Where did all the good Medium pieces go?

They aren’t showing up in my feed very much.

People I follow on Medium have been writing good follow-on articles to the ones I’ve seen before. People I don’t follow on Medium have also been writing about topics I’m interested in.

I get a little tired of clicking the “following” tab every time I go to the Medium homepage if I’m in a reading mood.

I’ve given Medium a lot of data for me as a reader! I’ve clapped, I’ve commented, I’ve followed… and yet… Medium keeps serving me a pretty random-looking pile of “recommended” articles, many of which I don’t find interesting and most of which don’t come from writers or publications I follow.

A year ago, the algorithm was pretty different. I’d see a lot of things from writers and publications I followed, and a lot of it was from netailored to my interests. The stuff I didn’t like was split into two bins: Stuff on topics where I had opinions but disagreed with the author (“hate read” material, thanks algorithm) and stuff from Medium-run publications that were being pushed into everyone’s feeds regardless of whether or not they were interested in them.

When and why did this happen?

I don’t really know. I know that it’s certainly been pretty bad for the last few months, and the decline was gradual enough I didn’t really notice. So if I look back at what happened this year… it’s possible things started…