How our quality guidelines incentivize your best writing — and how we curate those stories for our…

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses why writers should publish their stories on Medium, highlighting the platform's features and benefits, such as its simple and intuitive editor, strong domain authority, and the ability to reach a wide audience. It also explains Medium's curation and distribution system, which is designed to match great stories with interested readers, and the importance of writer's experience in the platform's quality guidelines.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Why should you publish your story on Medium?

• Medium offers a simple and intuitive editor, strong domain authority, and makes it easy and quick to publish a story.
• One of the main reasons is that if your story is good, it has a chance of reaching a wide audience.
• Unlike other platforms, you don't need an external audience or knowledge of SEO, as Medium's curation and distribution system is designed to match great stories with interested readers.
• Medium's recommendations system is built around incentivizing writers to share the deepest, richest stories.

[02] What are Medium's Quality Guidelines?

• Medium's Quality Guidelines are used by the curation team to assign each story to one of three distribution categories: Boost, Recommend, or Limit.
• The criteria for Boosting stories is based on five broadly defined factors, including writer's experience.
• Medium emphasizes writer's experience because it provides valuable understanding to readers, rather than just conveying information.
• The article provides examples to illustrate the difference between "write-arounds" that lack real insight and stories that demonstrate the writer's actual experience and expertise.

[03] What is the significance of getting a story Boosted on Medium?

• Getting a story Boosted on Medium means it represents the best of the best on the platform, and that Medium is thrilled to share it with readers.
• Unlike other platforms, there are no easy formulas to reach a wide audience on Medium. The incentives are set up to reward writers for sharing their best stories with readers.
• To reach an audience on Medium, writers should focus on their own lived experience and consider why sharing that experience can be valuable to another person.
• When a story is Boosted, it's a meaningful recognition of the writer's excellence in deepening the reader's understanding of the world through the power of writing.