MEDIUM|SATIRE

How To Properly Read My Medium Posts

Please follow my rules.

I was naïve when I first started writing on Medium. I thought it worked like social media or school essays, where people wrote and hoped the audience liked it. Then I saw all the articles from Medium authors with far more followers than I have, expressing frustration over how readers are interacting with their posts. Never would I have thought of ordering potential readers around regarding how to consume their content!

This is awesome. If much more successful Medium writers than I am can do this AND continue to grow their audience, it must be a key to success.

Without further ado, here are the rules to reading anything I post on Medium:

1. You are to accept the method I choose to write a post. Hate listicles? Too bad if that’s the format I choose, like for this piece. If I opt to write an essay, you will be okay with that. By the way, you Medium writers shouldn’t write in any format I disagree with you choosing for a post.
2. You will read my articles for at least as long as Medium says it should take to read them. If I write something Medium lists as a 20 minute read, you damn well better spend at least 20 minutes on it. Granted, the odds of me writing anything that long is 0%, but it’s the principle of the matter. I don’t care if it turns out the post isn’t relatable to you. I don’t care if you opened the article with the intent to read it, but the device you’re using is telling you it’s about to run out of power. You should’ve made sure it was sufficiently charged before opening my brilliant work. I don’t care if you read faster than Medium thinks an average person does. You’re probably so fancy pants you don’t take as long to walk from the bus to your destination as the route planner says you should too.
3. You better clap 50 claps or you’re wasting my time. So what if dividing by 50 can show the reality of how many people clapped for me? Can you easily divide by 50 without using a calculator, putting the equation into a browser or asking your smart device of choice? I think not! So what if you can click on the clap icon and see everyone who clapped? So what if claps are completely meaningless with regards to earnings in the Medium Partner Program? Claps tell me how popular my writing is and I need that ego stroking. What’s the point of writing anything otherwise?
4. Don’t highlight my posts! You may think you are engaging with my content. Next thing you know the article is nothing but highlighted. I may make hundreds off it at that point, but it won’t be enough to make me feel better over how ugly that story got in the process.
5. You must always comment and say how everything I said was genius or otherwise Pulitzer/Nobel Prize worthy. How dare you even consider reading anything I write and disagreeing with it! So what if by commenting a dissenting opinion makes the article more profitable in the end? So what if you bring up a point I overlooked? How dare you suggest I didn’t cover everything perfectly in my future award winning article! Either agree 100% with everything I say in your comment or don’t waste my time by reading the article to begin with.
6. Don’t follow me if you don’t write anything related to my topics of choice. If you don’t write about music, for example, there’s no way you could actually be interested in reading any articles about it. We write about what interests us and nothing interests us other than what we write about. Haven’t you figured this out by now?
7. Most importantly, you better have a damn sense of humor and realize this article is satire.

I promise if you treat me to a coffee, I will never become this uppity. I hope.

I can’t promise that by becoming a paying member of Medium via my link, you will love everything I post. I can promise you’ll find plenty of other authors here who write great things and aren’t remotely uppity to boot.