Jack Preston King , I’ve been doing this for about a month now and it makes very, very, very little difference. The tiny curating staff is so profoundly inundated with recommendations that they obviously just briefly skim over them all and pick what they think might be the most popular. But at the same time I totally agree with you. If you don’t do it the chances of your post appearing in a feed are negligible. Very close to zero. If the curating staff does not bless your post, allowing it to appear in a feed, then it will quickly disappear into the Medium abyss. I email tips@medium.com with a recommendation for every single post I ever post on Medium and about one in 25 gets blessed by the curating staff and actually appears in a feed. These posts get about 20 to 100 times as much exposure than posts that the curating staff ignore. It is definitely worth it. Sadly, in my own experience, the curating staff picks the posts that I make that are quick throwaway posts rather than the posts that I spend days and hours on. Quality is obviously not their main priority. At Medium it’s all about popularity and perceived popularity. It is important that we do not let this influence our writing. We just need to keep writing and keep emailing tips@medium.com and let the chips fall where they do. Hopefully Medium will eventually expand their tiny curating staff and start focusing on quality rather than exclusively on popularity. It’s a pipe dream but in the time I’ve been on Medium things keep slowly getting better. I cling to the hope that things continue to get better. The important thing is for us to continue to write for our audience and not just for the obviously over-worked curating staff.