Club Meedz
Starting Over on Medium
Confessions of a former disciple of Follow-4-Follow
I followed 2700+ writers on Medium. Should we question the wisdom of that approach?
Before Medium, my writing career consisted of ten failed blog posts on my business website. Roughly fifty percent of my readership was my wife, reluctantly wading through poorly-formatted and low-quality word nuggets.¹
Imagine how inspirational the after-success story would be were I a Medium legend like Tim Denning or Smillew Rahcuef reflecting on my humble beginnings. I am not, and I don’t want to be.
I'm here because I enjoy reading and writing stories and love this ragged little community of writer-persons. It's not about the money. ²
The pennies and micro-pennies
As a small business owner, Medium is more of a liability than an asset. The financial reality is for every client that books a Team Event or professional development Workshop; my business earns more revenue than a year on Medium. Before anyone calls me Pappa Moneybags and asks for a loan, know that it takes hundreds of non-billable hours creating, refining, and marketing those client experiences —i.e., "I don't have money either."
If acting in my financial best interest, there would be ZERO time for reading and writing on Medium. All those wasted nights and effort giggling about Fartwaffles and Phantom Poopers should be funneled into sales and marketing.
If only we were created to approach life like an AI or empathyless CEO — whose only concern is Q2 Shareholder Sentiment. But a compelling desire exists to create, design, and give new life to ideas burning inside. Without this online canvas, how long before that plasma-hot desire consumed organs into biowaste ash?
The Medium community helps with the loneliness of solopreneurship and helps meet tangible emotional and psychological needs in my life.
My strategic error
Back to the point of this story, my entry into the bizarrely unique Medium ecosystem needed more knowledge and context to succeed. Not knowing how to navigate my entry into the wild west of writing platforms, I defaulted to my background in experiential education. We discover the path forward through observations and reflections on our experiments.
In my first few months, I tried EVERYTHING. One of those failed experiments was Follow-4-Follow.
Follow-4-Follow
In my sophomoric naivety, my reading queue filled with every blooming story about getting the first 100 followers to join the Medium Partner Program. When confronted with Category- 5 tag storms, each writer was added to my list without waking a dormant synapse in my tiny brain.
When someone followed me, I immediately followed them back, regardless of my intentions of reading their articles.
How could my rise to Medium glory be halted long enough to take fourteen seconds and scroll through my new follower's profile? Follow, Follow, Follow, no matter what.
If it costs me nothing to follow someone else, why not follow everyone?
A pattern
My initial analysis revealed a surprising truth in the popular writers I followed.
Success= 4:1 Follow to Follower Ratio
If you want 1000 followers, you need to follow 4000 people. Apart from the Medium royalty with 89k followers — who only follow eleven people — my observations showed this pattern consistently at the 100, 1000, 5000, and 10,000 follower thresholds.
I have 1500 followers and follow 2700 people. That's a 2:1 FFR ratio. Based on my formula, I am twice as successful as the average writer with the same following. Impressive right?
Nope.
Our follower count is irrelevant because followers and readers share a low correlation.
Why did I believe F4F would work?
My faulty reasoning:
“If I follow EVERYONE, then the collective masses will read one of my stories and be instantly hooked on a crystal meth-like urge to read my delightedly playful and irreverent humor.”
Let's say the whole #AddictedToMark thing never materialized. If you are still reading this story, you can guess that my modest readership came from changing my approach.
The Community
Growing to appreciate the broad spectrum of talented wordies in the Mediumverse, I stopped trying to be viral and enjoyed interacting with ideas and people. Club Meedz became my infinite playground to connect with brilliant, sassy, satirical, humorous, creative, and mesmerizing storytellers. My evenings on Medium replaced an unhealthy habit of social media doom scrolling.
Read, Read, Read, never stop reading. I love it here!
But are there limits to the size of an authentic community?
The Dunbar Number
Fans of Malcolm Gladwell will recognize Dunbar's Number as a limit to the effective relational size of a community or organization.
Extrapolating from human neocortex volume, he predicted that humans would cluster into groups between 107.6 and 248.6, with an average group size of about 150. This is “Dunbar’s Number,” which Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his bestselling book, The Tipping Point.
— Jim Davies
You can have a stable social relationship with only so many people.
Conclusion
I am unfollowing all 2700 people on my list and starting over with a handful of people. If you need to unfollow me in response, I understand.
I aim to find my Dunbar number of Medium relationships and share life with a realistic number of other writers. I hope you find this choice made out of wisdom, not selfishness, and I love you all.
Cheers.
Footnotes
¹ Thanks to foresight in my wedding planning, included in our vows was the phrase,
“I promise if my spouse ever undertakes a hobby that he pretends is a professional online writing career, I will grudgingly support him by reading his shenanigans, hijinks, and tomfoolery faithfully without complaint — even if I believe his word babies to be unfunny nonsense. Til death do us part.”
² Full Disclosure — If T-Paine Stumplewocky handed over the keys to the Boost machine, I certainly wouldn't complain. Who doesn't love when someone points a t-shirt cannon of $$$ your way?
³ Davies, Jim. "How Many Real Friends Can You Have at Once." Oct 20, 2015. https://nautil.us/how-many-real-friends-can-you-have-at-once-235665/
Want some ridiculous Medium-Themed shenanigans? Enjoy this Club Meedz favorite.