Hi Gautum! Jessica here. I’m a Product Manager at Medium leading up User Engagement. Our team launched new user onboarding a few weeks ago, where we have new users follow tags they’re interested in. Based on those tags, we then make user and publication suggestions. You’re actually featured user in one of our featured onboarding tags, “Media,” given that you’ve written a few stories with that tag which have gained traction:

The second big thing that happened a couple weeks ago is that we introduced native login and Google login, which has brought in a whole slew of new users who usually don’t have profile pictures (with FB/Twitter-only login options before, 99% of the time we could import a picture for the new user), so they look like shell accounts. Since these users are all new, they aren’t going to have much activity just yet. But, in response to your main question of whether they’re real: Yes, they’re real.

We do plan on making this experience and our ecosystem better — here are a couple of examples of how:

• Encourage users w/o profile pics and bios to add them to their Medium profile so that our site feels more real.
• Notify users when they’re featured in Onboarding — not only does it feel good, they’ll know why all of a sudden they’re getting more followers.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback! Would be great to hear from you next time you publish a story whether you see an uptick in views and recommends as a result of these new followers.