Like All Publications, Illumination Lost 63K Followers Overnight

It’s sad, but here’s why I think it’s good

What Happened?

It took one night and 63,000 of Illumination’s followers went down the drain. From 98K followers to 35K, Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s amazing publication left a lot of Medium shocked.

Why?

The reason for this? Bots. 63,000 of them. Medium announced on June 17th that it was “Keeping Medium Authentic” by “Removing spam accounts, and what that means for you.” (Keeping Medium Authentic)

“The relationship between readers and writers is at the heart of Medium. With that in mind, we want to ensure that your follower and following counts only reflect quality users. As part of our ongoing work to provide the best possible user experience, we’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts across Medium starting today.” (Keeping Medium Authentic)

What I Think, And Why I Think This Is Good

I think this for Illumination, this is extremely unfortunate and I am so sorry to Dr Mehmet Yildiz. However, since they were all spam accounts, none of them were contributing to the publication in any way, so it gives everyone a better idea of who is actually engaging with the publication. As Dr Mehmet Yildiz said himself, 35K Real Readers More Important Than 100K Fake Followers.

Although this is sad for Illumination and those who ‘lost’ followers, I believe this is good for Medium going forward. This new policy and continuous dump of spam accounts is going to permit writers to truly know how many engaged followers they have, not a fake number.

Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think down below.