The best recommendations come from someone you know
How many people do you know on Medium? Probably more than you think. Now you can find out by connecting your address book to see how many of your email contacts are already on Medium — reading, writing, and curating stories for you to discover.
Here’s how to get started.
How To Connect Your Address Book
This feature is only available in the Medium app, so to find contacts you already know on Medium, open the latest version of the app on your phone (or download it here for iPhone, or here for Android).
Then head over to your “Find Friends” in the settings page to see who you already know on Medium. If you have any connections, you’ll be able to select who you want to follow.
Once you’re connected, check their activity tab to see what they’re reading, highlighting, and responding to. If you’re new to the activity tab, here’s how it works. It’s the best way to get reading ideas from your connections.
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A few things worth knowing: We hash your contacts for matching so we’re not storing your address book in plain text. Contacts re-sync monthly, so new matches surface automatically. And if you’re not ready to connect, you can skip the prompt. We won’t put the prompt up again, but you can come back to it anytime in your settings in the app.
Trust starts with knowing who’s behind the recommendation
We’re feeling a shift in what matters most on the internet. Readers — on Medium, but not just on Medium — want more than just a recommendation from a system. You want stories you trust. It’s easier to reach that level of trust if a story recommendation comes from a person you know. Maybe an old friend, a professor from college, or a colleague you lost touch with years ago.
We tend to think of reading and writing as solitary activities, but there’s a real social layer to both. I’m much more likely to read something if a person I know and respect has touched it in some way — if they clapped for it, highlighted a line, or left a thoughtful response. They cared about it, and that makes me more likely to care about it.
When we ran a small experiment, we found that over half of Medium users in the sample found more than ten contacts already here and active. Chances are, people you know are already reading, writing, and curating stories. You just haven’t found each other yet.
If you’re looking for a new way to find connections and reading recommendations, open the app, find someone you know, and see where their activity tab takes you. And somewhere, someone you know is probably hoping to find you here, too.