Collections: Curating a More Browsable Medium
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So many great stories are published every day on Medium — it’s hard to keep up. We’re building a platform for authors to reach their audiences and for readers to find compelling stories and diverse perspectives.
Today, we’re making a change to our iOS and Android apps to bring a bit of serendipity to our reading experience. Now it will be even easier to find that “Formation” think piece, ~new media~ analysis, or firsthand account of being a juvenile in an adult prison. We’ve built a brand new browsable reading experience that integrates your personalized interests with explorable threads of content and diverse viewpoints across different topics.
Our new home experience is powered by a feature called collections. The top list of sections on our home screen will be a mix of popular verticals (like Politics or Culture) and more specific, timely events (think the Oscars or Apple vs. the FBI). You’ll be able to find new collections in these sections every day, curated by Medium and a handful of trusted testers—for now. If you’re interested, you can also read about our curation principles. Collections are homes for topic or theme-based content from Medium and beyond that will allow users to bring together Medium stories, people, and publications to follow, as well ideas from the rest of the web.
We believe that in order to create a great reading experience for humans, other humans should be part of that process. There’s a unique sensibility that individual curators bring, whether that’s a specific tone, voice, or simply good taste. They can help act as a filter for readers in guiding our limited time and attention to things that matter, calling out stories that haven’t yet been seen by many, helping to easily showcase the big stories of the day, or sometimes just adding a dose of weird and wonderful. Today, collection creation is only open to a small group of trusted testers. Eventually, we want to open the ability to create collections and allow everyone on Medium to curate around a specific topic, issue, or theme — that’s where the true power of this system really lies. If you want to stay updated on the collections feature, you can add your name to the interest list.
We’re really excited about the potential for collections and what we’ve done with our new home experience to showcase the best of Medium. It’s live in our apps today and will be available on web in the coming weeks. But this is only the first step—we’re experimenting and learning as we go. So if you don’t yet have our apps… 👀
Get the iOS or Android app today and start browsing. Then let us know what you think at yourfriends@medium.com.
