Medium: Are Rules of Engagement Broke?
By: Stevie Adler
Tags: Medium, Broke, Complaints, Rankings, Bugs

Photo by Matthias Zomer from Pexels

Medium: Are Rules of Engagement Broke?

BUG:1: Most fiction tags have top story lists filled with stories published more than six months ago. Why?

Note: What follows is speculation based on observation.

There seems to be a problem with Top Story Lists. There seems to be loads of stories permanently pinned to Top Story Lists. All these stories seem to be published before the introduction of claps. I hope to show that Rules of Engagement seem Broke, and have probably been this way since August 2017 when Hearts were converted to Claps.

What is Engagement?

Engagement is the value placed on stories to be able to rank one story against another. In simple terms, if story A has 2 fans today and story B has 1 fan, story A will have a higher Engagement value. [note: A fan is someone who claps for a story]

The real Engagement calculation is unknown and complex, but, a couple of things can be surmised:

Trending: Today’s fans and claps have higher value than last weeks fans and claps. Similarly with other criteria.

Today’s fans and claps have higher value than last weeks fans and claps. Similarly with other criteria. All interactions are stored: These can include Claps, Fans, View, Read, Read Time and many other criteria. Obviously, more fans equals more Engagement. Also a longer story, if read, has more Engagement.

The Initial Observation

In November 2017 I published three stories, all using the Microfiction tag, which, back then, was little used. Each story charted high in the Microfiction Top stories List, stayed there for a while, then didn’t get any more claps and dropped out of the list. At the time I did notice other stories with only a couple of claps in the list stay put after mine had dropped out, but didn’t pay too much attention to them.

More recently, I had a feeling that three or four stories at the bottom of the Microfiction Top stories List are still there from last November without any more fans. So I started observing more closely.

New Story Observations

I became an editor, which made me privy to stats of all stories I publish. I found, that if a new story got into a Top story List and did not get a new fan for two days running, it dropped out of the list like a ton of bricks. I observed this time and again on all new stories, I will call this the 2-day rule.

The 2-day rule : If a new story does not get a new fan for 2-days it will drop out of every top story list.

Old Story Observation

There seems to be old stories permanently pinned to every (fiction) Top stories List I looked at, except the very well used Fiction and Short Story lists. See Tags for the Fiction Writer in Medium for a list of lessor used tags [example tags: Drabble, Horror, Fairy Tale, Very Short Story, Very Short Fiction]

What are the Old Stories with this Problem

Tags: Fairy Tale, Very Short Story, Drabble are chock-a-block full of old stories. ALL lessor used tags that I reviewed have this problem. Most Fiction Top story Lists are chock-a-block full of old stories.

Looking at the published dates of all stories in the various lists it can be seen that incumbent stories originate from before the switch from Heart to Claps, in August 2017.

Why is this a problem to you?