What Medium Considers Spam in Your Stories
Don’t do these things when you write on Medium
The bigger a platform, the more it is exposed to threats by sinister elements who don’t care about transparency or honest people working hard to do something that they want to do.
Medium does not allow any form of spam, and spam means more on Medium. Anything that is covered as spam under the Medium Rules will be removed without notice or warning.
Medium admits that an exact definition of spam is difficult, but if any of the following is true, it is considered spam:
Stories that drive traffic off Medium
If your story is trying to get users to some other website address to promote some product or service, it is considered spam.
Reposting from other sources
If you are scraping the internet and reposting stories from other sources to earn money or if you are trying to increase your prestige by these measures, it is spam.
Don’t post the same article twice
You are not allowed to publish the same story twice from your account or a second or third account.
Clipped stories that go off Medium
If you are trying to use Medium’s ranking status for better SEO of your blog and you want to take your readers to your blog with stories that are incomplete and force your readers to go off Medium, it is spam.
Using software solutions to interact with Medium users
If you follow and unfollow the users by using some browser extension or clap, highlight, or leave notes by using specialized scripts, your interactions come under the definition of spamming Medium.
Responses are not for self-promotion
If you don’t read a story and send a response to someone for self-promotion, you are spamming Medium users. Please don’t do this, your account will be suspended.
Bounty campaigns or brigades
Bounty campaigns or brigades to fraudulently boost search rankings for posts, accounts, businesses, or products are considered spam. You cannot offer other users to follow you, and in return, you’ll follow them.
Slightly modified stories are not allowed
If you wrote a story and then later slightly modified it for republishing it, it is not allowed and is considered as spam. Every time you hit publish, the story should be new. If you are working on an idea that you wrote previously about, your story should be fully modified or fresh.
Ultimately, these spam rules are the best protection against real spammers. I remember the days when my email account was first spammed, it took me several hours to delete those phony emails until I reached my business emails. But the Medium system is big, and there are numerous forms of interactions — created to facilitate honest connection between a reader and a writer — like newsletters, highlighting content, leaving responses for the writer, private notes, claps, and more.
If everybody follows these rules, the writing process on Medium — and the reader-writer interaction in the future will become stronger as Medium grows in numbers, and I hope it does.
You don’t buy every book when you go to a book store. You read the book reviews for guidance. The curation is a review of your written piece — by Medium. What Medium wants and what you can do about it — an explanation of the requirements for successful curation.
For a good writer, writing is a difficult challenge. It requires endless care and constant focus from the birth of the idea to the final product. Sometimes, this product is good enough to be curated and distributed into topics for the Medium members — and the writer is in for a surprise as well as a smile.
