The Most Disingenuous Medium Strategies Exposed
Uncovering the Fakest Ways to Succeed as a “Writer”
You may know some of these, you may not. You may have tried some of these, you may not. You may still be using some of these strategies, you may not. Medium isn’t the problem. The only problem with Medium is the people. And it is the people that come up with all of these ways to potentially game the system. But in the end, what is it really worth?
What is it worth to hang another internet medal around your neck? What does it feel like to value your words so little that you would do anything to get eyes on them, if only for a second? What is it worth to you to have creative integrity?
Buckle up. These are the most disingenuous Medium strategies exposed. Because you should know. Because you deserve to know. Maybe you already know. Then this is for the new writers who fall prey to all the traps advertised by the gurus and coaches out there.
Follow for Follow
Ah, the classic internet strategy. The one taught in several Medium “mastery” classes in the past. Follow everyone and they will all follow you back. It’s patently untrue, but it will scale your following up. But to what end? Anyone who follows you back just because you followed them will never read your work, but something tells me those who do follow for follow don’t have the true value of their work serve as the underlying core particulate of this method.
If you are following more people than are following you right now, ask yourself why. If you are following more than 1,000 people on Medium, ask yourself why. You can’t possibly think you are going to read works by all 1,000 writers, do you? Be honest with yourself. Why are you following so many people?
In response to a submission request that I got, as I always do, I checked to see the balance between following and followers. What I saw was something I have seen before, so I responded to the request as follows:
Hi (insert name),
I received your request to contribute to (a publication) on Medium, thank you. I have had a chance to review your Medium profile and I see you are following 8x as many people as are following you. We do not advocate or support the follow for follow strategy and we feel it devalues the actual following a writer has. Even if your (works) are good, this is not the best way to get eyes on them.
Best,
Jonathan
I found this to be a perfectly fair response. The writer did not. The writer had over 1,000 followers but was following more than 8,000 people on Medium. Why? Do you really think they earned those 1,000 followers? This was their response:
Too unfair. You’re judgemental in a hilarious way. And I don’t want to be a writer in publications of pompous people like you.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but don’t you think something is missing. What is the reason anyone would be following 8,000 people on a reading and writing site? I rest my case.
Tagging
Nothing makes me want to pull my hair out more than an unsolicited tag for the purposes of spamming, or in the eyes of the “writer”, a way to get me (or anyone for that matter) to notice their work. I’m not talking about a direct reference to another Medium writer as a way of giving props. I’m not talking about a true thank you to another Medium writer. I’m not talking about a pull quote tag because you are quoting someone on Medium. I am talking about the spam tag.
You know the spam tag. Clickbait title. Worse subtitle, backed by science. Headline. Words. Headline. Words. Quote. Headline. Words. Call-to-Action (actually called Call-to-Action). Unnecessary tagging of 100 writers on Medium “who might be interested in this gripping diatribe.” No, we are not interested at all.
The major problem with spam tagging is that it creates scroll time for works behind the paywall. So, if you run a publication that publishes all of its letters behind the paywall and then tag 100 “writers” a day, they all go to the story and scroll down, looking for where they are mentioned. Those scrolls are dollars.
Every time I get tagged by someone I don’t know on Medium, I cringe inside and tiny vomit. Once in a while, it is a very nice tag. Once in a long while. More often than not, it is a spam tag. Old me would respond in the comments with a somewhat biting tone. New me just reports to Medium as it is against the terms of service, as are all of these things on this list.
Tagging, then Deleting
The new move that people don’t think we are smart enough to figure out. The one most recently done by a new writer I won’t name who runs a new publication I won’t name. I got an alert to a tag from someone I didn’t know. I went to the story and scrolled down. This is important, I scrolled down looking for where I was tagged which is creating scroll time on a locked story. Do you see where this is going?
So, I scrolled and scrolled, but I didn’t find anything. I was not tagged. At first, I thought this was a genuine mistake until I saw who the writer was and what publication it was for. Now, they are introducing the new tag, then delete strategy. And it wasn’t just me. It was several writers I know. We all scrolled down to see where we were mentioned. We all paid that “writer”.
Spam Sham
Spam sham is currently not a word on Urban Dictionary. Maybe it should be. I seem to use it all the time. The way I define spam sham is the excessive application to multiple publications on Medium with no regard for their submission guidelines. Boom. Spam sham. Unless you run a publication, you might not understand just how bad this is here.
It’s basically the equivalent of someone walking in off the streets and just telling the New York Times that they want a job. They have no writing experience at all, they did not check if any positions were open, but they would like a daily column. Also, like now. Within the next hour.
Spam sham is a directive taught by several Medium “coaches”. The better ones say it in a way like, it couldn’t hurt to try. The worse ones tell people to just apply everywhere because why not? Why not? Because the editors who run publications take a long time to write their guidelines and for every rogue submission they get, it makes it harder to pay attention to the good ones.
All spam sham tells me about you is that you can’t follow instructions. In the real world, this means you will never get hired. Ever. And if you do, you will get fired for not following instructions.
