Types of stories on Medium
There are four types of posts on Medium:
- Draft is an unpublished story. Drafts are automatically saved on your Medium account in Your stories section. Drafts are private, but any Medium user can read your draft if you share the URL with them. Learn more about sharing drafts and getting feedback.
- Published story is a story that was published and can be read by anyone from your profile page and elsewhere on Medium. Learn more about writing and publishing a story.
- Response is a post that was published on another published story. Learn more about responses.
- Unlisted story is a story that is also a published story, but it cannot be viewed from your profile page or found in the Medium network. You must share the post URL for people to be able to read them. Learn more about unlisted publishing.
In this section, you can learn how to manage stories on your Medium account.
About Your stories page
Your stories page shows you all the stories that you have on your account. From there, you can browse your content on Medium, edit your stories, or delete them.
- On your homepage, click on your profile picture.
- Click Stories from the menu.
- In the app, tap your profile picture on the bottom bar.
- Tap the three-dot button in the top-right corner.
- Tap Stories.
Create a draft
- On your homepage, click Write to start a new draft.
Once you create a new draft, you can start writing. To learn more about writing and publishing a story, see this article.
- In the app, tap your profile picture on the bottom bar.
- Tap the three-dot button in the top-right corner.
- Tap Stories.
- Tap New in the top-right corner.
Edit a draft or published story
You can edit your draft or published post at any time. If you're editing a draft, changes made on your post will be automatically saved. Once you save your changes on your published story, they will become immediately visible to your readers.
- On your homepage, click on your profile picture.
- Click Stories from the menu.
- In the Drafts tab, click on the draft you want to continue working on.
In the Published tab, click the down arrow button near the published story you want to edit and click Edit story from the menu.
You can also edit a published story by going directly to the story you want to edit, clicking the three-dot button on the bottom bar of the story and choosing Edit story from the menu.
- In the app, tap your profile picture on the bottom bar.
- Tap the three-dot button in the top-right corner.
- Tap Stories.
- In the Drafts tab, tap on the draft you want to continue working on.
In the Published tab, tap the three-dot button near the published story you want to edit and tap Edit from the menu.
Check out this article to learn more about using the Medium editor.
Delete a story
From the Stories page
- On your homepage, click on your profile picture.
- Click Stories from the menu.
- Scroll down to the story you want to delete and click the down arrow button.
- Click Delete story and confirm.
From the post page
- Navigate to the post you want to delete.
- Click the three-dot button in the top-right corner to enter the edit mode.
- In edit mode, click three-dot button.
- Choose More settings from the drop-down menu.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page, click Delete story and confirm.
Note: This deletion is permanent, and your post will be removed in accordance with the Privacy Policy.
- In the app, tap your profile picture on the bottom bar.
- Tap the three-dot button in the top-right corner.
- Tap Stories.
- Scroll down to the story you want to delete, tap the three-dot button, and tap Delete from the menu.
Note: This deletion is permanent, and your post will be removed in accordance with the Privacy Policy. Any earnings accrued in the Partner Program will not be paid out for deleted stories.
Common questions
Posts on Medium cannot be reverted back to draft status. Instead, you can copy your post, paste it to a new draft, and delete the published version. An alternative way to hide a post from the public view is to set it as unlisted. Please note that posts that have been unlisted can still be accessed by anyone who has the link.
There is currently no way to batch delete all of your posts from Medium without deleting your account. You would need to delete each of your posts manually.
Password-protecting stories is not available.