Growth Hack 4 Medium: 10 Ways to Draft on Millennials and Achieve Internet Stardom¹

This is an example of a vampire kiss. The woman in black is stealing the soul, chi, or mojo of the woman on the left. Thirsty is as thirsty does. This is why God put millennials on the earth, so that we could use them like bags of Internet Human Growth Hormone.

There has been an awakening… of Millennial hatred on Medium. Like many trends, Millennial hate existed on the Internet before this, and there was some of it here on Medium too, but over the past week, thanks in part to talia jane’s now infamous open letter, it became a “thing.” Please forgive me. I know I’m flogging a dead horse, but I was in Chicago for most of the dust up and missed all the lulz. I have to serve my “hot take” a little cold.

Millennials Are Publishing Gold

If you’re not currently exploiting Millennials on Medium, I have to wonder if you are even trying. Why should the CEO of Yelp get all of that Millennial goodness? Check this out;

Yes, bitches, that’s 13,000 views. What? You have more views than that? Get off my lawn. Go back to writing your self-help listicles and leave me alone.

For those of you still reading, you may wonder; how, Gutbloom, did you get SO MANY VIEWS??? Well, I’m going to let you in on a little “growth hack” that I discovered. If you comment on a Millennial’s post YOUR NUMBERS GO THROUGH THE ROOF. It turns out that there are two kinds of people in the world: Millennials, and people who hate Millennials. Guess what? Both read posts by Millennials!

If you comment on a Millennial’s post YOUR NUMBERS GO THROUGH THE ROOF

Step One: Find Your Mark

I drafted² on Ellie Guzman. Why Ellie? While it’s true she is smart and funny, that’s not why I picked her. I picked her because she went to USC, the institution that gave us Paul McCarthy, Neil Armstrong, Leo Buscaglia, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Herb Albert, Macy Gray, Mohamed Morsi, Joseph Heller, and, of course, OJ Simpson. USC alumni are obviously used to being exploited by the media. The fact that Ellie is on the west coast also helps. I believe strongly in maintaining the east coast/west coast feud in all media outlets, especially the newly minted ones like Medium.

What it looks like when someone my age “drafts” on a Millennial.

What’s important in exploiting millennials is that there is a proper power differential³ between you and your mark. You want to make sure that when you create your vampire link to them they can’t steal YOUR chi. On one hand, Ellie looks kind of dangerous. She is smart, funny, young, and went to a better college than me. That’s “yikes”, “yikes”, “yikes” on the slot machine of psychological risk management, but don’t worry! She’s also female, Latina, and underemployed. Ha, ha! I’ve got this. I’ve got a metric ton of privilege on her. Start with the fact that everybody calls me “Mr. Gutbloom,” while I, who have never met her, call her “Ellie”.

The Vampire Link

So, how do you steal the mojo of a Millennial? To properly conceptualize the power of a sympathetic link you have to understand what is called the “realistic view of language”. The ancients believed that there was an ontological connection between an object and the name connected to it. That’s why there is no word for “bear” in the Indo-European mother tongue. If you name it, it will come; so you don’t say the name “bear”. All of our words for bear are taboo surrogates, like “brown one.” The realistic view of language filters down to us with stories like Rumpelstiltskin (one of the oldest folk tales in Western culture) and why you don’t say the name of the devil. Saying the name of the devil summons him, so you call him “old scratch” instead. Likewise, G_d is very protective of his name. He is reluctant to give it to Moses in Exodus, and then enshrines a prohibition on its misuse as part of the covenant.

Medium, being a modern institution, doesn’t believe in superstition, so it wants you to use your real name, and in doing so, hands users the power to summon one another. If I wanted to, I could summon Ev Williams, Jon Krakauer, or John Battelle but why would I summon them? They don’t have the Millennial goodness. Notice how I did summon Ellie earlier. She will be here, and if I can trick her into recommending this piece, I WIN.

Who Cares About Views?

You might be thinking, “why bother? Who cares about views?” The answer is: I do. I can’t explain it, but for some reason I care more about views than my own dental health, which isn’t saying very much. Let me try again. I care more about views than cleaning up the mess in the basement or getting dressed, both of which I should have done before writing this.

While you might not think 10,000 views in a month is a big deal, when I get together with my alte kocker⁴ friends I brag about those views. They laugh at me, but I know that when they are talking to their wives or friends they say, “My friend Gutbloom, he’s an Internet star. He has like 10,000 followers” (its so easy to confuse statistics). OK, maybe they don’t say that. Maybe they only say that in my delusional fantasies about their private lives, but still, that’s something. Isn’t it?

Thanks, Ellie.

Footnotes

¹ Notice the genius of my clickbait headline. The words “Growth”, “Medium” and Numbers, numbers sell. I also got the word “Millennial” in there, and in case the article was TL/DR, Millennials are Internet gold right now.

² “Drafted” as in NASCAR drafted.

³ “Differential” is Millennial speak for “difference”