Writing on Medium
My Follower List is a Disheveled Mess and Badly in Need of a Haircut
If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself
Obviously, things have gone a bit sideways here and no small amount of digital ink has been spilled on the latest vagaries and mysteries of what has gone down on Medium lately has been documented.
But since Mediumcorp rarely lets the people who produce its content know what is going on — possibly because it doesn’t know, itself — we rely, as always, on fellow writers’ articles to pull apart the plate of spaghetti.
Justiss Goode | F😄M does a great job of rounding things up in one place here. She asks some key questions about what people are paying for in the Friends of Medium programme. Since its unveiling six months ago with the promise of increased exposure and distribution in exchange for a tripling of the yearly subscription fee, many who bought in have seen the bottom fall out of their little empires in the subsequent months.
But the tote bag was nice.
The issue seems to be two fold: first that due to an attempt to deal with the rash of spam accounts, bots and activities of a fraudulent nature, there has been a cull of profiles and some unfortunates have gotten swept up in the dragnet and have had their accounts suspended.
The second is that the good feeling of community and financial reward that many had experienced last August and September has pretty much dissipated and many writers’ metrics have returned to pre-August levels.
I include myself in this. The plummet has been very real.
If they are indeed deleting the kinds of fake profiles that I mentioned above, then I am all for it. Even — or especially — if it means that my follower count drops drastically.
I’ve always believed that follower counts mean absolutely nothing, since it’s authentic readers you want. But also that there is a reason that it is the only displayed metric near our names: to remind us that at its root, no matter how elevated we want to believe this is, this is still social media and it is still a competition for eyeballs.
But unlike many, I hadn’t noticed the sudden disappearance in the writers I follow closest, nor had I seen a drop in my own follower totals. Granted, the explosion I saw towards last fall had stopped and growth had slowed.
It was roughly 90% empty accounts that were causing this growth, but I didn’t question it at the time. I saw the number go up drastically and just like anyone in the midst of something like that, I put off the consequences until later.
It was just easy. I saw the money going up at the same time and put two and two together. There was an obvious link. How could having more accounts attached to me be a bad thing?
It turns out there is an answer to that question.
It was brought to my attention when I wondered out loud how someone (ie: me) with X number of followers was only getting Y number of reads within 24–48 hours of publishing, before the story seemed to disappear altogether.
Since there is always gold in the comments of many articles, I took a piece of advice from pockett dessert, who told me that it’s the fake accounts in my follower list that are messing things up for me. In short, my stories go out and are ignored by “people” who purport to hang on my every word. And the algorithm takes that to mean that there is no interest in them.
They are ignored because they don’t exist as “actual people”.
It was, I decided, high time for me to take the bull by the horns and perform a self-cull. And off I went, going through my entire follower list on a machete wielding blocking and deleting rampage. Anyone with a made up sounding name, no profile pic, no articles and less than 50 followers, or at least two out of four of these things got the immediate and unsympathetic chop.
It took hours and is still ongoing. Trust me when I tell you that it is a tedious and mind numbing task. But it is also eye opening as far as the number of empty profiles that I let in.
If I see an avatar profile pic.
If I see any kind of url or phone number in the first two articles.
If I see that the first article is anything related to how to game this platform, how to make $10,000 a month, or any kind of follow for follow anything.
If I see anything related to bitcoin, the Ugandan Illuminati, or see that a person has published their last (or first) ten articles in the last two days.
If you are trying to sell me anything. If you are posing as an established writer and want me to join your telegram group.
I think I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing shady when it is staring me in the face.
I realize that such drastic actions might cost me a few legitimate readers, but the vast majority of these profiles that I’m getting rid of are the ones that are fucking up the algorithm for me right now and causing the plummet in all my metrics.
I think I’ve shed around 1000 “followers” so far and I have no idea how many more there are to go. And though it is taking forever to do it, I think it will be worth it in the end. The total number of subscribers has dropped by about 20% and I lost a few of the remaining referred memberships I had been collecting on.
I even found one who copied and pasted my highest ever grossing article. It had zero engagement, interestingly.
Moving forward, no more blind acceptance of follows. I look at each incoming profile and if I can tell that there is no way the “person” attached to it will ever be a reader, then sorry not sorry.
It’s too soon to tell if there has been any improvement in the rest of my metrics, but enough’s enough. Consider it my little way of pushing back against being pushed around by the mysterious vagaries of some faceless force that decides whether I live or die here.
I don’t want followers. I want readers. Now there is a little more room for the latter. It’s actually quite liberating, giving yourself a haircut without a mirror like this.