Would you buy followers? What about if they were real?

Happy Friday,

Did you know you can buy Medium followers?

Once Medium brought in the 100 followers rule and changed the partner program to stipulate that writers don’t get paid until they have 100 followers, it was inevitable.

There’s a lot of sites selling Medium followers.

Some of them sell claps, too. 500 claps. Ten bucks!!

I read a post by some guy saying they’re all “fake” and “robots” and telling people not to use those services.

Some of them are robots, for sure. But not all of them.

After I read that post, I did a little dive down that rabbit hole.

Boy, the stuff I found. lol. I’m working on a piece about those types of services. It’s not even about whether they’re legit. There’s a bigger point I’m hoping to make.

Buying 100 followers varies in price from $10 to $40. Give or take.

Some are obviously robots.

You can’t buy 100 followers for under $10 and think they’re real. lol. That’s a kind of gullibility I can’t wrap my head around.

But some offer a “guarantee” that the followers are real and you can go look at their profiles to see that they are. Price is higher. Of course. Those are the services that have five star ratings.

That’s if the ratings are real. Fake ratings aren’t unique to Amazon.

I’ll probably see if I can find some of the “buyers” on Medium and see if their followers stuck or fell off. If they’re robots, they’ll fall off.

Here’s the bigger point.

Let’s play pretend. Pretend there’s a team of 10 people who have 10 “pseudonyms” each and they’ll follow for cash and split the take.

The accounts might be real. The followers might stick.

But here’s what they’re not doing. They aren’t actually reading any of those people they followed for cash.

How could they? They’re too busy following people.

Here’s the dumb thing. People do the same thing for free. They join “follow” groups on Facebook and happily follow each other until they reach their required 100 followers. Yay. Goal achieved. Until they realize they still have no readers.

How is that different?

Are the FB groups somehow smarter or more ethical because they don’t involve money changing hands? Does “free” somehow make it better?

Are the paid services somehow worse and unethical simply because money is changing hands? Why does adding money into the equation make it bad?

I’m curious to hear what you think.

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More reading…

• The True Story Of Two Toddlers Who Survived The Titanic Alone

• 3 Features Medium Took Away. I Wish They’d Bring Them Back

• The “Witch” Who Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale

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P.S. If you are reading this in email, you can click the title to see the online version, where you can leave comments, just like on Medium.

xo,
Linda