I don’t think curation matters much anymore. When Medium first introduced curation, it meant something beyond a sense of validation. I used to make more money off of curated stories. Now I see no financial difference from curated stories.

Curation used to mean more eyeballs

For people new to Medium, the homepage used to look much different. Across the top were topics that people knew, such as Politics or Productivity. If I clicked on Politics, I would get all the curated stories with the politics tag.

The topics were useful to get to the content you wanted to read, which is no longer the case. The Medium homepage is a design mess.