Writing and reading on Medium is simple.

In just a few minutes, you can publish a great-looking story, write a response, highlight lines you love in other people’s work, or bookmark cool stuff to come back to later on. (The actual writing part probably takes a lot longer, if you are anything like me, but that’s another post entirely.)

With all that simplicity, you might not realize there are ways to make your experience here even more betterer…

Enter this handy guide to help get your stories discovered, start more conversations, and look even more awesomer than they did before.

Hook them with a clever title

Reel them in with an even cleverer subtitle

Titles (and images) on Medium stories are your first and best chance to entice readers to click through and read your whole piece — so choose wisely.

If you don’t include a sub-title in your story, the first sentence will be used in previews of your content on and off Medium by default. Here’s an example of how things show up in the Medium feed au naturel.

Sometimes using the first line of your story in a preview will work perfectly. Other times less so. Luckily, whatever you decide to write in your story, you can customize what appears in previews of your content on and off Medium.

Before publishing your piece, click the “…” icon in the top right corner of your screen and select “Customize title/subtitle”.

Here, you can fine tune exactly what will appear in feeds and previews.

Customizing the title and subtitle for previews can help get your point across and hook the reader in ways your natural first sentence might not.

Create a striking header image

We eat first with our eyes… so too do we read first with our header images?

If you want a header or cover image above or below your title, hit the + icon to the left of your cursor before you start typing.

There, you can click on the Camera icon and select an image (or drag and drop directly into the article — you can also reference this quick guide or this more detailed image guide for all your image needs). After your image is in the article, click on it to select how you want it displayed. The border will turn green when the image is selected and the image toolbar will appear:

Here are preferred image sizes for the different settings you see in the image toolbar above:

Preferred Image Sizes

• Full column-width images: 1400px
• Out-set images (bigger than full-column): 2040px
• Screen-width images: 2500px

Make your preview image look perfect

You have more power than you know

Medium will include the first image in your piece in feeds, previews and embeds (and if you don’t include an image in your story, it will use your profile picture).

To set a different featured image to use in previews, click on it and press Cmd / Ctrl + Alt / Opt + 8 (here’s a list of all our keyboard shortcuts). You’ll know you did it right when your green border turns red.

You can also click on the part of the image you want to be the central focus for your preview, then press Alt / Opt on your keyboard.

Image grids are your friend

Image grids are a particularly powerful way to use photos and illustrations to tell your story. On your desktop, select the images in the order you want them to appear, then drag and drop them into your story. Medium will do the heavy lifting of making sure they all line up properly in a grid.

Once images are uploaded, they cannot be re-ordered (but you can delete them and try again). So if you have a big group of images you’d like to upload in a particular order, change their file names to reflect the order (alphanumeric) you’d like them to show up in (e.g., A.jpg, B.jpg, C.jpg) and then just select the whole group at once.

Image Links

Want your image to be a clickable link? This is your lucky day! Click on the image (the border will turn green) and then press Cmd / Ctrl + K on your keyboard.

The link toolbar will appear where you can paste in your link and press “Enter”. Your image is now linked.

What else will we think of!

(This one also happens to be left-aligned so the text flows around it, just FYI.)

Write eloquent credits and captions

A picture is worth a thousand words (but you can fit a couple more words beneath the picture, too)

While editing, click on your image. You’ll see a green border around the image and a place to add your caption beneath the image.

Here, you can add a credit to the original artist or photographer and even link to the original source. Highlight the words in your caption you want to link and click the link icon from the text toolbar that pops up. You can also write a caption here — or do both.

PS. Please only use images on Medium you have the rights to use.

Optimize your stories for how people read

Let’s face it: We don’t always read an entire story in one go, and the ability to scan easily understandable sections helps grab and keep people’s attention.

Creating visual differentiation with section breaks (Cmd / Ctrl + Enter), images, and strategic use of the “H1” and “H2” headers will help your audience navigate your articles — especially long ones like this!

Also, pull quotes…

Which I find to be very impactful

…are an amazing way to highlight or reiterate a particularly stunning sentence or phrase. Because impact.

