The Three Things Everyone Writing on Medium Has Wrong About Curation
By: Hogan Torah
Tags: Curation, Writing, Data Science, Digital Life, Social Media

Everyone starts off in curation jail

It doesn’t matter how good your articles are the first month. If they’re not in the right topic they’re probably not even processed by the algorithm. Medium wants to humble you.

Image author.

Five months later I’m still toiling in relative obscurity. Medium is not the right place for Hogan Torah I’ve come to find out. So I write as myself now. But kept the name because my real name is Logan Paul. Really.

Medium knows more about you than you know about yourself before you write anything

Medium has strong ties to Twitter. If you don’t know why Google it. Speaking of, Google plays a part in it as well. They are all part of an ecosystem that includes Facebook and Amazon among others. These corporations are businesses that sell things for profit. What does Facebook sell?

The product is you.

Your data. What you like. What you want. What you don’t have so they can sell it to you.

Medium already knows what categories it wants you to write in before you make an account. What do they want you to write? They don’t say. You need to figure it out.

Your first curation

Maybe you will get lucky and the first thing you write will be in the category that Medium has chosen for you, but probably not.

You can write anything you want on Medium. But if you want anyone to see it, it needs to be in one of their preferred 30+ categories.

To know what you should be aiming for look at the Customize your interests when you click on your avatar.

This picture will increase your read time for some reason. Photo by Daria Sannikova from Pexels

Your topic probably isn’t what you think it is

My topic is Culture and Movies. I suspect most men between 25 and 45 is also culture.

Your topic is probably not going to be a popular one. From my observations and correct me if I’m wrong, but no one starts off being able to curate in fiction, nonfiction, humor, writing, poetry, and politics. There’s likely more.

It’s possible to get curated in these things your first curation but not as the main focus of your article.

The right publication for your story

I wrote about movies and culture for other pubs. It wasn’t until I published in a pub for culture and movies that I was curated.

Publications like Illumination and The Innovation are a good place to start getting some eyes on your work and experience writing. But their tagged categories aren’t clear. Start there. Try a few different topics. Tags are important but the main focus of your story is what really matters.

It can happen if you self publish, but you are better off in a publication. Here’s why:

Auto Curation Publications

No publication advertises that it auto curates, but they absolutely exist. It’s not just the big publications.

It’s often the ones that are hard to find. They don’t publish 50 stories a day. They’re not on Facebook advertising for new members, but they’re out there.

It’s not only a publication with auto curation but in the topic Medium has pigeonholed you in. It’s a guessing game. If a pub you have never heard of pops up in your feed sparsely but regularly with different authors, that maybe the one.

You are probably all wondering what pub it was I found that auto curates. If I told you the editor will be inundated with requests and he wants to keep it small. It’s very nichey and he’s not accepting anyone who isn’t genuinely into the theme. If you do some digging it’s not hard to figure out.

After you publish a few times in an auto curation publication, you will notice you are curated more often in other places as well. Once you get to that level you have a chance at being curated in the tags that you weren’t before.

Auto Curation Writer

This is where you want to be and the level I might have finally reached. Ever see something that’s not that great get curated by a popular author? Or something that doesn’t follow the rules of curation curated? Or why no one gets curated from a certain pub except Ryan Fan who gets almost everything curated? That’s why.