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e the cut with the readers most likely to be interested in these stories.</p><figure id="2bfa"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/0*z2cqqXQ5svMTLq3-.gif"><figcaption>tenor</figcaption></figure><p id="74dc">Medium’s algorithms weight those stories for extra distribution across Medium.</p><p id="27ef">In regard to boosted stories…</p><blockquote id="cd70"><p>“(i)nstead of being the judge of what’s good, the algorithm will play more of a matchmaking role between what humans think is good and what readers like to read.”</p></blockquote><p id="aa32">Plus, almost all articles will continue to get distributed by the recommendation algorithm.</p><p id="6306">However, “engagement” (the old gold standard of curation) is not the same thing as providing satisfying reads.</p><p id="b098">This is what the algorithm is looking for:</p><ul><li>what topics a reader follows</li><li>what they read</li><li>who they follow</li><li>what people they follow read and clap for</li></ul><p id="3f52">Let’s dig a bit deeper now into the role of publications.</p><h1 id="a8b5">The impact of Community Curators and Publications</h1><p id="e337">Before I get into the FAQ section, I think it’s worth speaking about the role of publications.</p><p id="fe52">Publications will become important curators.</p><p id="df5c">At the moment there are <b>15 Medium publications </b>that are testing the Boost button and are having a major say in what gets boosted.</p><p id="3b39">In the near future, it can be any high-quality publication.</p><p id="1ae1">The owners and editors know “so much better than (Medium) what is an important read and why”.</p><p id="e7a4">For becoming a trustworthy partner, Medium will pay editors based on the number of stories they successfully recommend for boosting.</p><p id="ff37">Medium is looking for taste: “taste comes down to having the experience to know what is true, what matters, and where there is debate”, <a href="https://blog.medium.com/a-new-boost-for-top-stories-541884654fdb">Tony shared.</a></p><p id="07a4">Medium’s wish is to spark an influx of new publications.</p><h1 id="74ea">FAQ</h1><p id="ba42">These new changes are raising a lot of questions.</p><p id="a1fc">I aggregated the most popular questions from the comments, stories and official announcement:</p><h2 id="92ac">Who qualifies for this Boost?</h2><p id="dc92">Everyone.</p><h2 id="621d">Does my story have to be in a publication to be Boosted?</h2><p id="ee92">No, but it does help a little.</p><h2 id="c5e5">Which publications are curating?</h2><p id="02b4">Medium isn’t telling us yet who the 15 publications are.</p><p id="f0ed">Here’s the reason:</p><blockquote id="6304"><p>“The first is that it’s the job of these curators to find you. The second is that listing them now has a tendency to stick when we expect it to shortly be many or most publications.”</p></blockquote><h2 id="5baa">What should I write about to get boosted?</h2><p id="8178">Tony’s #1 tip: “write what you want to write.”</p><p id="3728">Since there are a lot of meta stories about Medium that are totally misguiding.</p><p id="b2b6">Here’s what Tony recommends:</p><h2 id="bfb5">Tips from Tony Stubblebine to get boosted:</h2><ul><li>writing can’t move you in any substantial way unless it can first move you to click and read.</li><li>Medium wants to reward you for writing your best stuff, but only you know what that is.</li><li>the top-performing stories had the most engaging titles, the most compelling intros, and the most entertaining writing.</li><li>attention-grabbing is not the same as useful or valuable or entertaining.</li><li>often the tricks of engagement lead directly to disappointment.</li><li>Authors who promote their articles through social media, email, to their followers, and publications are now more likely to get their articles picked up for a boost.</li><li>Medium wants to boost great writing, not great growth hackers.</li></ul><h2 id="d26a">Which posts are Medium boosting and why?</h2><p id="975d">These are the types of stories Medium is looking for:</p><ul><li>constructive</li><li>original</li><li>written from relevant experience</li><li>well-crafted</li><li>memorable.</li></ul><p id="650c"><a href="https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006362473">Click here to read the updated Distribution Standards.</a></p><h2 id="ba86">Is the Boost big enough?</h2><p id="5920">In the test period, Medium has seen boosts between 5