Letters, Behind the Paywall
Medium created letters as a way to send out updates from publications that were not paywall creatures. You can not put a real newsletter behind the paywall. But some folks have started to just write their daily or weekly letters behind the paywall as a “story”. Why? Why do you think? Money.
When you write a letter that summarizes the stories of the day and you tag all of the writers you wrote a story that day, they will all scroll down to find themselves. But again, this is not supposed to be the type of thing you put behind the paywall every day. It’s actually against the terms of service to write “stories” with limited or no content, just links. But it happens every day.
Pyramid Schemes
It’s all in here if you really want to go down this rabbit hole.
Plagiarism
Lately, plagiarism has been running rampant on Medium. Both Jeff Barton (see, appropriate tagging to give props or a mention to a friend) and I have flagged multiple plagiarizers in the last month. They all had applied to one of our publications and in a shocking turn of events, all of them had also been a writer for one of those publications that has no oversight whatsoever.
Jeff responded to one “writer” as follows:
Thank you for reaching out and wanting to be a writer for (a publication). After reviewing the articles you submitted, especially the one titled “(title),” it appears to me you are copying and pasting from other people’s work which is plagiarism. You have copied portions of the articles below word for word and pasted them into your article:
(links included)
I have no tolerance for plagiarism and Medium has been notified.
Thanks,
Jeff
You would think that would be the end of the story. Ah, Medium “writers”. They didn’t let it end there even though we both checked the five websites and found word-for-word complete copies of entire paragraphs, if not the whole articles.
Thank you Jeff for your response! I too agree on plagiarism however I didn’t copy paste any of the content of my story. If you have read the full story, you may get to know.
Well- Thank you for sharing the links, I’ll go through them. I appreciate your time and consideration here.
Let me just confirm that this was not an understanding. There were verbatim copies everywhere. This is not uncommon. There is even a very “popular” Medium writer who was caught plagiarizing a long time ago and recently wrote a story about how it was incorrect and didn’t happen. Oh, it happened. I retain screenshots of everything. Please don’t make me use them.
Clap (Scroll) Groups
We used to call them clap groups when claps were the defining metric for payment behind the paywall, but now they should be referred to as scroll groups since scroll time is the prevailing metric. A clap group is when a group of people get together, usually online in a social media group, and agree to clap for each others’ work 50 times. Yes, this happened. Many, many times.
The same thing is still happening as it relates to scrolls, but now it’s mostly bolstered by some of the tagging and letter strategies as discussed above. But there are still sects of people, scroll sects, that scroll each others’ works back and forth. It’s basically the follow for follow of paywall metric hacking.
Short Commenting
This is really an Instagram bot special tactic, but it has infiltrated Medium as well. In order to garner followers, people will write the same general comments on many pieces every day. Nice. Really enjoyed this. Good job. We’ve all said those and meant it, but the writer usually knows us if we send something small. When they are a new reader and just let you know, it can be part of a short commenting strategy.
Tagging Comments
The only reason to five-tag a comment is in the hope that it somehow plays in your favor as a notch on the bedpost of the top writer gods. Have you ever seen a comment five-tagged? Or two-tagged? Or one-tagged? Why? It. Is. Just. A. Comment. And on someone else’s work nonetheless.
This isn’t the tagging I talked about at the top, this is subject tagging. So, someone drops a comment on someone else’s piece and says, “I loved this one. So philosophical.” And then they tag their own short comment with philosophy, existentialism, life lessons, self, and writing. See?
But, if there was a reason for it, maybe I can help figure it out…
Top Writer Fake Out
There’s nothing quite as awesome as going to look through the Top Writers in Poetry and then seeing someone there who not only can’t write well at all, but has never written poetry on the site. You might wonder how that is possible?
Well, if you use the letters, behind the paywall strategy you may decide to tag all of those links as poetry if there was a lot of poetry in your “letter”. If you do it often enough (every day) and the writers all scroll and read and you make money from that, you will become a Top Writer in Poetry without ever having written a poem. Fake out.
Why I Wrote This
I love my small corners of Medium where my friends, writers, and collaborators can all interact and work together in each other’s best interests. But to be on Medium is to unintentionally see the landscape through osmosis. And once you do, it’s hard to look away.
It’s hard to look away from the garbage littering the sidewalks that make it hard to find a path forward. It’s hard to look away from the abject spamming that is rationalized as a business strategy. It’s hard to look away from the droves of “writers” who spend more time hacking than writing.
I wrote this because I am an ethicist. I do understand that an internet site can not be run with an ethicist’s yardstick, but I can hope, can’t I? It’s how I run my publications and I constantly get flak for it (from the people who do these strategies), but if I am just being completely honest, I don’t care.
I don’t care because this is my corner. If you don’t want to get the overflow of this exposure, move to a different corner. Read different things. Play with those who play the same as you. But please, for the love of the Muse, stop pretending that any of these strategies are anything but the fakest way to succeed as a “writer”.
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