ProcessLens — I think your anti-curation idea is fantastic! I don’t want to be limited to seeing only posts by people or tags I follow. I want something NEW! Yesterday after posting my response to Gutbloom I went to a friend’s office for some business but I had to wait. There was a computer that no one was using and I asked if I could use it to check on some things online. They said fine.

So I went to Medium. Since I was not logged in and no one from that office was logged in I got to see the “For You” feed for strangers who go to Medium and are not logged in. Wow! The feed was 20 times better than the feed that I see at home when I’m logged in!

I ended up clicking on and reading about 8 articles. That never happens with the “For You” feed when I’m logged in. I discovered some great writers and some great articles. I was actually impressed.

I realized the problem is not with Medium but rather with me. My feed is totally filled with only stuff from people and tags that I follow and that’s why it’s impossible to find anything NEW! I began wondering what would happen if I un-followed everyone that I follow and every tag that I follow. What would my feed be like then?

But then I thought about those writers that I really like who I follow. I don’t want to miss their writings. But I don’t want my feed to be completely limited to those writers and what they recommend (especially what they recommend). Do I have to log out in order to get a feed in which I can discover NEW things? Of course, then I wouldn’t be able to recommend or follow things I find because I’m not logged in.

It’s frustrating. I realize that there is a tiny amount of discoverability provided by the “collections” at the top of the page but I can go through every last one of them and still not find as many interesting things as I did going through the “For You” feed when not logged in.

I keep wondering if there will ever be any “collections” on subject matter that I am interested in. They seem to be strictly confined only to what is the most popular trending stuff and to what interests the Medium curating team. And speaking of the curating team, they seem to be extremely adverse to fiction. In the months that they’ve done collections they did do a fiction collection ONE TIME for ONE DAY but nothing since. I was so happy that one day that I posted an article about my happiness. I guess anything more would be too much for me to expect.

I have wasted so much time over this last year+ trying to figure out how to make my feed responsive to my desire for discoverability that I feel stupid. I could have spent that time writing…. or doing anything. The more I try to make the feed work better for me, the more frustrated I get. How utterly silly of me. The feed is obviously as good as it is going to get. I’m done wasting my time on it. If I want to discover something NEW I am simply going to have to log out and keep a small pad of paper on my desk on which I can write down the names of writers and titles of articles I find that I like and then when I’m logged back in do a search for them so that I can follow and recommend them. Maybe then my feed will accidentally get better over time.

This process should also help with the problem of my feed (when logged in) being updated so infrequently. Being logged in, I have to wait 4 to 8 hours before the feed is updated with a handful of new articles. I now realize that I don’t have to wait that long. I just need to log out.