Yes, Curation Still Exists. And here’s a Weird Way to See the Topics
Medium now calls it “Chosen for further distribution.”
Medium has been busy with their algorithm changes again — I’m sure you’ve noticed. It seems they like to make major changes every year around the October to November period.
Last year they changed the entire payment system from claps over to reading time.
I also remember they spent a few months heavily promoting their own publications (ex. Forge, OneZero, etc) in our feeds for about 2 months. At least they changed that policy after a lot of backlash from Mediumites.
Hopefully, they do that again with some of these changes — although they’re not all bad:
One change people have been complaining about is the disappearance of curation on Medium.com.
But from everything I can gather — it still exists.
They’ve just changed it.
Medium’s new curation style
I’ve often complained about Medium’s opaque public communication.
I love the platform and the idea behind it — but I still can’t wrap my head around why they communicate so little with their massive community.
I tend to think it’s somewhat due to a fear of manipulation — the idea that the more information they share, the more they leave the platform open to abuse.
But I firmly believe they can say much more than they do.
Anyway, why did they change curation?
Here’s what they officially said:
“We removed topics from the story stats page in order to reduce the focus on topics in distribution. Because our recommendations engine uses several different signals to distribute relevant stories to readers, such as popularity, your reading history, readers who are similar to you, etc., displaying only the topics on a post was incomplete. But we do appreciate that removing these notifications without replacing them was disorienting. We are working on lots of improvements to writing and distribution on Medium, including providing more information about how your stories are doing and why. Thanks for your patience.”
Perhaps this PR person could teach a course on how to say nothing with 96 words.
*Italian chef’s kisses* goodbye to any chance of future curation for me.
Anyway, the good news is — they still do curation:
“We are still reviewing stories (and authors and publications) for promotion and featuring across Medium (as mentioned above). But as Medium places a greater emphasis on the connections between readers and writers, we don’t want curation to be a bottleneck to those connections. Instead of focusing or waiting on curation, creators are free to focus on creating — doing their best work for themselves and their audience.
While we don’t review every published post, if we do select your writing for featured promotion, you will see that on your post stats page.”
So now instead of seeing the topics you were curated for on the main ‘Stats’ page, you won’t see anything at all.
BUT, if you click into a story’s ‘details’ section, if it’s curated you’ll see this:
Your screen may or may not also show the stick figure expressing his gratitude.
How to see what topics you’ve been curated in?
Now for the pulp of the piece — you want to still see what topics you’ve been curated in on Medium, right?
I have to thank someone on Facebook for pointing out a weird way to view your topics. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post anymore, so if that was you — thanks!
Here’s a somewhat nerdy way to see your curated topics, if they matter that much to you.
***Warning — this is a bit on the techie side for some people***
- Find a story that you know was curated or think it might be (one that says “Chosen for further distribution.” in the ‘Stats’ → ‘Details’ page) — this can be tedious, or you can go to an old article you remember being curated.
- Go to the story’s page (NOT the article’s stats page)
3. Now, we need to inspect the page. If you’re on Windows, this is easy enough. Press F12 and a very complicated-looking page will pop up:
4. Now press CTRL + F to bring you to the search function. Then just type in the word ‘topic’ and you’ll see something like this:
5. The word ‘topic’ will be highlighted in yellow, and any word beside it will be your curated topic for that article. If you look above, you can see this article was curated in ‘Mental Health’, ‘Psychology’, and ‘Self’.
Wrapup
And there you go, I personally don’t really care about curation anymore. It doesn’t happen too often to me but I tend to write Medium² articles a lot — which people suspect hurts curation chances.
Curation can lead to huge performance articles on Medium. But it’s a crapshoot.
I’d love for all my articles to get selected for further distribution, but it’s not my goal when I set out to write.
And at the end of the day — getting published in big publications is the easiest way to get curated. So if it matters to you, just aim for the pubs.
I’ll have to update the guide soon, but if you want to know the ins and outs of curation, here’s a big piece on it:
As always, thanks for reading and good luck with your writing, Mediumites!
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