Drop caps also help guide the reader’s eye

They also look super-pro

Ever seen someone’s article start with a giant letter and thought, “that looks really amazing?” I know, me too, and it’s a great way to make your writing look really awesome, guide the reader’s eye, and add personality to your story.

To use drop caps, highlight your paragraph and select the drop cap option from the quick menu.

Want to customize what that letter looks like? We got you covered!

Click on the drop cap letter itself until a green border appears:

From your desktop, drag the custom image file you’d like to use in place of your drop cap directly onto the green box.

Your custom image will now appear in place with a green box around it:

Voila! Fancy letters galore.

(Sorry, drop caps are not yet available in the app.)

TK reminders are awesome

Never forget that you wanted to add something to your story ever again!

Need to remind yourself to add a picture, change a quote, image drop cap, or go back and edit something later? TK is an editorial notation (it stands for “to come”) and writing it anywhere in your post will pop up a yellow notation to the left of your draft text, helping you remember to change/add/tweak something before your publish.

Personally, I find this wildly helpful — before the days of TK, I used to do things like write PUT SOME PRETTY S&!T HERE as reminders and… well… if you ever forget about those, things can get awkward come publication time.

Before you publish, Medium will remind you to go back and finish what you started…

Tags are your friend

Find the right people with the right keywords

If you’ve hung out on Medium for any amount of time, chances are you are following a couple tags already. (They live on the right side of your home page feed.)

When you’re ready to publish, you can choose up to five tags to categorize your writing. Picking the right tags to describe what you are writing can help people discover you.

I often find inspiration by searching the tag terms I’m contemplating using to see if the content within those tags aligns with what I’ve written. I then meander through similar tags to find secondary terms that help further describe my work.

Other times, you might want to use vastly different terms because, often, our writing doesn’t fit in one narrow category. Have a funny life story about an awkward work situation that you learned a ton from? Humor, Life Lessons, and Business might be perfect for you. Get creative! Sometimes using a lesser-known tag might help your piece gain traction because it will be prominently featured for longer.

Write something worth reading

The sky is the limit on Medium. During the year-plus I spent reading and writing on the platform and the month I have now spent working at the company, I can confidently tell you that if you have a topic you want to write about, there’s a group on Medium that wants to read what you have to say. Using the above tips can help make your stories more beautiful as well as help more people find them, but they are mere tools to the backbone of what makes any post great: the words on the page that you and your expertise provide.

This is just the beginning. There’s no way we’ve covered everything cool about Medium. Chances are, you do something amazing that we have not listed (and perhaps haven’t even thought of). If that’s the case, leave a response and teach us your ways.

How to Win at Medium was originally published in 3 min read on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Mar. 1, we announced Talkback, a new Medium publication for people who use Medium to talk with the people who make Medium. We also launched a survey that asked broad questions to gauge what users currently do, aspire to do more, love, and, well, don’t love about Medium right now.

We received over 800 responses to the survey. I was delighted by how thoughtful and concise the responses were. I suppose on a platform of avid readers and writers, I should expect nothing less.

Without further ado, let’s dive into what we learned (or confirmed, since a lot of the information we received was stuff you’d already told us and we’ve been working on) and some insight into what we’re going to do with everything you said.

Here’s what people read a lot on Medium right now

This word cloud is probably going to surprise no one, but it does elegantly visualize valuable information for us and helps emphasize the actions we need to take.

Engaged Medium readers and writers read a lot about technology, business, and personal stories (including life experiences and advice). This is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: These general topics were first to appear on the platform and therefore have the largest base of writers and readership, but we all know that you want more than that.

Here’s what people want to read more of on Medium

Both of these word clouds analyze every single word that was written into the answer box for these questions, and I made sure that every single word was drawn into the final image we created.

Yeah, you want to read more of everything.

While this data still returns a strong desire to read more of what’s already on the platform (understandable, given that’s what people like to read right now), there’s a huge desire for so much more.

