Come See the Hacks at the Cyber Circus Freak Show!

Two dreaded secrets of how to “succeed” as an online writer

Help! Medium is haunting me by sending me a steady stream of hackneyed meta-articles about how to succeed as a writer on Medium. It’s a mobius strip made of pure narcissism, a social media platform’s equivalent of that self-indulgent fellow who can’t stop talking about himself.

Granted, I rubbed the genie’s lamp by clicking on a few of those articles — just to infuriate me, you understand, and to use that disgust as motivation to write something else. But once the algorithm mindlessly sees that you’re interested in something, it will send you more and more of it until you’re swimming in that content.

Algorithms in search of hacks and sophists

I clicked on one of those articles recently, called “The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Establishing a Presence on Medium,” by Chris Sowers. The article’s from 2018, but the algorithm still passes it around in 2022, which is perhaps one reason why the article has a whopping 14.6K claps and over 200 comments.

Sowers aims his article at those who are surprised when they get crickets for readers even though the internet makes writing and publishing so easy. If only someone could come along and lay out the simple steps that even you can take to increase your readership. Sowers obliges by providing the lamest, most hackneyed steps you can think of — all while ignoring the elephant in the room.

Here are his steps:

• Figure out your topic and tags
• Identify target publications
• Time to write (with “quality writing,” “great headline,” “eye-catching image,” and proper “formatting”)
• Submit your draft to publications
• Keep trying

Easy, right?

Mind you, those are the steps you’d want to know about if you were an elderly person, you’ve lived under a rock for a decade, and on a whim you’re trying your hand at writing even though you barely know how to use a computer. These are the very steps that virtually every Medium publication lists in its guide on submitting articles. These steps are elementary and commonplace. So, this is the equivalent of teaching someone how to succeed financially as a writer by teaching her the alphabet.

But there are evidently swarms of readers who are craving such sophistical advice. At least, the algorithm still assumes you might want to delude yourself into thinking that building an audience on Medium is as easy as following those basic steps. Or again, despite the rumors you hear about how some Medium publications don’t publish articles about Medium, perhaps the algorithm likes to promote those meta-articles as a kind of advertisement. It would be like all the screens at McDonald’s headquarters playing ads for McDonald’s hamburgers on an hourly basis.

Oh, and are you curious about whether Chris Sowers went on from setting forth those marvellous insights to overflowing with an even greater abundance of wise advice?

Sorry, then, to disappoint you, but in 2021 Sowers switched from writing the usual self-help, meta-article fluff pieces (“How to Set Aside Distractions so You Can Write with Purpose,” “3 Fundamental Writing Techniques You Have to Master,” “A Key to Happiness and Productivity at Work is Right Under Your Nose,” etc.) to posting mainly monthly lists of publications where writers can publish (as in “Calls for Submissions — Where to Get Published (week of July 5, 2021”).

In short, although in his Medium profile he calls himself a writer’s “coach,” Sowers isn’t a real writer so much as he’s a human extension of the algorithms the online writing industry uses to attract lemmings to its ecosystem.

The internet as Idiocracy

A real writer would have addressed the question of how to succeed on Medium, by ignoring the low-hanging fruit and pointing out that there’s an elephant in the room: Medium is a website on the internet and is therefore in direct competition with the likes of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, and Pornhub.

Thus, assuming you’re a writer who’s thinking of success as a matter of financial reward for the size of your readership, I’ll reveal the primary secret for those who want to “succeed” on a platform like Medium. Are you ready for it? It’s the hidden name of God, so you need to be ready for it. It will blow your mind, so I’m just saying you’d better be prepared. Ready? Okay, here goes:

Write only dumb things.

There you have it, the Key to the Kingdom, the Holy Grail, the Vision of the Kwisatz Haderach.

You see, all readers of digital content would rather be bumming around on social media, watching cat videos, ASMR, or porn. Due to the digitization of content, the highbrow medium of writing is now on the same cultural playing field as the more mindless forms of entertainment.

Suppose there’s a circus in town that attracts hundreds of customers a day. They’re all there to see the flashing lights and the two-headed snake, to eat cotton candy, and to lose some money playing shabby, rigged games. How foolish would it be for a fellow customer to step onto a soap box at the circus and to launch into a disquisition on philosophy, religion, politics, science, or some other highbrow subject, as though that speaker were instead at a college lecture hall?

No, it’s a question of reading the room. If your articles are in direct competition with cat videos, Twitter fights, and porn clips, because readers can easily click from one thing to the next without warning, you’d better be sure your articles are the linguistic equivalents of cat videos, Twitter fights, or porn clips.

As a writer who wants to “succeed,” you’ve got to make your content dumb, dumb, dumb. So stupefyingly, aggravatingly dumb. And that’s just for starters. You’ve got to pander and flatter. You’ve got to titillate and infantilize and lie by being oh so winsome and uplifting: Everything’s all right, ladies and gentlemen. Step right this way, just a little deeper into the circus freak show!

Lucking out at the circus

Now, there’s a secondary path which gives hope to writers who are more interested in exploring ideas than in succeeding as a writer in capitalistic terms. Here’s the bonus procedure:

Be lucky.

After all, social media outlets are like lotteries or slot machines. The purpose is to addict the users. And the randomness that drives these systems spills out, sometimes rewarding even thoughtful or negative, doomsaying writers.

Thus, you have your Umair Haques and your Jessica Wildfires. They benefited from the network effects and power-law dynamics, by being early adopters of Medium as a writing platform and by publishing so often, but they also got lucky in going viral. You can tell they’re lucky because although they’re hard-working and far more popular than the average Medium writer, and their content isn’t dumb by Medium’s standards, that content isn’t orders of magnitude more thoughtful or even more critical than that of plenty of other writers on the platform who aren’t nearly so well-known.

Evidently, as in a lottery, a few writers get lucky while most don’t. The algorithm that selects which articles to promote isn’t wise enough to be meritocratic. Indeed, when that algorithm shows a writer its face or its backside, what prophet can predict which end it will be?

Although the vast majority of Medium readers are there to visit a side-tent at the greater cyber circus freak show which is the internet, the writing platform is still part of that circus so the readers are bound to be surprised now and again. They might see a bearded lady, a fish from Mars, or a doomer penning daily criticisms of consumer culture.

The few superstar thoughtful attractions have mastered the second directive: those writers got lucky. Their snowball started rolling down the hill relatively early so there’s little snow left for others, or they found a niche the algorithm can’t ignore but isn’t eager to replicate. Too much doom and gloom and the platform wouldn’t be upholding the primary directive, which is that Medium writers who want to “succeed” should write only dumb content to attract the broadest possible audience (“broad” being a euphemism for “lowbrow”).

Protect the secrets

By imparting these twin truths I’ve initiated you into a secret society that operates within the cyber circus. I’ve reminded you that there’s an elephant in the room and I’ve pointed out that shadowy algorithms rule here — along with the weaknesses of the writers and readers that are exploited by the platform that addicts those crowds.

Guard these secret truths with your life and try, at least, to be a halfway honourable addict and dupe at the circus. Treat the genres of self-help pandering and how-to hackery with the contempt they deserve, according to the higher standard.