The Tantalizing Scam Medium has Unwittingly Created

This isn’t an anti-Medium story — it’s a story about how people manipulate Medium

Everyone involved with The Unseen Truth has been a part of Medium for at least several years now. We’ve all seen a ton of changes throughout that time. We’ve all also seen an absolute slew of scams make their way through the platform.

Ironically, the best of all of them is the one that almost nobody acknowledges is a scam at all.

I’m talking about read-for-read scams.

Over the years, we’ve seen so many individuals, groups, publications, cliques, and even one person making 30+ accounts, signing each of them up for the partner program, and then mercilessly using each account to read the garbage published on each of the other accounts in an attempt to generate their own, virtually unlimited income stream — or so they thought.

But even that wasn’t — and isn’t — the best of the Medium scams.

No, instead, like all good scams, the people who run the best scam need to convince their hapless victims that participation in the scam is both entirely legit and completely mutually beneficial.

Enter what I call, “the community read for read scam.”

The perpetrators of these scams are some of the nicest people you will ever meet.

In fact, every single one of them will work diligently to convince new unsuspecting victims that they are only organizing one of these RFR clubs as a way to “give back” to the community that helped them achieve their massive successes.

It’s as if giving those unsuspecting victims the “honor” of reading the perp’s highly anticipated next Medium blog before anyone else gets the chance, will immediately bestow upon the newbie victims the ‘magic sauce’ that will unlock the ability to earn far beyond the traditional $100 to $150 per month most Medium writers make.

Now here’s where this story gets great — Please let us know in the comments if you can relate to the scenario.

All you have to do to reap the benefits of this wonderful new mutual admiration societal clique of Medium writers is to say you want to join, be a member of The Partnership Program in good standing and preferably a “Friend of Medium,” agree to read (always for more than 30 seconds), highlight, clap, and comment on no less than 5 stories written by fellow group members, each week, then sit back and watch your stats skyrocket baby!

Of course, if you’ve participated in one of these, in any of their hundreds of iterations, (it’s okay we’ve all tried them at one point or another) you know by now that they never work.

But that’s only the first issue.

There are also a lot of inherent and fraudulent issues involved with these RFR group scams, not the least of which is that once you agree to sell your soul, you immediately devalue the idea of having to write great content to attract reads, comments, highlights, claps and read time.

Instead, a finite number of each will now immediately befall you even if you published your grocery list — and all because you joined a group that wants to “pay something back” to the Medium community out of the goodness of their heart.

Let’s be straight, we all know that’s not how this platform is supposed to work.

The ‘masterminds’ (and I do use that term very loosely) of these RFR scams, will almost always sell the guilt away by telling you that their second goal (after paying something back), is to create a solid core of avid Medium users that want to form a ‘family.’

By forming a family, they mean a group of dedicated, money-focused Medium bloggers who are willing to commit to artificially increasing each other’s read and interaction times without any regard whatsoever for the nature, subject, theme, level, or quality of what anyone involved is actually creating.

Sure, there are even a few of these that pretend to care what each new victim writes so they at least limit the subject matter to make it look a little more legit, but at their core, every RFR scam is the same. It’s also why none of them last.

As I’m sure you’ve already found out for yourself, the only person or people who truly benefit from these scams are the organizers of these groups.

That’s because, as an homage to the people who recruited them, you can guarantee that every person in the group (feeling honored to have been chosen), will read the articles posted by the recruiters first, more completely, and sometimes even more than once.

But to maximize the effectiveness of these scams, it does the organizers a tremendous benefit if they can recruit from a position of reverie.

In short, that means that if the organizers are people who are considered ‘Medium Royalty’ — you know, the ones who most everyone working on this platform believes make several thousands of dollars per month — the ones who represent the distinct elite minority who continuously try to convince the rest of us that they have close relationships with the people who run Medium’s day to day operations, possess inside information very few other people on the platform know, or are, in short, Medium’s influencers.

Scams like this are a huge part of the reason The Partner Program doesn’t work like it’s intended. It’s not because of any mysteriously omnipotent algorithm or how said algo does or does not function properly.

No, it’s because money is involved. Money that anyone can earn from the relative safety and security of their own home without ever even having to put pants on.

And whenever money is involved, so is greed.

Whenever the ability to acquire money without what is largely considered to be hard work presents itself, there will always be some who will dedicate themselves to finding ways they can manipulate the situation into giving themselves an unfair advantage over everyone else.

Yes, sorry to be the one to tell you, but Medium’s algorithm and distribution systems never work because too many people are constantly working their fingers to the bone trying to manipulate each of them for their own personal gain.

So how can that affect how your story performs on Medium? Simple. The Algorithm — any algorithm — is designed to look for patterns, especially hot ones, or ones that are generating a large number of views, the longest duration read times, the biggest number of claps, and the highest amount of comments.

When the algo picks up on these things, it establishes them as ‘trending’ and adds algo weight to them. So when, not if, but when, this happens, the little people who weren’t on that manipulative gravy train, suffer depleted distribution because whatever they are producing — doesn't even slightly matter what it is — isn't part of what’s trending.

That’s exactly what RFR scams are. It’s also exactly what Medium Royalty people are. You would do well to avoid both.

And that’s The Unsettling Truth.

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