Breaking it down analytically, we saw a strong trend towards the following topics:

• Fiction (and other creative writing, including poetry)
• International news and opinions
• Lifestyle insights and hobbies (music, food, pop culture, sports)
• Health of all sorts (healthcare, fitness, mental health)
• Experts/AMA-style pieces from all viewpoints and topics

Secondary topics we saw trending frequently included:

• Posts in languages other than English
• Local news, current events, and non-mainstream issues

While these are topics many of you spoke up about and ones we will be focusing on to help amplify and incubate first, the real takeaway from the wide swath of answers you gave was this: We need a better way for people to find their tribe — be it likeminded people, a specific topic, or anything in between. People are already writing about most of these topics — but in order to have more people write and foster more conversations, we need to help you find each other, teach each other, and promote each other.

Most people felt part of a community on Medium

The wording of this header is important: People who took our survey felt at least somewhat part of a community on Medium. This is very different from feeling like they are part of the Medium community. Speaking frankly, I think the notion of a “Medium community” to be superficial at best: Medium is made up of many different communities, both large and small. Medium is a platform — it’s the tie that binds people together, but you are here for what’s on the platform.

This is a question I will likely ask on a regular basis as a way to gauge if what we’re doing is working. For the 20ish percent of you that never felt part of a community: You might not want to be part of a community, and that’s cool. But some of you probably want to be, and we’re here to help you find your people. And for the 45ish percent of you who feel part of a community sometimes? We’re going to work to make you feel part of something whenever you want (which is hopefully whenever you visit).

Here’s what you love about Medium

It’s always great to validate what you think you are doing well and find out what people are happy with so that we can put our attention and resources towards improvements that are most impactful. It’s like that adage “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” — but expanding it to be more of “if it isn’t broken or is working well enough, go fix something else first.”

Here’s what we found you love the most about Medium:

Quality — of our tech, home stream, recommendations, the people, the writing, the comments.

“Maybe this is weird, but I don’t look for topics, I look for anything honest, insightful, and well written. That can be about work, business, society, life, art, anything.”

Ease — of writing, editing, navigating.

“The platform is wonderful to use. Period. Simple, seamless, and it saves everything.”

Variety — of topics and people.

“The broad range of topics. Not every story appeals to me but there seems to always be something posted that piques my interest.”

Audience — again, the variety was a trend here, but people who said that they loved the audiences on Medium also spoke about the ease of using Medium and the ability to find and grow that audience, or find the audience with whom you want to interact.

“The fact that it manages to offer aspects of a social network without losing the consistent tone and atmosphere of a publication platform, ie, it feels welcoming, deep, without being alienating or offensive.”

Algorithm — related to the quality trend, folks were very happy with our algorithm and how it helped them find new content.

“Everything. Beautiful design, great algorithms, discovery of articles, meaningful layout, organisation of the topics, too many good things to fit in a little box like this.”

Here’s what you would fix first about Medium

As with every product, things can always be improved. In order to get to the heart of what needs the most attention right now, we asked what you would fix first, if you had the power to choose. By limiting you to your top choice (which most of you adhered to, by the way — thanks for that), we were able to gauge the biggest pain points, helping confirm what we already believed to be true and, in some cases, exposing some areas that needed attention sooner than we originally might have assumed.

While these are the top issues identified, they are far from the entire wish list you gave us through the survey. Rest assured, the complete list is ranked and archived for our reference.

Improved profile pages

By far, this was the most requested first fix. I highlighted my profile as a great worst-case scenario of how responses can drown out the fully fleshed-out stories I want to emphasize in order to draw in more readers and create more conversations.

How we’re working on this: Suffice it to say, we didn’t need a survey to tell us that this was not only a big issue but also one a lot of Medium users care deeply about. In short: We’re working on it, and some improvements to the profile page are on the cusp of going into effect (when it happens, you’ll see that original posts are elevated, and shorter responses displayed prominently have been de-prioritized).

To understand where we’re coming from here, let’s talk stats. Responses are growing like crazy on Medium, and that’s awesome. Original posts have doubled in recent months, but responses have grown by 250 percent. So while we want to ensure your profiles look their best and highlight the original posts you pour so much time, energy, and thought into, we also want to celebrate the responses that are fueling so much discussion and discovery on the platform.

