Hey Mauro— just wanted to share a thought. I think it’s important to remember Medium didn’t create the term “curation jail” — writers did. In Medium’s POV, there might not be a curation jail. Maybe there’s just math.

I don’t know how many writers there are on Medium, but I’ve heard the number is around 200K. Might be more, might be less. No idea. There is no way everyone can get curated even semi regularly. The math doesn’t work.

Medium used to have an email that we could use to send them a tip on a great article that should be featured. You know what happened? It was bombarded with “hey, why didn’t I get curated. Can you look again?”

And maybe sometimes that worked. Until it was abused and they removed it. I’m sure there are still people emailing to ask why they weren’t curated.

What writers need is reach. People to see our work. Curation can be a shortcut to that, sure. But we are not helpless here. We could be building a list, promoting our writing. If we do that, and our audience starts growing without Medium’s help — call me an optimist, but I don’t think it goes unnoticed. It’s what some of the top writers that get curated 80% of the time have been doing all along.

I only started a list recently. I discovered the darnedest thing. When I share my posts of the week, the ones people click via email are the same ones people clicked to read on Medium. The duds are duds both places. It’s taught me a LOT about titles and subtitles. For the record, I suck at titles. lol.

Maybe there’s no curation jail. Maybe that “form letter” people see is a polite rejection because the title and subtitle didn’t even entice a click to see more. I don’t know. With that many writers, there has to be shortcuts to sort that volume of content.