Member-only story

The fear of “Curation Jail” shouldn’t keep you from publishing

Kelly Tompkins
5 min readNov 25, 2019

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There’s a sort of science revolving around writing for Medium.

Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash

If you talk to anyone who writes here, the biggest advice is to work to get curated. No curation = low views if any at all. Medium’s elusive algorithm has yet to show me why some of my articles are picked while some aren’t. Some articles will feel like some of my best work and not get selected while some were fluff pieces and they immediately made the cut.

I was fine with that; I knew there would be a learning curve so I was having fun playing around with headlines, varying topics for my content, and reading other people’s work to get a feel for what content is allowed. Recently though, there’s a new concept floating around: “Curation Jail”.

The idea is that if enough of your articles don’t get curated, the editors of Medium just stop looking at your articles all together. It’s almost a form of punishment for repeatedly using bad headlines or writing poor articles. Some are okay with it, some are confused, and others have ideas on how to get out of the loop of denial.

Anxiety kept me from hitting publish

If you’re afraid to write on Medium, you’ll find a flurry of articles advising you not to be scared of hitting the ‘publish’ button.

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Kelly Tompkins
Kelly Tompkins

Written by Kelly Tompkins

Austin,Texas sober girl. Lover of horror movies, cats, and fitness. Occasional bad poet.

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