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00 views and 100,000 views.</p><p id="f473">Medium’s goal: every Boosted story should get at least 500 extra views within 7 days!</p><p id="70b0">Why?</p><blockquote id="a11f"><p>“In practice, that’s usually enough to tip a story over to a much, much wider audience.”</p></blockquote><p id="50fa">According to Medium, it’s the highest-level boost ever.</p><h2 id="edb4">Is traffic shared evenly across all authors?</h2><p id="78fb">No.</p><p id="a6da">Plus, what gets boosted changes as new readers and authors join.</p><h2 id="4f3d">How many recommendations does Medium make per month?</h2><p id="c0a4">In total, Medium makes several billion recommendations each month.</p><h2 id="9030">Can other people Boost?</h2><p id="9ff2">No other people than publication editors and owners.</p><h2 id="6f0e">Why is a Boost necessary?</h2><p id="8dff">Often authors join Medium because they want their stories to get more views and reads and to (finally) feel rewarded and recognized.</p><blockquote id="1b0d"><p>“Often, the best writing comes from people who don’t want to be audience builders. With the rise of the creator economy, these doers are often left out. Our goal is to find the best individual stories, regardless of who wrote them, and give those stories to a wider audience.”</p></blockquote><h2 id="01cc">How did Medium give the highest quality recommendations in the past?</h2><p id="cdbe">Medium had many ways to boost a story on Medium…</p><ul><li>via the recommendation algorithm</li><li>tags</li><li>newsletters</li><li>publications.</li></ul><blockquote id="518a"><p>“To give readers the highest quality recommendations, we’ve seesawed between two primary heuristics. The original model was mostly human curation, with a bias towards well-written, well-constructed, and well-supported stories. Then we swung to a heuristic that was dominated by machine learning algorithms biased toward engagement.”</p></blockquote><h2 id="fa9e">What about evergreen stories?</h2><p id="1987">Medium has already other mechanisms for boosting stories in the works.</p><p id="8e8d">Medium has started several projects to organize the best of Medium as a form of boosting.</p><p id="8310">“Evergreen writing should get boosted well beyond the day it publishes.” <a href="https://blog.medium.com/boosting-the-boost-d983f0552ab9">Tony shared.</a></p><h2 id="bcd3">What about canonical stories?</h2><p id="b7b7">Medium has already other mechanisms for boosting stories in the works.</p><p id="23d0">Canonical stories are part of it.</p><h1 id="03e9">What’s next?</h1><p id="bbcd">Getting Boosted on Medium definitely takes some effort and strategy, but it can pay off in terms of more readership and engagement.</p><p id="2b0d">Follow the tips shared above to optimize your stories for distribution and visibility on Medium’s network.</p><p id="5159">Although Medium doesn’t publish any income reports anymore, I bet a lot of writers will share how many views/reads they got and how much money they earned thanks to getting the Boost!</p><figure id="c399"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/0*Vzcb3tiIB5cKOJ5Z.gif"><figcaption>tenor</figcaption></figure><p id="0bf2">If you’re one of them… feel free to share your insights in the comments or send me a screenshot to [email protected]</p><p id="5bf6">Last but not least, I hope my story helped you to have the breath and no excuse to not execute and get Boosted!</p><h2 id="fd7a">Found it valuable? Want to see and know more?</h2><p id="0dc8">Sure thing!</p><p id="d2b0"><a href="https://kristinagod.substack.com/">Why not join my Substack newsletter </a>and tell me what you think?</p><div id="3262" class="link-block"> <a href="https://kristinagod.substack.com/"> <div> <div> <h2>Kristina's Newsletter | Kristina God | Substack</h2> <div><h3>Medium Blogging Tips and Tricks. Click to read Kristina's Newsletter, by Kristina God, a Substack publication with…</h3></div> <div><p>kristinagod.substack.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*1y2gGHnpmOCPEBwH)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><p id="341f"><b>P.S.</b> I hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please give it a clap👏 or share it with someone who might find it useful😊</p></article></body>

While Black Series

While Black: Thoughts on the Assumption of Wrongness

When I think about the Black Death, these days I don’t think about the medieval plague. Instead, it’s the widespread killing of Black people in America. Some people might find it hard to figure out why a non-American even cares about this. But Black people in a post-slavery or post-colonial context have all suffered the enduring effects of racial discrimination.

