Medium: Rules of Engagement Now OK
Blog: 29 March 2018: Rules of Engagement: Microfiction
Engagement OK?: The Story so Far
A week ago I raised concerns that Medium’s Rules of Engagement were Broke. The Top stories lists, I looked at, were full of really old stories, freezing out recent stories. Perhaps I laboured the point, but to Medium’s credit they picked up the gauntlet, found out what the problem was, and fixed it, without me having to formally complain. (Thank you Medium, thank you Kyle)
The result is, for the past few days only deserving stories, with recent Engagement, have been in the Top story lists I have looked at, and probably all top story lists. It’s good to see ones own stories in amongst the others with recent fans.
What is Engagement?
Briefly, Engagement is the metric Medium uses to rank one story against others.
The value of Engagement (for a top stories list) is calculated by adding all recent fans. A fan is anyone that claps for a story, in the recent past, up to 2-days ago (in practice it could be up to 24–48 hours). This is applied to the top stories on the tag you have searched (Microfiction is my favourite) and they are then ranked and listed in order.
I was a little disappointed that the calculation is so simple, I imagined all sorts of complex algorithms. But, the overriding requirement should be, does it work? Is it effective? It has been working properly for less than a week, so, perhaps we should give it a fair amount of time before we criticise or praise.
Microfiction
Back in November 2017 there were 18 stories newly published and tagged Microfiction (I had 3 of them). 144 new stories have been published so far in March 2018. So my publication Adlers Writing showcasing some of the best Microfiction on Medium has had some success in raising the profile of Microfiction for a great experience on Medium.
Also, only a couple of months ago saw the first Members Only Microfiction. I thought this would never take off. I thought Microfiction was too short, but, I was wrong. It is a great success and there are now many Member only Microfiction stories, and I am missing out as I don’t subscribe (yet).
So, all in all, Medium is working better, and there is way more Microfiction read, written and appreciated. A bit of a result.
