Featuring judges Natalie Portman, Roxane Gay, Saeed Jones, Susan Orlean, and more
Calling all storytellers! When was the last time you read a great piece of writing? What quality made you want to share it far and wide? Why did it strike such a powerful chord? If you were asked to replicate that feeling — to craft an essay that leaves readers caught up in the rapture of an unforgettable narrative — could you do it?
We believe you could. You showed us as much in the past: the Pandemic Reflections writing prompt resulted in hundreds of submissions in the first month. Our call for entries to the #StopAsianHate blog resulted in…
Introducing lists: a new product feature in beta. Lists are an easy way to quickly organize and share stories, from personal favorites, to recommended reads within a topic or area of expertise, to themed lists around stories that inspire you. Want to save your favorite stories so you can revisit them? Organize ideas on the best writing on UX Design for your colleagues? Share helpful advice with friends? Tap the bookmark icon on a story to get started.
If you’re an avid Medium user, you may be familiar with the bookmark icon. Previously, it allowed you to privately save stories…
Removing spam accounts, and what that means for you
The relationship between readers and writers is at the heart of Medium. With that in mind, we want to ensure that your follower and following counts only reflect quality users. As part of our ongoing work to provide the best possible user experience, we’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts across Medium starting today.
What Does This Mean For Writers and Publications?
You may see a change in your follower and following counts. However you’ll gain a more accurate sense of your audience size now that follower counts only contain authentic, quality users. …
Medium is an open platform that exists to share ideas and perspectives from the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers.
Today, we are updating our Rules. As Medium evolves as a product, so do the ways people use it. To accommodate this, we regularly assess our rules, and adjust them accordingly.
Changes today include strengthening our rules regarding content that violates the Terms of Service of Medium or other third parties, and our policies on copyright.
To prevent copyright violations and plagiarism on Medium, we have written specific policies, which are now linked directly from our rules. As part…
Check out the new tag pages
Recently we’ve launched some updates to the tag pages on the web to improve discovery.
Tags are keywords and keyword phrases that are added to stories by the writer to improve story discovery and categorization. A writer can add up to five tags per story.
These tags appear at the bottom of a post, and readers can click these tags to see all similarly-tagged stories on Medium.
Helping build and maintain relationships with creators you love
Last year in August, we announced our new mobile app and began rolling it out to a small number of beta users — a big step towards a more relational Medium experience that is oriented around following so that readers can have a deeper connection to their favorite writers, while writers and publications can more actively engage and grow their audience.
We’ve been iterating and refining this new app experience to address the feedback coming from you. …
At Medium, we’ve been working to improve our site’s accessibility so that it’s more usable for people with disabilities.
After performing an accessibility audit at the end of 2020, we’ve been tackling some of the most prevalent issues, with a focus on making navigation more accessible.
Below are a few of the major improvements we made to accessibility.
Dropdown menus are keyboard-accessible
We use the dropdown menus for settings-related navigations, such as user settings and story settings.
They were not reachable with the keyboard before, which means keyboard-only and screen-reader users couldn’t access them at all.
We’ve implemented a fix so that most of…
I’m happy to announce that Mariam Naficy will be joining Medium’s board of directors for an 18-month appointment.
Mariam brings a wealth of company-building experience, having started the first major online retailer of cosmetics (eve.com) back in 1998, and having founded Minted in 2008, where she is still CEO. She has also served on the boards of Yelp and Polyvore and is currently on the board of the non-profit Every Mother Counts.
I’ve known Mariam for the last few years and have grown to highly respect her creativity, insight, and leadership. It was while talking to her about what she’s…
Last year, Ev detailed our commitment to strengthening writer discovery, enabling readers to “serendipitously find stories they wouldn’t have otherwise.” In that spirit, we’ve launched blogrolls, a new feature that connects readers and writers in more visible and meaningful ways. Before getting into the details, here’s a little background on blogrolls for those unfamiliar with the term:
The term blogroll comes from the early days of blogging, when bloggers would often include a list of useful links on their blog (it was literally a roll call of your favorite links. hence, blogroll). It sounds simple, but before search and social…
Your domain name is an important part of your brand and clarifies the relationship forged between writer and reader. A couple years ago, we pushed pause on allowing writers to set up new custom domains on Medium. We did this because every feature on Medium should be frictionless and scalable, and the set-up of custom domains did not adequately satisfy either. During that time thousands of writers reached out, asking to bring this feature back. Last year, Ev detailed our plans to bring back custom domains:
Among other reasons, we needed to fix some cross-domain bugs and revamp our system…
3 min read
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