Thanks for the response. To some degree, I think writers are asking for clarity on what followers actually ARE. On other social networks, we know what it means when someone follows us. On Twitter, we know that followers will see our posts — provided they don’t get swallowed up in the news feed — and we can use analytics to see how many impressions our tweets get.

On Medium, that’s less clear. I’ve also seen an uptick in followers after some posts, but I don’t know how to directly engage with them other than hope my new posts get to them somehow. Today, I got an (unexpected, but welcome) e-mail from the On-Demand Economy collection — so it seems like a custom “newsletter” features may be on the table.

That’s a tool that I would love to see rolled out — and potentially would even pay for. A platform that seamlessly integrates the best features of a blog AND an e-mail list? Now we’re talking.