I posted this internally to Medium employees on March 5, 2014. See Hatching Inside Medium for more context. We’ve since done a lot of work in this area (with more to come).

A Brief History of Collections

In the beginning, every Medium story had to be published into a collection. That collection had to be selected before you started your story (“New Post”) only existed on collection pages. And a story could be in only one collection.

Part of the original reasoning for this was because we had multiple post “types.” Types had different templates that defined their structure and form. When you created a…