I did. 😏

My Curated Stories

TOPICS: Education, Climate Change

Date Published: 29 October 2020

In a Publication: Creatures

Story Duration: 5 mins

Tip: to find the suggested or allocated possible Topics “behind the scenes”, using Google Chrome (maybe using other browsers too) right-click anywhere in your Story page and left-click on View Source. Use Ctrl + F to find or search, searching up the word “Topic”. You should see something like below.

If the above method doesn’t work, try one of the following!

A day after my story was published in Creatures, I checked the Stats page for my story. I was surprised but happy to see “Chosen for further distribution.” My tactic is to check each story’s Stats page 1 or 2 days after publication, and from then onward, to check once every 3 or 5 days or even wait until 1 week after publication, for the “Chosen for further distribution” notice (or its absence).

I immediately went to the 3 Topic pages shown above, and found my story title under the “Education” and “Climate Change” topic pages, BUT it was not on the Science topic page! Beats me why a scientific article about insects was not selected for SCIENCE !! 😲

However, I am happy that the story was double-curated, assumedly under “Climate Change” as a topic just because I mentioned climate change once in the article !! I guess it was put under “Education” because it is educational, though not related to the usual school or college theme, i.e. not about the education system.

TOPIC: Relationships

Date Published: 24 October 2020

In a Publication: PS I Love You

Story Duration: 4 mins

I believe that this was “automatically” curated because it was in a Publication that has an agreement with Medium to publish high-quality high-value articles in exchange for curation (which, of course, can bring traffic to the Publication).

I waited 4 weeks for this article to be published by P.S. I Love You. Once again I received no email or even a notification on the platform itself (not happy about that one bit). Through guess work and finally looking at the source code, I went to the RELATIONSHIPS Topic page, and found my story title on that page.

In summary, I intend to check up to one week after one of my stories is published (whether in a Publication or not) for the elusive and gold-lined “Chosen for further distribution” notice. If I really feel a story will be or should be curated, then I might look two weeks after its publication.

Now that all stories are eligible for curation, the curation rate will be spread thinner across the board. If you seek curation then just continue as you are doing, and take what you can get.

So many people on the Facebook groups say “just write better” which actually makes me a bit cross, because I think that most of those who ask about curation, are already writing valuable well-written articles already!

To me anyway, it is clear and logical that it’s not easy to get reads or curated because of the vast amounts of stories published every day on Medium

I find the Search function on Medium woeful for new writers or fresh stories, as only the already esteemed top 10 viewed / read stories are displayed when one searches upon a Tag name.

Medium says it is now more relational and wants writers to build up their followers and to relate to each other, with cross-references in their own stories (or links to your other stories, etc.) yet has taken away a valuable source for engaging with others, being the viewing of Claps, Highlights, and Resources.

Curation still matters. I still maintain that the content or topic matters the most, and it is a no-brainer or a given that a story has to be well-written and universal or appeal to all sorts of readers. Other factors, like consistently publishing valuable or useful, easy to read, universally appealing, well-written stories, are also important.

Some say that curation is over-rated and doesn’t help them, but they can only speak for themselves. My curated stories have all had a greater number of reads after the initial distribution, compared to my non-curated stories.

I can empathise with Medium not wanting to be persecuted or besieged by members clamouring to be curated; but is that enough reason to water down curation so much, I wonder. By this of course I mean do they have to remove Topic labels plus not send emails plus have no platform notifications??

I sure hope that Medium is not just making curation a tokenism, on the way to doing away altogether with curation. The Topics pages are a great idea, as landing pages for readers, especially new readers. Curators, lots of them, are needed, to assign quality stories under the various Topic pages.

Thanks for reading. Don’t give up on curation. Below is my article about the October 2020 curation changes.

UPDATE: MARCH 2021

Since writing this I have found that when you View Page Source the lines are not word-wrapped so it looks like some of the code is missing. BUT what you should do, is to highlight all the content in the code window (e.g. click anywhere then use the Ctrl plus the A button for the Windows O.S. to select all content) then COPY all the content. PASTE it into a word processing document and then do a search for the word TOPIC or for the word TAG.