Follow for Follow: The Dangerous Medium Strategy?

Or a magic key to Medium’s gate of success? 🗝️

This story has been originally posted on April 25th, 2023, but sadly I have deleted it. I thought about this topic over and over again, and I came to the conclusion that this follow-for-follow thing is always trending and this story deserves to be republished, because it contains valuable information for many new Medium members. So I have added some new insights and decided to republish the story again. I hope you will like it. ✌️ 🙃

And just cause everybody’s doing it, Does that mean that I can, too? 🤔

So yeah… This whole situation took me back to my teenager years and reminded me this beautiful song:

The context of course is a bit different — it is not an unhappy love with a girl or boy, but a broken-heart story with a Medium platform. 💔😹

WTF are you talking about, dude? 😂

Although I have been registered on Medium for a few months, but only this week I took it more seriously — posted a few stories and got like… 10 reads.

Like I have put in hours and hours of work, trying my best to write and… I got 2 or 4 reads per story.

Even my Comments / Responses got more attention:

So the only thing that came to my mind was:

Dear almighty Algorithm of Medium, why are you hating me? Why are you not promoting my content? Why, oh, why? 😭 :D

Follow for Follow thing

So after seeing these disappointing Medium results, I started to search for tips and tricks on how to increase my reach.

I hoped to find inspiring stories about how people reached their first 100 subscribers, joined Medium Partner Program, and started to earn tons of money.

I thought I will find success stories, will learn from them, clap on them, and so on. But what I have found was…

A lot of Follow-for-Follow, #F4F, Sub4sub schemes. And it seems a lot of Mediumers are interested in doing this!

So the idea here is pretty simple: You follow me = I follow you back. Not because your stories are intriguing or interesting. Just because you follow me, I follow you. Great strategy, huh? 🤔

Is it “legal”?

So after finding these “methods”, I instantly began to wonder — is it legal? Is it permitted here on Medium?

As far as I know, other platforms (like YouTube) do not allow such a thing. And you can even get banned if you are participating in such schemes:

Because in the end, it is some sort of spam. It is not organic or natural. It is more or less the same as buying fake followers to “trick” the algorithm.

So I took a look at Medium Rules and here is what I’ve found:

In my opinion, it is quite clear that this method is not allowed on Medium either.

So is it worth it?

To be honest — I really don’t know.

But in general, from its essence, it is wrong.

Maybe it is a good (but also risky) thing to do, to get your first 100 followers, because then you will be able to monetize your stories. But then what?

There is a 99.9% chance that those fake followers, won’t care about your stories and content. In the end, they won’t increase your reading time (the metric you are earning from). They only care about that potential follow-back that they get from you. So what is the point here?

My conclusion:

If you want to earn money on Medium, the most important metric you should care about is reading time of your stories. Because without it — you won’t earn money.

And to increase your reading time, you have to do two things as best as you can:

• create interesting/valuable/engaging stories;
• smartly optimize/promote them (by choosing proper headline, thumbnail, tags, publication, even publishing time and so on).

That’s it! Follow-for-follow won’t help you here (in the long run especially).

Don’t understand me wrong — I am not judging anyone. Every single one has a different story and path in life in general.

⚠️ But just beware that there are some risks if you participate in follow-for-follow schemes. It is against policies. That is the whole point of this story.

IMPORTANT! You can be rejected to join Medium Partner Program, if you participate in follow-for-follow!

One more thing: when I was applying for Medium Partner Program (MPP), at first, my application was not approved, because I had some responses/comments on “follow-for-follow” stories (that were created by other Medium members).

‼️ Basically, I was ONLY asking people if follow-for-follow is “legal” on Medium platform and, honestly, I did not participate in this follow-for-follow thing by myself. So keep in mind, that even comments on certain stories can raise a red flag when applying to MPP. 🚩

This is the response that I’ve got from Medium team:

Luckily, my application was not completely rejected. I was given some sort of second chance to delete those responses and proceed further. Medium, thank you for that! 🙏😂

I don’t know if it happens to everyone — I assume that Medium reviewed my profile and saw some informative, “real” stories that I have written. Otherwise my application may have been rejected straightaway.

So anyway I have deleted those responses that were causing a “conflict” and… I got approved for MPP!!! 🥳

⚠️ So to sum up, this is one more proof that follow-for-follow strategy, in my opinion, is not worth it and may cause only troubles for you.

And yep… It is the time for the irony… It’s my time to beg you to subscribe. If you truly liked my story, you know what to do :D

I can’t promise you the follow-back, but I will definitely check your stories (increase your reading time, dude 😂). And if I will find them valuable and interesting for me, then I will follow you back.

Because that is the essence of Medium, in my opinion. Sorry, if you don’t like it!

That’s it for today, folks! StrangeCash, out! :D Peace! ✌️