It's Either Medium or Me That Doesn't Know What Trending Means

Another one of those little articles where I complain about how incompetent Medium is in one of the things you would think was a core competency of theirs, one of the things that if they don’t do it well you start to wonder why the hell does this company even exist and why was I ever stupid enough to sign up with them.

To explain let me give the list of the latest 12 articles I have published at the time of this writing in descending articles.

published Oct 31, 2025

published Oct 27, 2025

published Oct 23, 2025

published Oct 22, 2025

published Oct 18, 2025

published Oct 17, 2025

published Oct 14, 2025

published Oct 10, 2025

published Oct 8, 2025

published Oct 3, 2025

published Oct 1, 2025

published Sep 28, 2025

Now as to why this should be interesting I would like you to look at the front page of this publication

The first four articles on this list of twelve is at the top of the page

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That’s right it is the first 4 articles of that list, that makes perfect sense because that is how it is configured

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After which, currently but will change in the nexxt couple of days are a list of Halloween stories, which also makes sense because it is configured o show those specific stories, but finally there is the section that I am complaining about today — it is called “trending” and it is configured like this

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where I have chosen the category for this section to “Trending stories” and thus it has the title trending. The definition of trending in The Oxford Language Dictionary is

adjective: trending

currently popular or widely discussed online, especially on social media.

“today’s top trending topics”

Normally, as nobody wants to run a general crawler to find out what on one’s own site is “trending” the meaning on a site specific basis is whatever articles are getting the most traffic and responses at the time on that site.

And thus trending in the publication would be whatever articles in the publication were currently getting activity of some sort.

And wouldn’t you know it the content of that section

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is the rest of the 12 stories I listed above arranged exactly in their order of publication!! How likely is that to happen?! I guess it must happen sometimes, but not every day I look at it over the last several months, especially not when I had one article from some years back that had over 2000 views in September and it didn’t show up in the trending section.

Look, as always I understand that something like “Trending” can be screwed up for a few days, and I understand when stats can be screwed up for a week, but not for months.

I could hazard some guesses as to what things are broken that caused this bug, because it used to work, but I won’t as I’m not getting paid for that, I’m just noting the brokenness of Trending indicates a rot inside the business model of Medium.

Essentially without managing to give Writers some meaningful stats or services to help give their writing a boost, Medium provides absolutely nothing of value. And they have been providing nothing of value for quite a while now.