All round… nice job! All the stories you picked are certainly worthy and I thank you for showing them. I only joined three or four months ago and missed a lot of the years other amazing stories so this was incredibly helpful.
What’s wrong?
However, you began to touch upon one of the facts that I’ve already been pointing out: there are now a lot of stories on Medium. There isn’t an easy way to wade through them all so when Medium’s algorithms (which, no doubt, are pretty awesome) pick a story out for you, what gets left behind are the smaller, less main-stream writers.
Take this story by Justin Forest for example. It’s probably one of my favs on Medium (though since I have a lot, that isn’t saying much). After the Paris shootings, it was a good, well written perspective and I felt it deserved something more than the five recommends it got (one mine, one his, then three more after I wrote a story proclaiming it’s awesomeness). The only reason I read the story was because he reached out to me in the replies underneath one of my stories and mentioned it in passing. I never would have found it otherwise and nor would anyone else.
And we Medium readers (178 of us, to be exact) think we have a solution: a random button. Something where you can just click a button on the home page and be teleported to a random story written by a random writer in the last bit. Statistically, this would spread out a lot of the views so that more authors were viewed instead of the limited 1% being viewed a whole bunch. This could also lead to other, less main-stream stories trending to the top, taking a writer from obscurity to awesomeness (a process that hardly ever happens now).
Take another story: my own. I wrote this to tell everyone about the Random Button idea, in the hope that you Medium Staff would respond back and either tell me I was wrong (hopefully explaining why as well) or say “Awesome idea man, we’ll do it right away!”
That never happened though. Instead, my story got 178 recommends over the space of a couple months, some of the less popular stories that reach Top Stories but doing it so slowly that it went unnoticed by your trends algorithm. It got 17 responses, agreeing with and improving on the idea.
So… why don’t you respond?
Happy Christmas and an awesome New Year to all the Medium staff, writers and readers,
Cheers,
Laef