New Book — Exploring Shadeism

Publishing a book has become pretty easy — and my most recent book illustrates that perfectly.

beingsharon.com

Here in the Caribbean, many of us have Black relatives who are or have become American, or who are attending school there. Simply put, we’re scared for them.

The danger of existing while Black in the US has been proved time and time again. A short list (publicly posted on Facebook reminds us of the most recent incidents, but there have been many, many more over the decades.

Courtesy of Kathie Daniel Fertur Lux, Facebook

In so many cases, to be Black is to be in the wrong, before you do anything or open your mouth. #AmaudArbery And your word about your own probity isn’t enough to save you from being stopped, arrested, or killed.

Sure, racism exists everywhere. I’ve had some experiences in the UK that would make your hair curl. I’ve experienced discrimination in the Caribbean. But I never felt like any of those incidents would result in my death. That’s not the case for Black people in the US. That’s why parents have to have “the talk” with their children about what to do if you’re stopped, about why your hands must be in sight, about how you need to ask permission for every move lest it be misconstrued. The trigger-happy minority have ruined things for everyone.

It’s why Black mothers of sons (and their dads, too) have their hearts in their mouths as those boys grow up and go out in the world, because they know there’s no guarantee they will be safe in the US. As we’ve seen, even being in your own home minding your business won’t keep you alive. But mothers of daughters are afraid, too — your sex doesn’t protect you. #SandraBland

A good friend of mine said “I am not sending my beautiful Black child to the US to be shot!” That child will be going to school in Canada or the UK, where his skin color isn’t a death sentence.

Why This Man’s Daughter is Scared to Visit America

“I don’t want to visit somewhere where I can get shot for doing nothing,” said my dual-heritage daughter, when we were…

beingsharon.com

Will it ever change? Who knows? Because the thing is, the concept — and it is only a concept — of whiteness depends on making blackness something “other”. Back in the days of slavery and colonialism, in order for racist white people to sleep at night, they created and perpetuated a fiction that Black people are still living with — and dying from — today. As Orientalism author Edward Said says:

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

That’s how people justify colonialism, and neo-colonialism (it’s not about the oil or other resources at all, clearly.)

Underlying all of this is the uncomfortable fact that the white establishment needed Black people, yet still didn’t want to value us. When slavery ended by force in the US, ex-slaveholding states turned right around and criminalized minor infractions to create an imprisoned workforce, slavery by another name. Watch Netflix’s 13th — it’s pretty instructive.

But even the people who were quote unquote on our side saw us as less than, in a different way. Some liberals are only liberal when Black people need help, but still don’t see us as equals. I’ve had personal experience of this from a former colleague.

The truth is that Black people are tired of this. Tired of doing everything “the right way” only to learn that it’s still wrong. Tired of being castigated when we take a different route to making our voices heard (I guess those who don’t like it when we kneel aren’t going to like it when we stand and demand justice). And, most of all, tired of dying needlessly. Didn’t enough of us do that during enslavement while white slave owners built personal and national wealth? Enough already!

So what’s next? It’s clear that Black people can’t fix racism alone — it’s been proved time and again that whatever we say about it hardly counts. So, it’s up to white people to play their part. First of all, acknowledge the system, described eloquently by Scott Wood:

“…racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.”

Second, don’t sit in silence bemoaning the system. Do something. Here’s what my podcast co-host Lisa Hurley says:

“As my math teachers would say: “Show your working.” It is not enough to think or say that you’re not a racist. Demonstrate active anti-racism. Silence and inaction = complicity. Get uncomfortable. Stay uncomfortable. Make an effort. Educate yourself. Take action. Show solidarity in public. Get out of our DMs and onto your feeds. Your silence is deafening. Your need to be co-signed as “one of the good ones” is burdensome. We are not here to hold space for you at this time. If you are feeling triggered and defensive reading this, then you are who it is meant for. #dothework”

If you do the work, then maybe one day existing while Black will be the norm and not a crime.

Read more stories like this in my book I’m Tired of Racism. If you found this article interesting or insightful, I invite you to subscribe to my anti-racism newsletter to see more of my articles on racism and anti-racism.