Many more will follow Medium’s strategy of showing dated stuff in your feed

I was running through the articles that were ‘recommended’ for me on my homepage of Medium.com as I try to make a habit of doing… and it occurred to me that some of them were quite old. For example this one from March 2019 that you see below.

And I thought to myself…

“hmmm that’s weird… why are they putting an article that is 2 years old into my feed.”

Then i thought to myself…

“but wait hold on.. the article actually looks interesting. And so i read through it and enjoyed it.”

And i scratched my head and thought…

“Why do i think it is weird to be shown a relevant article that is 2 years old in my feed?”

And the answer is because that is how pretty much everyone does it. Think about it..

• Linkedin’s newsfeed just sends you the recent posts and as someone who posts many of my articles on Linkedin I can tell you that the views die down very quickly after about the first 12 hours. And you can probably assume that about 90% of the people that will see your article will do so in the first 24 hrs.
• Facebook’s newsfeed works the same. They generally just feed you new posts from your friends.. and never really randomly decide to serve you up a post that is a year old from a friend… even if it could potentially be relevant.
• Twitter the same
• Instagram the same
• etc

We have been taught to focus on fresh news & articles. But is that right?

To give you an example of where i think it is wrong.. let’s look at how i browse Techcrunch. I open the homepage and i see a whole bunch of fresh articles and i start browsing them. But only about 25% of them are interesting to me at all. And rather if i think about it it would be much more useful if Techcrunch were to use AI and get smarter and smarter about the articles it shows so that the ratio is more like 80%+. And I don’t need every article to be new.. but rather they should be relevant and i should not have read them already.

There are only really two times that we ever really read dated articles

• First is when you are googling a topic.
• Second is when you are reading an article (eg. on techcrunch) and then at the bottom of it you see other similar topics that they recommend

But I really think Medium is onto something by trying to change this game…

The reader will have a much higher conversion rate of interesting topics that they read. And so they win.

But it is even more important for the authors.. as a ‘wannabe’ author who tries to write in any free time that he has… i can tell you that one of the most frustrating elements of writing is that you know that like 80% of the views are generally going to come in the first 24 hrs because of the way feeds work.

And rather I’d much prefer it if I knew that for example.. only 20% of the views will happen in the first 24 hours and rather the rest will come over time as the article gains more and more relevancy to certain trending topics or individuals who show an interest in that topic.

When this happens… we as authors will look at our articles as more long-term investments like a stock. I invest in stocks the way that Warren Buffet does… for the long-term. And I do not really care if it dips a bit in the first few weeks after i buy it. Because over the long-term I believe in it. And I think writing about topics as an author should work somewhat the same. It may not hit in the first few days… but over the next few years it can really show some traction.

In particular because i like to write about things that i predict will change in the next few years and i am catching it at the beginning of the curve..

For example this article about how i think Clickup, Fiverr and COVID are combining forces to expedite GDP per capita convergence.

So it would be great if the feeds then reward me by surfacing my article a couple years from now when what i predicted actually happens.

ok.. enough of my rant…. :)