Thanks for writing that, Melinda. Although I wonder whether that’s really their motivation.

Most writers don’t have a sizeable audience anywhere they could bring with them to Medium nor realistic means of finding one. You can spend months sharing your links on Twitter, Facebook groups, Instagram, etc. and just gather a few dozen true followers (as opposed to followers who just play the follow for follow game and are not really interested in you).

But have one of your pieces curated and have the Medium algorithm strap rockets to your story, and all of a sudden thousands of views come pouring in and your follower count grows by the hundreds.

I have 1.4K followers at the moment. Most of them came from maybe 3 or 4 stories that got curated and which then for some mysterious reason were pushed by the Medium algorithm and went a bit viral. In comparison, on Twitter I have about 300 followers, most of which probably found me on Medium first.

Then again, maybe your right. If each writer just brings a dozen new readers to the platform, that’s still a lot of new readers in aggregate considering how many writers there are.

Either way, I’m honestly happier writing without knowing whether something got curated (I know I could check the stats to see if something got curated, but I usually prefer not to). Maybe that’s their motivation? To reduce the drama among writers?