How our quality guidelines incentivize your best writing — and how we curate those stories for our readers
Update to our quality guidelines (August 2024)
Why should you publish your story on Medium? There are many good reasons — our simple, intuitive editor, our strong domain authority, and how easy and quick it is to publish a story, for example. But one of the main reasons is that if your story is good, it has a shot at reaching a wide audience.
Unlike other platforms, you don’t need an external audience. You don’t need to know anything about SEO. Those things can certainly help, but our curation and distribution system is designed to match great stories with interested readers, so you can focus on telling your unique stories without needing those skills. Our recommendations system is built around incentivizing writers to share the deepest, richest stories.
This is in contrast to, for example, a common and infuriating format of recipe posts you find on the open web: you’re forced to scroll through page after page of nonsense to get to the actual recipe. That extra “story” is all for the sake of creating advertising space and optimizing the page to rank higher in search engines. It’s not done for the reader. This isn’t because the writer doesn’t care about the reader; it’s because the incentives are not aligned between reader, writer, and publisher.
Since we’re supported by readers, not by advertising, we have the privilege of keeping our curation focused on the reader.
Our readers value thoughtful, nuanced, knowledgeable perspectives — we do, too
We’re pleased to announce a new revision to our Quality Guidelines today. This revision changes little in the guidelines themselves; most of the updates are clarifications based on feedback we received from writers and editors.
If you’re new to our Quality Guidelines, welcome! These are the same guidelines used by our curation team, and describe how we assign each story we review to one of three distribution categories:
- Network Distribution — stories that are matched to readers who are following that specific writer (and/or the publication, if the article is in a publication). This is the baseline category for any story on Medium which does not violate Medium rules.
- General Distribution — stories that earn General Distribution are matched to readers based on their interests, and on related writers or publications they follow. These stories are also given Network Distribution.
- Boost — especially high-quality stories that meet our Boost Guidelines (below). These get a higher priority in being matched to readers and are also given General and Network Distribution.
Writers and editors who are interested in how stories are chosen for Boost can find more details in those guidelines. There you’ll find that the criteria for Boosting stories is based on five broadly defined factors:
- Writer’s experience
- Value and impact
- Respect for the reader
- Non-derivative
- Writing and craftsmanship
I’d like to share some of our thinking behind “writer’s experience,” which is a unique element in our stance on quality in writing, and something we’ve found that our readers especially value.
Our readers love your experience
Readers prize reading stories that have a clear sense of a writer’s experience not because it makes a story warm, inviting, or emotional — though it can certainly do all of those things. They prize your experience because it transfers valuable understanding to them.
For example, anyone can look up how to prepare roasted potatoes and write a story about it. It could even be a good story. But it’s not what our readers come to Medium for. We call this a “write-around” — pick a topic, look some things up, and write around it. Write-arounds can convey information but they typically miss the mark on conveying real understanding.
Over time, we’ve emphasized writer’s experience in our Quality Guidelines, and we’ve noticed that writers are mistakenly trying to check that box, rather than give the spirit of what our readers really want. For example, some writers will include a personal anecdote somewhat related to the topic of the story, followed by a write-around. We also see stories that sprinkle in anecdotes, opinions, “in my experience” phrasing, and other bits that seem to be an attempt to fill this criteria for Boosting. However, the writer doesn’t bring any actual insight into the subject at hand.
This type of “filler” is disappointing to the reader who wants the writer to share the actual experience they could learn and grow from.
An example of writer experience versus a write-around
The state of recipes — real instructions for cooking food — offers great examples of what we mean by a story that provides writer experience in the form of insight rather than filler. Compare, for example, Crispy Oven Roasted Potatoes to The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever Recipe from Serious Eats.
What Are the Best Potatoes for Roasted Potatoes? The answer to this question is: it’s your choice. I prefer a smaller potato like the baby red or white potatoes so there are fewer cuts of the knife to make. But if you prefer, use yukon golds, sweet potatoes, or even russet potatoes, and cut them into 1-inch cubes.
Versus:
For variety, I tried the three most common supermarket types: russet, Yukon Gold, and red.
Russets get the crispest crusts and roast up a pale golden brown. Their interiors are fluffy and mild.
Yukon Golds roast a little darker owing to their lower starch content and higher sugar content. This leads to more flavor, but it also means a slightly less crisp crust. Their interiors are nice and creamy, with plenty of flavor.
Red potatoes roast up very dark because of their very low starch content, but have difficulty getting crisp. They come out of the oven crunchy, but soon lose that crunch, turning soft and tender.
Both are well-written and valuable to readers. Both contain personal experience. However, in the first case, the experience offered doesn’t contribute anything to elevate the readers’ understanding of how to make delicious roasted potatoes. In the second case, the reader’s experience goes far deeper: experimenting with different varieties, testing different techniques, and making specific recommendations based on that experience.
The first example is good writing, but it’s not nearly as helpful. “It’s your choice” is just filler. Insight into the actual differences — from someone with direct experience of cooking them — is far more valuable. The recipe by Kenji is infused throughout with this sort of direct experience that the other example lacks — even though that other example sprinkles in lots of colorful asides.
Boost is a high bar
When you get a story Boosted, you should be proud because it means we think it represents the best of the best on Medium. It’s a story we are thrilled to share with readers, and we trust that they’ll be equally thrilled to read. The process of curation is a process of finding the best exemplars of our Boost Guidelines, because these types of stories provide the best experience to readers.
Unlike a lot of other places on the internet, there aren’t any easy formulas to reach a wide audience on Medium. There’s no specific title, length, time of publishing, or topic that does best. All our incentives are set up instead to reward writers for sharing their best stories with our readers.
To reach an audience on Medium, a good place to start is to focus on your own lived experience, and consider why sharing that experience can be valuable to another person. Why are you writing about this particular topic? What can you uniquely bring to the story, and why is that valuable to another person?
Meeting that requirement of writer’s experience alone doesn’t guarantee that a story will be Boosted. But it’s a good place to start for any writer striving to authentically connect with their reader.
And when your story does get Boosted on Medium, you can be sure that it’s a meaningful act. It wasn’t done in the service of advertising, or SEO, or to generate filler material as a vehicle for any of that.
It was done as recognition of your excellence in deepening our understanding of the world through the power of writing.
Thank you for being a part of this community.
