The Hidden Power of Lists on Medium.com

Exploring the Role and Potential of Lists in Enhancing Reader Experience and Article Organization

I've been racking my brain for some time about the real meaning of lists on Medium. Whether it's purely to postpone an article for later or to store it in an imaginary archive of topics that makes it easy to go back to what one liked. In reality, however, it's much more complex than that, these lists can also be created by the authors themselves to make it easier for readers to browse their articles. Since the medium itself also pays considerable attention to lists, they must have some other meaning that is not yet visible.

The meaning of article lists from the author's point of view

At the moment I see some pretty fundamental problems there, I can add an article to the list only after it is published personally it would make sense to me to be able to add an article to the list at the moment I plan to publish it but as far as I know this is not possible at least at the moment.

The second thing I can think of is to create lists dynamically based on the tags used in the article... well even this medium can't do as far as I know but it is not difficult to do as I wrote a script for this and sorted the articles this way, throwing away too small groups of a few articles.

The third and last comment I have about the lists is that we don't have any statistics to check if readers came through the lists through a series of prepared articles. However, this problem is also shared by the so-called BBC links where when you write an article you put links to older stuff you've written or to other authors.

How to solve these problems?

The first problem is purely on the medium. The second problem can be partially circumvented if you know how to program and there is an exciting solution to the third problem because some URL shorteners allow us to get statistics with the number of clicks so we could get exactly the data we don't have at the same time. The question is whether this approach would be worth it enough since it would mean passing each link through the shortener and then evaluating other statistics outside the medium. Other side effect,s it could cause are for example less promotability on the medium through the use of external links, breaking internal seo links and last but not least it can be very unreliable for users to click on links to unknown places.

Conclusion

Lists are obviously an element that affects user experience/ reading experience a lot as at least the medium thinks so when they invest time and money in developing new features. How do you see it do you see lists as something that makes sense to you or is it purely an extra thing for you?