You Can Now Follow Tags Instead of Topic Pages
My thoughts on yet another Medium change
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Medium is making yet another change to how blog posts are found by readers. Those super broad Medium topic pages? You know the Art, History, Politics, Science, Money, etc? They are going away. Very soon, if they haven’t already.
But no worries.
Medium’s plan for replacing those topic pages, I think, will be a good one not just for readers but also for writers.
I work with a lot of Medium bloggers in my role with the Ninja Writers team. And one of the biggest frustrations is the lack of control over making sure that our blog posts get seen by those who are interested in them. It’s also really hard to stand out among so many posts in those broad topics.
But broad topics like “Money” and “Health” are going away and will be replaced by those more granular, more focused, and writer-generated, tags!
This move, I think, is a good one for readers and writers. Here’s why:
Noise reduction for readers
Enabling readers to follow tags means they can hone in on exactly what they’re interested in. Medium used to do this, way back when I first started on Medium, before writers were paid. It worked great. This I believe will reduce a lot of the noise for readers, they will get less in their feed that isn’t what they want and more of what they do want.
Example: Readers currently following a Money topic page will be able to hone in on tags like personal finance or budgeting instead of having to sort through posts about everything money related.
Content will be more accurately categorized.
Enabling readers to follow writer-generated tags allows for more accurate categorization which can be found easier by readers wanting that content.
Example: No longer will writers have to use a tag for health when the audience they truly want is interested in women’s breast health or male pattern baldness.
Instead of 100 topics to choose from, readers and writers can choose from over 7 million+ tags.
