I Contacted Medium to Delete Fake Followers From My Profile
And their answer surprised and made me sad at the same time
I’ve recently crossed the line of writing on Medium for over a year. While it had been a fun journey I have made some big steps this year when looking at my followers count.
On the first of January this year, I still had less than one thousand followers. Seven months later I’m close to 30 thousand followers. Sounds amazing. Sounds impossible. Sounds ridiculous.
But what it is the most for me — unreal. I mean it in a way I don’t believe those numbers. The follower number has exploded since February this year. But not so much my stats. While I had a constant increase in reads and earnings, it was rather a slow increase connected to the rising effort I put into Medium. As soon as I would write two articles less in one week, the earnings dropped.
And the earnings and statistics by all means do not represent even a thousand people reading my work. I rarely ever get over 100 reads on a piece. This meant for me the follower numbers have only one reason:
It must be fake followers
Those people following me but not increasing my reads must represent a large number of fake followers on my profile. The conversations about such problems on the platform had been going around for quite some time already so I was sure this was the problem in my case too.
Medium also got aware of it and started cleaning up. Deleting thousands and thousands of bots and fake accounts, many writers and publications reported decreasing follower numbers due to the “clean-up process”.
I expected the same to happen to me. I actually was prepared for seeing my followers dropping in thousands. I checked daily and still, the opposite happened. Each week another thousand followers joined my team.
I tried to focus on writing and ignored statistics and increasing follower numbers. But eventually, I decided to contact Medium and point out my account as being followed by many fake accounts.
I must do something
Deciding to get active and writing a message to the help center of Medium I explained my situation and added a screenshot of the current follower numbers and another screenshot of the stats.
I was sure it would take some time for them to find all those bots and did not expect a quick reply. And I also was sure about the outcome of this situation. I was sure I would lose thousands of my followers.
Then, the reply came
But it all came very differently.
When I saw the response pop up in my email server I quickly clicked on it, scanned it, and couldn’t believe it. Did I read that correctly? Let me go through it again.
“We looked into your account, and you are being presented on many surfaces as a suggested account to follow.”
Wait, that is great, right? Medium is promoting my profile to many readers? I feel honored. I should be proud of this. This is really cool! But let me continue reading.
“What is happening that as new people join Medium, they have a high chance and opportunity of following you, but might not be as active readers as your core audience.”
Right, I understand. So when new people join Medium, they do see my profile and quickly press “follow”. But most of them won’t turn into loyal readers. Makes sense. That’s just sometimes how it is.
What else do they have to say?
“So while your follow count is increasing, it isn’t translating to views/reads on your stories. We understand this isn’t a great experience, and are looking at situations like this to make it better for creators such as yourself.”
Correct, that is what I was saying. And you are right, this isn’t just a demotivating experience but it actually sucks. While people see my profile thinking I must be a great writer earning a living on Medium with so many followers, I barely get more reads than I did back in January with less than one thousand followers.
So what does that mean for the future?
“Please bear with us, and you’ll see improvements in the future.”
Right. I say thanks for looking into my account and appreciate the reply. I strongly hope to see improvements in the future because if there are 27 thousand real people out there who decided to press “follow” on my account it would be great if at least a tenth of them get shown my articles as well and therefore get the opportunity to read my work.
What can I do?
After I received the message I quickly responded with a thanking reply and then archived it all. The thoughts about having fake followers. The statistics that don’t represent my real follower counts. And my feelings about it all.
Because you know what?
There’s nothing I can do to change it. Literally nothing. All I can do is what I did before.
Keep on writing. Write more. Write better. Proofread more. Submit to new publications. Interact with those readers I have. Be grateful for the “core audience” I do have. Because those readers and writers I truly value. They read almost every article, highlight, and clap. And they do all of that to represent my following of 27 thousand “readers”.
And aside from writing, I’ll return the same to my favorite writers by reading their work, highlighting my favorite phrases, and clap as many times as the computer allows it.
Because this is in the end why I’m here.
Because of the community. Because of the friendships I made. Because of the kind souls I met. And because I love to write.
Final words
In case you’re in a similar situation having lots of followers but weak stats, don’t worry. You’re not the only one. And Medium is aware of it. Not sure what they can do to change it but they are aware of the problem at least.
And while we are all wasting our time trying to figure out how the algorithm works and how we can outsmart the system we should just get back to what we can do best:
Writing.
Thank you for reading and thank you for listening to my story. Sometimes we also have to rant out here and I appreciate your open ear to my problems. I am incredibly grateful for every loyal reader following my journey. I appreciate you taking your time to read my work and leave a lovely response. I smile every time I see one of you have left some kind words behind.
You make me smile.
You are the reason why I do write out here.
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