Guidance to new writers

Warning — Medium’s Algorithm May Flag Your Short-Form Stories as Duplicative of Your Long-Form

You may need to take two necessary actions.

Key Point

Duplication is against Medium rules, so writers need to pay attention to this rule to protect their accounts. Even though most of us are careful with not duplicating content, there might be blindspots, as it happened to me unintentionally, so I share my experience and provide guidance on clearing this blindspot.

Introduction and Background

My readers, writers, and editors know I am anal-retentively cognizant of Medium’s policies, yet, yesterday I received this AI-generated email with another follow-up from the Helpdesk agent of Medium:

We’re writing to let you know that your Medium account(s) is in violation of our rules (https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/213477928-Medium-Rules). We do not allow posting duplicate content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts, either publicly or as an unlisted story. We ask that you please review your account(s) and stories, and remove any duplicate stories to keep your account(s) active on Medium.

Reading the AI-generated email created an instant shock to the primitive/reptilian portion of my brain. It instantly escalated to my limbic system creating emotions of fear, anxiety, and disappointment — Amygdala does its evolutionary job well.

Thankfully, as soon as the logical portion of the brain, the frontal lobe, took over, I re-assessed the situation and responded to the Helpdesk request in a calm and composed way.

I don’t want to detail my situation but I am compelled to share it briefly so that it sheds light on the issue and helps you understand what we all need to do individually.

After yesterday’s shock being seen as a spammer by Medium AI system, today I had another shock when the AI system identified alleged duplication in my four stories and caused the Helpdesk to create a ticket with an 18-hour warning to fix them.

My understanding of the correspondence was that if the issue was not fixed and the Helpdesk timely informed, I could no longer operate on this platform. In other words, my account would be suspended.

I said “fair enough” and fixed the issues to remain compliant.

What was the issue?

The issue was caused by the short-form style approach.

We embraced the short-form, and I encouraged our writers to use it to increase the visibility and readability of stories. Stats dramatically reduced in November and December 2020 as experienced by most of us. We believe recent changes on Medium caused it. We had a sudden hope offered by short-form style as mentioned in my post.

For example, I wrote a long-form story and created a short form-story by extracting around 150 words from my original story. I ensured the titles and cover pages were different so that my stories could not be seen as duplicates by the system. But they were!

My short-form stories created an alarm, and Medium Helpdesk asked me to fix them within 18 hours.

I fixed four stories deemed duplicate by AI and informed Medium Helpdesk and the AI-generated message.

I made every effort from my end to address the issue on time.

This situation created a lot of concerns for the short-form stories. I embraced the short-form style and encouraged our writers to use it as a tool, but I am now assessing short-form stories’ ramifications.

I will share my views and decision in another post.

For now, I believe my mistake was taking the easy approach of cutting and pasting pieces of content from my long-form stories. The better approach is to write from scratch an abstract of the long-form story.

Actions for your considerations

There are two critical actions for writers.

Please read them carefully and act accordingly to protect your account.

Action 1

The first action is to check your email for any notifications from [email protected]

I don’t know about you, but most of Medium’s emails go to my spam folder. I make it a habit now to check my spam folder more frequently. It is another AI stupidity labeling valid messages as spam.

This is the first priority because Medium gives us 18 hours for us to fix the issues. If the response is not provided, your account may be suspended.

It happened to me once. Medium sent me a warning to address some allegations about my account and publication, but I did not see the message within 24 hours as it was in my spam folder.

My account was suspended, and my publication couldn’t serve readers. It was a harrowing experience for me and for our writers and readers. Therefore, I don’t want our writers to experience the same awful pain because of missing notifications.

AI manages large platforms. And remember AI doesn’t care!

Not answering the notification, the Medium system might be assuming that you are not taking actions; hence your account might be considered non-compliant and suspend it. The intention and purpose are for good reasons, but some innocent accounts may be affected.

In April in 2020, I introduced a distinguished scientist to Medium, followed in scientific communities for several decades. The person joined Medium with my recommendations, and Medium curated almost every story of this scientist submitted to my publication. Our readers loved her content because it was authentic and made a societal impact.

However, the AI detected duplication, and her account was suspended. On behalf of our editors, I sent a testimonial about the authenticity of her content. I don’t know how Medium took my testimonial, but this scientist sadly left Medium as she did not want her reputation to be dented. She was concerned that her clients questioned why her account was suspended as the links to her memorable stories on search engines showed 404 errors.

She deleted all her stories and left Medium. We lost a distinguished scientist in this collaborative platform which hurt me, my editors, our contributing writers, and many of our readers deeply.

Action 2

As a second priority, review all your short-form stories.

Delete any duplicate text from your main story if you extracted content from long-form stories.

The key considerations are to ensure the title of your long-form and short-form stories are not identical.

Please ensure no content from long-form stories is duplicated in your short-form stories. This is essential to address the duplication issue and protect your account.

Conclusions

As a writer, I don’t create duplicate content. I only produced original and authentic content in my entire writing career. I am disheartened to be selected by an AI system as a creator of duplicate content and as a spammer because of sharing links to my stories hosted on other content platforms.

As an editor, I pay special attention to preventing duplicate content. I created policies, processes, and procedures to ensure the stories published in my publications have no duplicate content.

I invested in using tools to check plagiarism and duplicate content. And several of my editors did the same. Some of the editors check every story submitted to ILLUMINATION. We removed hundreds of duplicated stories and prevented them from being published on Medium.

Medium does not have an inbuilt duplicate sensing tool. At least it is not available to publications. Therefore, my editors use their own software.

We have hundreds of records on our secure channel assessing duplicate content to protect the Medium ecosystem.

Yes, I am called anal-retentive about plagiarism and duplicated content. However, the AI system dared to blame me as a duplicate content producer and warned me to comply.

Some say life is not fair.

I say life is life; the rest is the meaning we add to it.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. Please act and comment.

If you want to learn how I was victimized by AI in various social networks recently, you may check this short story.

Prospective writers interested in becoming a contributor to ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, and Technology Hits, please send a request via this link. Please point out the name of the preferred publication in your request form.

Samples Articles from My Writing Portfolio

You can find similar health articles on Euphoria.

About the Author

Thank you for subscribing to my content. I share my health and well-being stories in my publication, Euphoria. If you are new to Medium, you may join by following this link. You can join my publications as a writer requesting access via this weblink.