Back to the problem: The number one job of your profile is to represent your identity, as a writer, a reader, or both. Our initial fixes include filtering shorter responses out of the “More by” section so that area is filled with original posts and meaty, post-style responses. In addition, we’ve added a “Responses” area to the profile stream, similar to the way we show highlights and recommendations, so that your shorter responses are still accessible.

An improved method for finding new stuff to read

Many people asked for better ways to curate topics or create lists of articles. Being able to discover new and different content or have ways to find cool stuff to read beyond our current Top 10, and Explore and Search functionalities was high on the list of fixes. Conversely, writers wanted better methods for their writing to be discovered.

How we’re working on this: Our recent announcement of collections is a huge first step in helping solve this pain point. While collections are still in their infancy (and currently only available on iOS and Android — they will be on the web in the coming weeks), they are V1 in our efforts to create better, more discoverable homes for a more diverse content. Over the coming months, we will be iterating on this concept, collecting your thoughts, and further expanding on what we’ve begun. In the meantime, we have a dedicated curation team working on collections, along with early testers, creating new collections that will provide posts on different topics from a wide array of people.

Looking further into the future, the team is putting significant effort into ways to further personalize the feed and make sure it always has interesting and relevant stuff for you to read, every time you open Medium. There are lots of ideas on the table for how to do this, including things like being able to bring in stories from elsewhere on Medium that match your interests, even if you aren’t following them explicitly (but have clearly shown us that you are into that topic area). We’ll be able to talk more on this later once we figure out how it’s all going to work — so don’t hold us to any of the ideas we’re tossing around here. It’s all open for discussion.

Other notable areas you’d rank high on the list for improvement

More tools: This want spanned every kind of tool imaginable but weighted most heavily around publication tools. We’re on the same page with you in this regard and are already actively working on some cool stuff (more on that in the coming weeks). Beyond that you also sent in some excellent ideas that we’ve surfaced with the team. Creating better tools for you is something that’s always a work in progress, so don’t expect us to stop thinking about this — ever.

Mobile parity and in general, mobile love: Lots of people read Medium on their phones, but quite a few also write on their phone (or manage publications) and want full functionality from desktop on mobile. Speaking plainly for the sake of full transparency: We don’t have plans to enable full parity on this front right now. Reading on the go is the primary function of our app, and we still have a long way to go to make that experience awesome. Until we nail that, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to start adding new stuff that might potentially make things messier. That being said, we are working to fix bugs on the writing and editing front and are looking to make it possible to write, edit, and read in an offline mode (something that many of you wanted — shout out to the BART commuter who writes on his phone).

Foreign-language content: The need and desire for international content, in foreign languages, is a hot topic. Being able to set stories or publications to host dual languages and better ways to search for content in specific languages were top asks. This is another area we’re still getting started on, but we do have several international publications created by Medium in a bunch of languages. Beyond that, there are at least 16 other user-run publications in foreign languages on the platform.

Footnotes: We have created a solution for this. If you want to put a footnote at the bottom of your article, you can now type 1, then ^, then [number you want to make superscript].

Option for narration (a la audiobooks) for all posts if folks want to make a recording: Some community publications are already experimenting with this concept, and we’re big fans.

More stats: We could not agree with you more on this count, and we’re exploring ways to surface the stats that are most meaningful to writers and publications. We want to provide both readers and writers with the most important metrics in order to ascertain what’s working and what’s interesting, and help make your decisions on where and how to spend your time easier. (To the chap who asked for literal pie charts showing him what kinds of topics he reads the most, we’re not adding that, but I loved your gumption.)

Where we go from here

As I stated in the introduction post: This is only the beginning. From here, we’re going to continue having conversations with you — both in this publication and out in the wild of Medium — to get to the heart of what you are thinking about and looking for in terms of platform features as well as community needs. We’ll also continue to push out articles that help make Medium work better for you.

We’re also working on more programs to help people find their tribes on Medium (that’s what I call those communities that about 25 percent of you said you feel part of already), and make them more amazing than they currently are today.

As always, leave your thoughts on what’s here — and what you want to see next.

