100 followers in 1 year and some thoughts about Medium
It’s been an interesting year…
It’s been a year since I first posted on Medium. It was a review of my favourite animated film, The Aristocats, which I have since elaborated on.
Thirty articles later, I now have over 100 followers.
Thirty articles later, I have about 5 readers…
Overall, I’m quite disappointed with Medium.
My intention was, firstly, to write one article a week in order to improve my writing technique and to create a good habit. I failed at this partly due to other writing projects (including NaNoWriMo) and due to Real Life stepping in. But overall I’m quite pleased with the amount that I write, tending more towards quality than quantity. Looking back, I can see an improvement.
My other intention — more of a hope, really — was that my blog might be noticed by someone and hopefully that would lead to more opportunities. And this has happened. But it has nothing to do with the number of ‘followers’ I have.
Medium was not the welcoming community of writers that I expected it would be. I hoped it would be more open, more like a forum. Instead, I found that half the articles are member-only, and a lot of writers seem to be concerned only with acquiring followers for their own image or “brand”, rather than actually engaging with other writers on the platform.
While I appreciate that writers should be able to make money from their work, it does make it difficult for those of us who are writing for pleasure. It seems to me that Medium is biased towards more established writers. Further, it is biased towards the topics of “Business” (opinion with jargon) — “Productivity” (myth) — and “Science” (not peer reviewed lol).
With everyone else left talking into The Void…
I found myself being ‘followed’ by people who had not even read or clapped for my articles. Evidently, they expect me to follow back. And that’s actually quite rude. Have some common decency and I might follow you, but I won’t subscribe to mediocre posts by mediocre writers, and I wish people wouldn’t follow me unless they are genuine.
I find the… calibre of many writers who follow me quite annoying. It’s almost embarrassing to be associated with them…
However, there are a good few, who know who they are, who do take an interest, and write thoughtful articles and take the time to read and respond.
There are a lot of great writers on Medium, but because of the negatives described above I’d never consider becoming a member. (And no, $1 a week isn’t cheap when you think about the cost over a year, and Medium definitely isn’t worth that!)
Yet I have achieved my goal! It only takes a few individuals to provide that sense of community and new opportunities I was looking for, and the 1994 in Film project is exactly that.
So patience works. It took a whole year, but I have achieved what I wanted. Never mind silly followers who don’t read and can’t write.
In conclusion, I have mixed feelings about Medium; I am looking for other sites which may be more accepting of my style and interests. But for now I will persist. Whether I’ll be writing here this time next year I don’t know.
Then again, this time next year our book may even be published…
Ever hopeful,
Frou-Frou
