My 2021 Stories the Algorithm Didn’t Show You
Medium is wonderful, but its structure sometimes buries stories away from view.
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N.B. — This is only the second of my last 80 articles that was not “Distributed” by Medium. The moral of the story is don’t talk about Medium.
2021 was a great year for me on Medium, and I am grateful to everyone who took the time to read any of my articles. I received tens of thousands of views, but several really good articles fell through the cracks and received very few views. Some probably for no other reason than bad luck, and some because the algorithm just didn’t give the article a chance to be seen. So, here I hope to give them a better chance at being discovered.
I published 79 articles on Medium in 2021, and all of them were “Distributed by Curators” except one:
I take it that asking questions about Medium means your article won’t get distributed. Well, fair enough. I wrote that article just before Medium’s much ballyhooed bonus system. I won the first month’s top level reward, FWIW, but that was before anyone knew about it, and then that bonus system encouraged a lot of quantity-over-quality behavior from writers. Anyway, I feel that my concerns expressed in that article are still relevant.
Despite a bunch of claps from those who read it, that article on the future of Medium had the second fewest views for my articles in 2021. The least read was this one.
I originally wrote that for the “ask the philosopher” site Armchair Opinions (currently on hiatus) and I took on that question offering my philosophical analysis. Maybe Medium’s algorithm thought it was about beauty tips and showed it only to people who wouldn’t ask philosophical questions about what…