We Asked Stuff; You Told Us Even More Stuff was originally published in 3 min read on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some thoughts on how we act when tempers flare on Medium

Last weekend, you might have noticed some serious shade being thrown in an article on the Medium top stories list.

I’m not in the business of recounting the goings-on of communities within Medium, but what happened highlighted some tensions that we have noticed and are an excellent catalyst to take the temperature of the communities on the platform, and be transparent about how we think and react to our users when issues arise. This is also a good opportunity to talk about how I think we, collectively, can be more awesome to each other.

Before I begin, let’s do some level-setting: Medium is home to fantastic people and communities. I’m not just blowing smoke or trying to butter you up with compliments: I’ve built communities of all sorts for the past decade, and, without question, Medium is the most inspiring, kind, and thoughtful digital community I’ve ever experienced. It’s the main reason I started writing here, why I became fanatical about the platform, why I decided I wanted to join the company rather than take literally any other job in the world (I really mean literally there). Last weekend, a small subset of our community had a darker moment, but the issues they are upset about are real and valid, and, even in our darker moments, we, as a community, conducted ourselves with dignity that is still far above the normal code of conduct when tempers flare online. No one got banned, no slurs were bandied about, and at the end of it all, all parties involved conducted themselves with grace and were able to talk over their qualms and reach a conclusion that I believe brought a net positive to both the individuals and the community as a whole.

I cannot overstate how lucky I feel to be able to help elevate communities that are already so strong. This is why I feel we can have these discussions in the open: because we are starting from such a point of strength and mutual respect.

That being said: We can do better. We have to do better. We should not pat ourselves on the back for the fact that last weekend’s ongoings were far from the worst-case-scenario on the internet. That’s not an acceptable standard for us to live by.

We can be better.

This post is adapted from something I sent to the company internally. Yes: When things happen, everyone at Medium cares, and we all talk about not just what’s happening, but how we improve.

Last weekend: Bring out the pitchforks

Life hack and self-help woes

There are lots of articles on Medium that can be categorized as “life hack” or “self-help.” Listicles, clickbait headlines — they’re a thing on the internet, and they are popular on Medium. And while these posts have value, the fact they dominate our top stories list and are quite prominent in many people’s reading lists has become a serious pain point for some Medium communities.

Let’s be straight: People find value in life hack posts, otherwise they would not garner as many readers as they do. That being said, our top stories list is often very narrow when viewed through a lens that seeks diversity of topic, gender, ethnicity, and geography.

Medium is not a homogenous mass. There are threads that weave through all our experiences, but the one tie that binds us might only be the fact that we’re all on this platform together. The Medium Community does not exist: We’re made up of lots of communities with lots of different needs, wants, desires, interests.

We, the staff of Medium, need to find a way to surface people, publications, and posts that serve everyone’s needs. It’s not an easy proposition, given the fact that our communities are very diverse with sometimes competing needs, and yet, that’s the challenge we want to undertake: to create an experience personalized enough for everyone, no matter who they are.

We aren’t there yet. We’ll probably never be 100 percent there. Medium is a living, breathing product that exists because of its communities, and this tension is normal. We want to hear from you: We need it to do our jobs.

What’s not is that this tension is turning toxic among some of our communities.

Here’s where you come in: Put down the pitchforks

This is not the Medium anyone wants

Last weekend’s tension, in a nutshell, was borne from a frustration that Medium is not doing a good enough job at surfacing what people want to read. Writers aren’t finding their readers. Readers aren’t finding their writers. We’re traveling down a specific path, unable to find alternate routes, although we all believe they are out there somewhere.

While this feels and looks solely like a problem with the product, it is, at its heart, a community problem.

That’s not to say that product solutions are not imperative: Our work on Medium will never be done. Medium is always going to have issues that need to be improved and we’re always going to be thinking up ways to make cooler, more useful stuff or make better what already exists.

Your input into the product is essential to our success — but it’s not the most important thing you can do to make Medium better.

We need you, the people who use Medium, to help us set the standards for how we treat each other and hold each other accountable for treating everyone with respect.

It’s not okay to be mean, to attack, or otherwise be a jerk to other people on the platform. Doing this will not make Medium a better place for anyone: It will make Medium worse.

