After announcing the impending changes to collections, we received some feedback. There were emails, some tweets, and one guy even stopped us on the street. We value feedback, we encourage it, we eat it for breakfast.
While everyone got the how, some didn’t understand the why.
One of the biggest factors in this decision was the (relatively) new ability to follow individual authors on Medium. Now, when you publish your story, it goes out to your entire Medium social graph. This graph is generated by your Twitter followers and Facebook friends who also have Medium accounts, as well as people who follow you directly on Medium.
You might not even realize that you already have followers that you brought with you from Twitter and Facebook. They are automatically connected to you and shown on your stats page.
When you publish a story, it reaches your followers in three ways: as a notification in their sidebar menu, as part of their reading list on the homepage and in the iOS app, and via email (depending on your user settings). Then, if those followers recommend that story, it could be surfaced as a notification to a follower that they all have in common. That’s how the story can travel through the network. It will spread like warm butter.
We’ve looked at the data, and with that feature, the average story reaches a far larger audience than it would in a collection. The necessity for a story to be in a collection to find readers has been greatly reduced.
So yes, we are suggesting you increase your network. We recommend tweeting your stories and connecting your account to Facebook in your settings. We also realize not everyone uses Facebook and Twitter and may not bring a built-in audience with them. In that case, we encourage building your connections on Medium, which will ultimately benefit you as an author and as a reader.
We are continuing to evolve and build Medium. The site is written in code, not cast in stone. We are going to continue to experiment, and introduce new features you’ll love and others you will…also love?
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