Introducing Tags: Increasing connectivity between ideas

Everyone’s stories and ideas… organized

Since the beginning, Medium has been a place for people to share stories and ideas with one another. A community where people can find an audience for their thoughts, no matter how big or small, and engage in meaningful dialogue with one another. The introduction of Responses late last year allowed you to respond to a story that inspired, provoked, or engaged you. However, we wanted to take it a step further and create spaces on Medium where all stories on a specific topic could be organized together in one central place. From there, those interested in that topic could consume those stories all at once, and potentially even be inspired to share their own. Our belief is that when brought together, good ideas have the power to fuse, recombine, and spark even greater ideas.

That vision — increasing connectivity among everyone’s ideas — is the inspiration behind a new feature we’re shipping today: Tags.

For each story you publish or have already published, you’ll now be able to choose up to three tags. Upon publication, your story will be distributed on the relevant tag pages, where it will live on Medium with other stories that share the same tag. In this way, tags will help your story find its right audience.

More broadly, tags will improve the Medium experience by providing more paths to browse and discover new stories about the things you care about most, whether it’s Memories or Photography or Kanye. On the homepage, we’ll frequently be rotating trending tags into the new Featured Tags section, which will highlight timely, relevant stories on Medium. We hope that tags will lead you to find stories you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Perhaps you’ll even be inspired to share your own story or ideas with the Medium community.

As always, we’d love to hear from you and know what you think. Respond to this post below, or get in touch. For more on tags, plus the new in-line editor and stream, read Ev’s post — A Less Long, More Connected Medium.

When you click on a tag, it’ll take you to the dedicated tag page, where you’ll see your story, along with other stories with that tag, in the “Latest” tab. If enough people Recommend your story, it’ll be featured in the “Top” tab.

Happy Tagging!

FAQ

What’s the purpose of tagging my story?

Tagging your story helps people who are interested in that topic discover and read your story. Your tagged story will be distributed on all the relevant tag pages, where it’ll be surrounded by similar, relevant content. Additionally, when people Search for one of the tags you’ve used in a story, it’ll appear higher in Search results.

Is this basically the same thing as #hashtags?

No, tags are not exactly the same as #hashtags — think of tags as metadata that you’re attaching to the entire post, as opposed to something you’re linking to within the post itself. Practically speaking, this means that you don’t need to add a “#” before entering in a tag, and you’re allowed to use spaces and dashes when creating tags (e.g., “hip-hop” or “Road Trips”).

What happened to the channels (Tech, Culture, Design, etc.) that used to be on the Homepage?

Featured Tags are the next evolutionary step of Channels. We’ve migrated over that content to the tag pages. Now, all stories that were in the Tech channel are now in the “Tech” tag page. As a writer, you can add your story to the “Tech” tag page by tagging it as such.