We stand for open, thoughtful, inclusive conversation. We stand for honesty and kindness and respect.

We, the staff, the writers, the readers of Medium, we are better than other sites with internet mobs who thrive on throwing shade at each other.

Stop the madness. Put the pitchforks down. Don’t attack each other. We’re capable of such amazing conversation on this platform. Let’s use our talents to push each other for the sake of making things better and even when we’re frustrated or something is broken, let’s maintain a standard of respect for one another.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing an official set of community guidelines to help crystalize these principles and give clearer guidance to everyone on the platform. While they’re an important part of this process, they aren’t the solution: Holding each other accountable for our actions is what’s going to make our communities the best they can be.

Thank you for making Medium what it is and helping us make the platform and all the communities within it great.

Addendum

In terms of feed diversity: That’s not a short-term, quick fix. In the meantime, there is stuff both we, the staff of Medium, can do — and stuff that you can do — to make your experience more personalized to the Medium you want most.

• We are continually updating our collections, currently on iOS and Android, and will be bringing them to the web in the next couple of months. We’re hiring for the curation team and accepting applications for trusted testers to make their own.
• We are working on better tools for you to explicitly signal to us what you want to see less of in your feed. Right now you can use the “Show fewer stories like this” flag to help us make these tools even better. We need your help, so when you don’t want to see something, use the flag. You’re helping make Medium better by doing so.

• We have an amazing Help Center for you to navigate how to follow people, publications, and tags so that you can target the posts that populate in your feed.
• We will continue to create posts in order to help you get exactly what you want from your experience. They will be posted in the Talkback publication. One specifically aimed at helping you create a more diverse feed should be out sometime next week.

Barometer Reading was originally published in 3 min read on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On making decisions

Topics like plagiarism and civility have been vigorously discussed on Medium since we started. They’re important subjects: These conversations will, and should, always be happening here. They’ve surfaced again in the last week, and I want to talk about what happened, how we responded, and where we plan to go from here.

First, an overview of what happened: Someone wrote a post that some people regarded as plagiarism that should be taken down. Others believed (and we at Medium concluded) it was a parody and therefore not plagiarism (or copyright infringement). The post remains up. The original poster, a prolific writer on Medium, deactivated her account, which is something we never want (and, on a personal level, makes me sad). The subsequent discussion sparked by what took place has focused on the specific question of plagiarism — when a person’s words can be reused, for example as a parody, and when that can be prevented. But there is another conversation going on about civility that is at the core of Medium’s community, and what should be done when that level of civility is compromised.

I know this is a very sensitive subject. We care. (My whole career, in many ways, is driven by these issues.) The Trust & Safety team, of which I am a part, has talked about this at length and worked hard to make a fair and reasoned decision. We are balancing the desire for transparency and wanting to talk about what’s happened forthrightly while also being constrained by the need to respect the privacy of everyone involved.

To respect both privacy to individuals and our desire to be transparent, I’m declining to discuss the specifics of last week’s issue (and I will continue to do this if any similar issues arise in the future). That being said, I want to make the promise to you: This and every situation reported to us is addressed personally by our Trust & Safety team. We read and investigate every complaint, argue over the hard ones, and do what we believe is fairest to the people involved and right for the health of the platform.

We take bullying and harassment seriously and respond to everyone who writes in. If you see a post that might be in violation of our terms of service or rules on the site, please flag it using the report tool in the post. If you ever have a question or concern, reach out to yourfriends.medium.com. In addition, you can block a user which will remove their response from your story page (though it will still appear on that author’s profile). You can also hide all responses on a story. The Help Center has all the details on how to use the tool and exactly what it does.

These issues are part of an evolving conversation that we will continue to have, probably for as long as Medium exists. We’ll keep working to address complaints as fairly and open-mindedly as we can. And now, here’s the part where I ask to hear your thoughts and questions about this (or any other) topic and welcome this space as a place to continue the conversation.

Thank you for reading, for writing, and for being part of Medium.

Let’s Talk About Plagiarism and Civility was originally published in 3 min read on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.