I’m hooked on Medium. Stories here are still alive. They’ve escaped the death by a thousand red lines of an editor’s pen. They haven’t been trampled by commercial considerations. Like food fresh from the garden that hasn’t been frozen or processed, they just taste better.

In The Magazine!

These fresh stories are bundled into a menu of the day: the front page. If you’re a writer, this is the place to be. Front page stories get thousands of reads.

The front page is curated like a magazine, and there are two ways to earn a spot:

Get picked by Medium’s editors Get Recommended by lots of Medium users.

If you can score an Editor’s Pick, or Medium tweets your article, chances are you’ll get enough recommendations to stay on the front page. Door #1 leads to door #2.

This happened to me, and I was graced with 2 days on Medium’s front page. I loved every minute of it. I took screenshots. At one my point, my story spent an hour hovering next to a piece by MG Siegler, a TechCrunch columnist whose writing I admire. I danced a little jig.

As a writer, I was a nobody. And yet here on Medium, I could be heard.

Back Down to Earth

Somewhere near the stroke of midnight on the second day, my story disappeared. My carriage turned back into a pumpkin, and I walked home with a smile on my face and a question on my mind: could I do it again?

My brief exposure had yielded two new Twitter followers, who I was fairly certain were not robots. I was grateful for this, but if I wanted to write anything else, I was essentially back to square one.

What’s a Slush Pile?

In the publishing industry, unsolicited manuscripts end up in what is affectionally termed the “slush pile”. If you’re a nobody without an agent, this is where your stuff goes.

New hires churn their way through the heap, looking for something that catches their eye. Looking for something that will sell. Finding a diamond in the rough is their ticket out of this literary dungeon.

The slush pile turns out to be a durable paradigm: you’ll end up with one whenever the amount of content produced exceeds the ability of people to consume it. All content has value and some potential audience. The key to defeating the slush pile is getting relevant content to the people who care about it. Nobody’s mastered that yet.

Medium has a shot at it, but there’s more work to be done. What they’ve done so far is make the slush pile public and self-categorizing, which allows other writers and readers to do the churning.

The Recommendations Race

When you post a story, and submit it to a few collections, the clock starts ticking. Within each collection, there are just 4 slots for new stories and 4 slots for highly recommended stories.

How long your new story will be visible depends on the popularity of the collection. More popular collections get more posts, so you’ll get more eyeballs, but your story will also disappear more quickly. Sometimes within the hour. That leaves little time to get noticed and earn enough recommendations to stick around.

If your story slips from this 1st page, people will need to click a More button to see it. And according to Medium’s view counts: they rarely do. That’s not surprising. If you spend time pouring over Google Analytics charts of any site, you see a pattern: each manual hop filters out at least 90% of viewers.

Who’s Looking at Collections

If collections are the places to get discovered, who is looking at them?

I’ll start with my usage pattern. My first week of using Medium, I found myself clicking the Featured Collections button and digging into various collections. I spent lots of time exploring, and reading. Being a busy guy, this didn’t last long. I needed to get more efficient about my time spent on Medium.

Soon, I found myself just scanning the front page. Occasionally, I’d dive into a collection. But I found that the first 4 recommended stories didn’t change much. Since they were visible, they continued to amass recommendations. The new stories coming along simply couldn’t compete. This meant that the collections had a mix of stale recommended content, and new untested content. Neither seemed like an efficient use of limited reading time.

Looking at page views on my stories, I’ve seen a similar pattern. My front page story yielded 1000+ views per day. My story on the 1st page of the featured collection “Hello, Hyperloop” is yielding 100 views per day. In more obscure collections, I’m seeing anywhere from 1-10 views per day.

As a writer, I’m grateful for every single reader. Ten or a hundred views is wonderful, but I aspire to reach as many as possible. I’m not sure why it’s important, or where this compulsion to be heard comes from, but I know others have it too. It’s the reason we write.

It also determines where we write. The platform that gives us the most capability to be heard is the one that’ll win.

Collections Can Be Mini-Magazines

I believe Medium’s collections are a stroke of brilliance, and a few small tweaks can help them live up to their full promise:

Think of each collection as a mini-magazine, and model it after what’s already very successful: the front page. Allow collection owners to select editor’s picks within their collections. Collection owners care about the topic, and can lift up good writing when they see it. Keep the recommended stories within each collection fresh by cycling them more quickly. The longer a story sits there, the more recommendations they should need to stay afloat. Increase the number of new and recommended stories on each collection page. This will make it more engaging for readers and writers. Very few people click More.

Bringing the Reader Back

Once a reader has shown interest in a collection or writer, they need a way to be notified when future stories are available. This will give readers more content that matches their tastes, and allow writers and collections to build a following over time. Everybody wins.

Here’s one humble recipe for making this happen:

Medium already has an awesome mechanism for notifications. Judiciously used, this can be a powerful community building tool. Notify readers when a writer they’ve previously recommended posts something new. If a reader recommends two or more stories in a collection, notify them when future stories in that collection are posted. To prevent readers from getting spammed, rate limit how often you notify them about new stories in a collection. Rate limiting can be intelligent. As the reader gets more notifications: you’d require stories to get a higher # of recommendations before notifying readers about them. Detect negative signals and back off. If the reader doesn’t finish reading the content being recommended, over time Medium would phase out authors and collections from a reader’s notifications.

BYOR: Bring Your Own Readers

Writing is easy. The hard part is earning your audience. If you already have an audience, you can bring them to Medium, and earn the Recommendations needed for your story to be seen.

But for us solitary types with few connections, one of the whole reasons we write… is to create connections with like minded individuals. We don’t have an audience to start with. We come to Medium because we want to develop one.

Medium can help solve this chicken and egg problem. In doing so, it will have given a great gift to writers and created a community deeply invested in Medium’s success.

I believe this is exactly what the Medium team is trying to do, and they deserve our help and support. If you’d like them to consider the ideas in this post, please click Recommend.