I find this to be very sad. ‘Recent Stories’ showed the most recent stories published under a tag in real time as they were being published. For new writers or those writers who don’t have thousands of followers or who are not granted visibility by the young curating staff or the algorithm this was their only hope of attaining any visibility at all in hopes of being discovered by readers.

I liked that feature because it was the last bit of discoverability left on Medium. I could scroll down that feed and choose for myself what I wanted to read rather than have the curating team or the algorithm decide for me. I have a brain. I can make choices. What happens to be popular to others may not — and usually is not — of interest to me. Just show me what is being published and I’ll make my own choices as to what to read.

But Medium doesn’t want us to make our own choices. They want their curating staff and algorithm to make all the choices for us. I want to discover stuff on my own and not be forced to choose only among the stories that are most popular. This is Medium’s way of hiding 90% of what is being published on Medium from reader’s eyes. Only what they deem popular enough is granted any visibility. Medium has just flushed the last remaining aspects of democracy on the platform down the toilet.

Now, no matter how well-written a story is, if it is not granted visibility by Medium’s young curating staff it will never appear in any feed except those of the writer’s followers. There is no way for it to be discovered by anyone else. And if the subject matter of the story does not appeal to the young curating staff then there is almost no chance of being granted visibility by them. And if a writer is new to Medium and doesn’t have thousands of followers yet and writes on a subject that the young curating staff deems ‘not popular enough’ that writer’s story will immediately sink into Medium’s bottomless abyss without ever having a chance to be discovered.

As a reader I don’t give a damn what’s popular. I can make my own choices as to what I like. And I want to be able to explore and not be limited to only the top 1% of what is being published. Medium doesn’t like readers like me. They want to make all my reading choices for me. They don’t want me to explore on my own. They want me to read only that which they want to cram down my throat. As far as Medium is concerned readers like me can just take our money and go elsewhere.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Medium decides to completely do away with all tags and any other discovery tool and the only things we’ll ever see are the top 1% of the most popular stories that happen to appeal to the young curating staff. Medium continues to morph away from the democratic reading/writing platform that it used to be into just another mainstream magazine centered exclusively on popularity (and focused exclusively on just one demographic).