Medium just got a lot deeper: expanding topics to be more personalized

Tags are replacing topic pages — so you can write for audiences who care deeply about your subject matter, and find stories on any topic you love— from AI to Comics to Art

New topic pages

Some background

To date Medium has had around 100 topics readers can follow. 100 topics may sound like a lot, but in practice we’ve found that it can be limiting. Take the topic “Money” for example: what if you’re interested in financial planning but couldn’t care less about the fluctuations of the daily stock market? In the past, if you followed the Money topic, your personalized news feed would include stories on both of those subjects, and many more that fell under the broad umbrella of “money.” This wasn’t ideal for readers or writers: readers didn’t always find stories that reflected their more granular interests, and writers didn’t always get their work in front of the right audience.

Recommendations from the Topics you follow will show in your feed

What’s new

After we updated Medium tag pages a few months ago, we received a lot of positive feedback around the change. This month we’re rolling out additional functionality that will allow readers to follow Medium tag pages, which will exponentially expand the number of followable topics. Importantly, tags are replacing topic pages going forward and we will sunset the previous version of Medium topic pages.

What this means for readers:

• The variety and number of topics will expand dramatically because they will be populated by user-generated tags. While we only had 100 topics, we have 7 million tags that range from coffee to the metaverse to the latest on HBO’s Succession.
• As a result, you can now follow a bigger and more granular range of topics. Using the example above, you’d follow financial planning to make sure you’d see stories related to that subject in your homepage feed.
• Pro tip: create lists of your favorite stories around a particular interest/tag. Save them to read later or share with friends.

What this means for writers:

• Every story you’ve tagged has been ported to the new topic pages, so you don’t need to retag them.
• The new topic pages are powered by an algorithm that sources stories from a wider range of subjects and authors than before. This enables writers to have more granular control over which topic pages their stories show up on, and increases the likelihood that you will be discovered by readers engaged in the subject of your work.
• The algorithm will prevent some posts that might violate our rules and guidelines from showing on the topic pages, but the vast majority of posts will now be visible in the Latest feed of these pages.

If you have feedback and would like to share your thoughts on how we can make topic pages better — please let us know in the responses section of this post.