Alert: Your Medium Account May Get Suspended

Your Medium account may get suspended or even permanently deleted if you have done this one thing

Medium is now hyperactive for the safety and authenticity of this global publishing platform. So, it has started to take some unexpected actions on the platform. And, that can impact you badly if you didn’t go through this story and its advice.

Recently, on June 17, Medium staff posted a story in 3 Minute read with the title — Keeping Medium Authentic and with the subtitle — Removing spam accounts, and what that means for you. You must have seen that many Medium Handles with a horrible number of followings and very few followers. This is classified as Follow Spam by Medium and this is extremely common. They do so only for promoting their metered stories. And, Medium hates that. So, they are going to remove all those followers from your follower’s list and they can even permanently delete those accounts. Medium has been concerned about this issue for a long but it has not taken any strict actions yet.

If you are in the list of follow spammers, then, you have to be extremely careful because Medium can find your handle anytime and can delete it. This is what Medium has said in its recent post—

“The relationship between readers and writers is at the heart of Medium. With that in mind, we want to ensure that your follower and following counts only reflect quality users. As part of our ongoing work to provide the best possible user experience, we’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts across Medium starting today.”

Medium has also further explained the impacts of this decision on several thousand writers and thousands of publications running on Medium with a growing audience. They have said —

“You may see a change in your follower and following counts. However you’ll gain a more accurate sense of your audience size now that follower counts only contain authentic, quality users. Rest assured — this change will not affect your distribution or earnings.

Followers remain an important path to audience growth and best practices are still relevant. If you haven’t already, connect to Twitter so your audience can easily find you on Medium. Consider optimizing your Medium bio with relevant keywords, and post consistently in one or two topic(s) to increase discovery. And, of course, share your Medium work on other trusted platforms where you’ve built an audience.”

It means that this will not affect genuine writers negatively. Their followers' list will only show the authentic and genuine readers.

Medium has also explained what they are going to do with those follow-spam accounts. They have said —

“We will continue removing spam and other disingenuous accounts from Medium on a daily basis, as well as accurately reflecting your unfollow actions. So you won’t see significant shifts in your follower or following counts going forward, and you can trust that your followers are authentic and engaged. You can always flag an account you suspect of spam or other rules violations using our reporting tools for us to take a look at.”

They have clearly said that they will remove all spam and other disingenuous accounts from the platform.

They have not notified that how many accounts they had removed. But, from observation, it seems that they have already removed thousands of profiles. And still, they are working on it.

ILLUMINATION Lost 63k Followers

Yes, you read that right. Illumination — a publication where 1/3rd of Medium writers write lost 63k followers overnight. ILLUMINATION has had mentioned in its bio that it had 99k readers and 9.9k writers. Illumination is the most supportive publication for all newbie writers and even for established writers. So, it also gets tremendous support from Medium Members as well as spammers. But, Medium has now removed all the spammers from Illuminations followers’ list. Now, Illumination has only 35k followers. It has lost more than 60% of its followers.

It also means that Medium has deleted or suspended 63k accounts from its database.

Angelina Arakelian lost her Medium account

Angelina is a female Medium writer. She recently posted an update on a Facebook group. She said in her post —

“Hi everyone, I recently got a notification that my account may be getting suspended for no apparent reason.

I just wanted to remind you to save a copy of every piece you post on Medium, as it’s a very vulnerable platform — anything could happen anytime and all your content could get lost. Save them so you can post them on a personal website/another blogging platform as well.”

She has given a very important note to all Medium writers and I think you should too take the backup of your Medium data. You can do so through your settings. Just go to the setting and there you will find an option to download your data in a zip file.

Angelina has given an update that her account is now recovered. It was mistakenly being placed in Medium’s spam filter. But, not every account is getting mistakenly placed in the spam filter. So, be cautious!

What to do to Prevent Suspension?

Nothing, just go to your profile and click or touch on your followings and start unfollowing everyone. If you have 10k followings, then, you have to click that unfollow button at least 9k times, so, you have only 1k followings at last.

Final Thoughts

Whatever is Medium doing, doing for good. It is for our safety. So, we should support Medium in this decision. But, I would advise the Medium Team to give prior notice to writers before suspending their handle. If you are a paid member, then, they may give you a warning only as they are doing it on large scale and that can harm them financially. If you think you may also get suspended due to spam, then, you should send a sorry email to Medium. Medium will forgive you as they are kind to their users. They are not similar to angry Youtube(a product from Google LLC).

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Thanks for reading!

Sharique(CEO of Magzonal and Magzonal.com)