I lost 2200 followers on Medium

My weird take on that...

Happy Friday…

Medium cleaned house yesterday. Apparently, they finally decided to delete all the spam accounts. Here’s what they said;

The relationship between readers and writers is at the heart of Medium. With that in mind, we want to ensure that your follower and following counts only reflect quality users. As part of our ongoing work to provide the best possible user experience, we’ll be removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts across Medium starting today.

They said “rest assured, it won’t affect pay or distribution”

Because, you know… spammers aren’t reading posts or interacting anyway.

I lost over 2200 followers. Whoosh. Gone.

Which is — whatever. It sucked to see, but if they were spammers, they weren’t reading my writing anyway.

They weren’t posting spam, either, though. At least, not on my posts. I could count the spam comments I’ve ever had on one hand. On all my posts. For all of time.

I mean, maybe they followed me but didn’t spam me? I have no idea. I’ll have to trust the powers that be.

But it made me think of something else…

The slider bar of usage…

If there was a slider bar for how we use Medium, spammers would be at the far left side. They bring nothing to the table. On the other side would be those amazing readers who engage. They read the article, clap and leave a comment.

If you could graph that, the engaged side would look real sparse. Those people are the true gold to a writer. You’re the ones we’re writing for.

And, may I add — if you’re reading this, you’re one of them. Gold. Pure gold and you have no idea how much I appreciate you. You are not like the madding crowd.

Here’s a real life example.

My most popular piece (so far) has 123,000 views. It has a 50% read rate, which means over 60,000 people actually read the piece. You know how many of those 60,000 actual living, breathing readers bothered to leave a comment? 42.

Know how many clapped? 1,042. Out of 60,000.

The rest just read the article and left. They couldn’t be bothered to hit the clap icon or take a second to say “hey, thanks.”

I don’t get it.

I mean — I sort of do. People tend to think the world is made of content and they just consume and move along. Like a hot dog eating contest where people shove food in their mouth and swallow so fast they can’t even taste anything.

No appreciation. Just consumption.

I suspect the people who engage are mostly writers themselves. Because they know what it feels like when no one engages. It’s not like we vomit out posts in 20 minutes. Sometimes they take untold hours to research, write, edit and cite sources.

One day, some woman posted a short comment on one of my stories.

She just said “So funny — thank you!”

I’m sure she had no idea how much that made me smile. Because she took a freaking second to acknowledge the person behind the content she enjoyed.

I’m glad Medium got rid of the spammers.

Now I wish they’d do something to encourage engagement because those of us left after the purge are real human beings. And humans like to feel appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

/rant

:)

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What I wrote this week…

• $20,000 Dystopian Fiction Writing Challenge
  

• Honey, It Doesn’t Matter If He’s A Narcissist
  

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Thought for the day…

“Action speaks louder than words—but not nearly as often. ”

~Mark Twain

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Clicking the ❤ is free and a nice way to say you enjoy my writing. :)

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Have a great weekend…

xo,
Linda