Curation vs Discovery on Medium

Dear Medium and Your Friends @ Medium,

(Hello!) I want to share my feedback/perspective on my experience of your home page feed feature, and what I wish I could do on Medium that I currently can’t (as far as I can see).

Since I started using Medium, I’ve been actively building (by following) a network of people whose taste and whose writing I think will lead me to posts I like, and observing how it impacts my feed. In the process, I’ve realized what I really want is two different things, and they are somewhat at odds with each other. And trying to achieve them both with the home page feed is, I think, never going to satisfy either of them for me, or users like me.

You probably already know what they are because whoever wrote the title of this story totally forgot to add a spoiler alert.

Curation

I want to be able to leverage my network of followees into an implicitly curated, but well-defined, list of things to read. That is, I want ways to see all the new stories generated by my network, all the new responses, all the new recommendations, and, sometimes, yes, all the new highlights.

Right now, I think the front page lets me see all the new stories by people in my network, and I think it shows me most (?) of the new recommendations. I also think it only shows me some of the new responses, and none of the new highlights. And sometimes, my feed contains stories that don’t appear to be recommended by anyone I follow, or published by any publication I follow. (I’m less sure of these things than I’m sure whether “curation” is actually a word.)

I want both certainty about how the feed works, and control over those aspects of my experience. Curating a collection requires having full control over what to include and exclude, and it also requires certainty of that control. Recommendation algorithms are nifty, but I want to know for sure that I won’t miss a single remark by my friend Mr. Gutbloom, or, worse, by any of my Medium arch nemeses. Once I figure out who they all are.

[Looking at the volume of responses, let alone highlights, I realize including them all in the front page feed would likely make the feed less usable for people with larger networks. But somehow providing more robust functionality for sorting and filtering, for example, seems like a reasonably natural approach for a web application that allows users to manage volumes of data like Medium.]

Discovery

The other thing I want from my feed is to explore and discover posts my network doesn’t expose me to, or only connects me to very indirectly and infrequently. Every connected system forms clusters, and the better connected you are within your own cluster/bubble, the easier it is to stay inside it. I want to be able to tell Medium, Show me something different, and have it help me find active writers and, better yet, groups of writers, I wouldn’t see otherwise.

I realize, and appreciate, that seeing my followees’ recommendations, as well as new contributions to the publications I follow, exposes me to new writers every day. But I also have the creeping suspicion this will only ever connect me to a delimited subset of the Medium universe. (Maybe I am wrong about that? If so — heck, even if not—some kind of user stat, maybe even with visualization, indicating how broad the network they are connected to is, and what other constellations of writers in Medium look like, would be really neat.)

I also realize I can discover by browsing stories based on tags, as well as browsing the categories recommended in the Medium app. I don’t know how typical I am in this preference, but the vectors I am most interested in for this kind of open-ended discovery aren’t topic-based, or category based. Rather, I want to find other local maxima of relatively highly recommended and read posts that don’t rise to the Top Stories list, but nevertheless might be appealing to me. And I want to find active writers based not on the height of their highest heights, but things like, perhaps, the consistency of their efforts, or the frequency with which they respond to other writers’ stories, or the number of recommendations they have accumulated over longer periods of time (with, you know, some kind of normalization and other relevant statistical jiggery-pokery, plus some kind of memory of what I’ve explored in the past). Discovery feels too much like a popularity contest right now, and popularity is so seldom a good indicator of quality.

But Not at the Same Time

I don’t know if the front page feed was ever intended to be viewed as a mechanism for discovery. (Does it actually ever include stories that aren’t somehow connected to my existing network?) The experience in the app does a better job of presenting alternatives to the feed than the website, where the home page seems like the only real game in town, and browsing tags or searching feels like you are going off and freelancing.

But just in case, I want to note that I don’t want these different ways of organizing stories mixed together. When I’m looking at a curated collection, I want control and transparency — I want to know why something is in the collection. When I’m exploring, I want the opposite: The more surprising and novel to me, the better.

I hope this perspective on what this user thinks he wants helps you continue to improve this already great platform you provide.

Sincerely,
Matt

P.S. I’ve read a number of insightful posts about the experience of using Medium, and the remarks of A.H. Chu, Dheeraj Dhobley, Kellie Marie, and others I either can’t find now or don’t remember have informed my thoughts here, so if I’ve made any sense here, it’s thanks at least in part to them.

P.P.S. Oh my god I just wrote one of those open letter things how did this happen universe pls forgive me.