A new Boost for top stories
Suggested by our community, confirmed by humans, delivered by robots
5 min read
·
Feb 21, 2023
Starting today, some authors may see a notification on their story stats page and in their inbox that says their story has been
Boosted.
An important reason authors choose Medium is to give their stories a chance to be seen by more readers. Authors shouldn’t be required to build their own audience or mailing list to share their ideas and knowledge. Often, the best writing comes from people who don’t want to be audience builders. With the rise of the creator economy, these doers are often left out. Our goal is to find the best individual stories, regardless of who wrote them, and give those stories a wider audience.
We’ve always had many ways to boost a story on Medium, including our recommendation algorithm, tags, newsletters, and publications.
What we are launching today is a much bigger Boost.
For now we’re just calling it Boost, but given that we have other mechanisms for boosting stories in the works (especially for evergreen and canonical stories), we may have to eventually rename it to be something more specific. For now, it’s the highest-level boost ? worthy of a capital B
Boost
.
There are three factors determining the process by which stories will get Boosted:
- We are relying on publication editors to send in suggestions. They are our
community curators
.
- Humans at Medium, aka our
internal curation
team
, confirm these suggestions according to our
distribution standards
.
- Our
algorithms
match these high-quality story suggestions with the readers most likely to be interested in each story, and weight those stories for extra distribution across Medium.
These three factors deserve a bit more explanation.