Why I Won’t Follow You Just Because You Followed Me

A follow for a follow: the blogger’s drug deal

Since I joined Medium eight or nine months ago, I’ve always seen hopeful writers on Facebook, Twitter, etc, asking for people to follow them in exchange for them following you. Follow for a follow, the blogger’s drug deal. I’ve even watched videos from more established Medium writers advising new writers and bloggers to employ this tactic to get them more followers and readers.

But the whole point of having followers is to have people who enjoy your writing. People who don’t enjoy your writing, or never even bothered to read it before they gave you a few claps or highlighted some random passage without even reading it, will likely not read any of your work in the future. They are worth nothing to you if they don’t actually read your stuff. A writer who only followed you because they felt they owed you a favor, is useless.

If I read your work and I loved it so much that I followed you, you shouldn’t follow me out of a feeling of obligation. If I sucked, I sucked. If I could barely even write a coherent paragraph, as if I am without writing talent; why would you want to get daily or weekly notifications, reminding you that I had just published yet another piece of horrible writing?

If we are all being honest, not everyone has writing talent. Contrary to popular belief, very few people are good at it. I think it’s fair to say that for every one good writer, there are at least five or ten thousand people who have not even the tiniest molecule of writing talent. And that’s okay.

Just like not everyone can be a classical pianist or a professional basketball player or a great painter, not everyone can be a writer. Those people who cannot write well are probably good at a number of other things. I for one suck at math, and I struggle to remain conscious when reading anything scientific.

Writing is an art. Not everyone can do it, even if you are really unhappy in your current position, just wanting it to happen is not enough. Just wanting to escape your job or your asshole boss is not enough. At the end of the day, even for crappy commercial stuff, you must have something there. Even if you really want it to happen with all of your heart, you still need followers who actually want to read your work.

So I will not follow you just because you followed me. And I really hope that you look at my work, and the work of all the other writers you come across the same way. I will at least read some of your work to see if I like it enough that I would like to read more of it in the future. If I do like it that much, you won’t have to ask me to follow you. I’ll probably already be started reading one of your other pieces.

I read a lot; that’s what writers do. I’m happy to read more of your great writing, but I wouldn’t lie to you for the sake of politeness, or sparing your feelings or simply to give you so-called, moral support. If you are not good at writing, my misguided efforts at being supportive or “positive” could have kept you from pursuing something that you are really good at.

I’m sure I will be getting some rather unpleasant messages on this one. That’s what delete keys are for. Truth hurts. But a lie always hurts more. I can just imagine people searching my page for some piece of mediocrity they can use as creative ammunition, as they try to re-talk themselves into you can do it, if you just don’t give up, argument. But that bit of optimistic advice is more aptly applied to endeavors like losing stubborn belly fat or improving your typing speed.

You may indeed be a great writer, with all the natural talent of Toni Morrison or Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene, but a follow for a follow isn’t how great writers are made. Follow me because I followed you, is the tactic of bikini-clad Instagram influencers, not real writers. It’s like breaking into an empty safe. It’s just a lie that people tell you with the click of a mouse or the tap of a smartphone touch screen.