The Rat Race for Medium Readership
I appreciate and can relate to Lisa Renee’s metaphors when exploring 1. what Medium sometimes/often feels like to an aspiring writer whose stats don’t measure up, especially in relation to (and perhaps dismayed by) 2. the bulk of highly popular content that does, by the Medium readership stats, measure up. Especially, Lisa captures what feels sometimes to me as the rat race to attain Medium readership.
First, a quick step back in time…
Some years ago I joined Twitter to become a connected educator. I discovered the “cool kids” of that crowd, variably envied their popularity, and for a short time set out to tweak and adopt their formulae for “success” as my own, at least as I observed it. I wanted to be one of the cool kids, to both be accepted into the inner circles by them and to make a name for myself in that crowd.
However, it soon felt like a rat race of sorts, so many educators trying to position themselves as go-to experts, as worthy of the thousands of follows and retweets they garnered. And I have since learned there are financial incentives for an educator to do so; follower counts lead to such things as blog sponsorships, lucrative speaking gigs, book deals, and more.
Popularity monetized. While I see some as genuinely deserving of their popularity based on the genuine quality of their expertise, I see others for whom voluminous platitudes “pay off” in popularity.
I soon realized the desire for this, especially where it did not match my reality, left me feeling like I was back in middle and high school — longing to but not quite fitting in with the popular crowd, while sometimes losing sight of the true friends I had around me, the strong community of truly genuine folks just hanging out, wanting only to learn and share, not to brand themselves, but to help others and grow together.
I find my positioning on Medium sometimes elicits similar feelings. I see the posts that get a Medium Staff recommendation and thus find their way into the Top Stories tab. I see so much validation going their way, and I envy it. I want to tap into that same tree of validation, and draw from it the gushing Read/Recommend/Respond sap, and from this boil down a sweet syrup of consistent readership that might eventually help me see my writing go somewhere.
But then I look more closely at the content and quality of at least some if not many of these “Top” posts — especially lately, it seems — and I see the types of posts that I had thought the collective Medium, at least as measured by its Top Stories, would move beyond: so many listicles (especially the emerging lists of “learning” resources), redundant self-help and how-to pieces, and the ilk.
I see an emerging trend of formulaic posts, one copying and following the success of another, perhaps with some tweaks. This is normal and to be expected, of course. As Kirby Ferguson showed, everything is indeed a remix, and I definitely carry with me into future works the inspiration of others I have read and learned from.
But I try in each endeavor to keep it genuine, and not purely a formula for success as others’ success might dictate it. And where the content I genuinely share is met with minimal response from others, I try to accept that I shared it for me, not for anyone else. Ideally, doing so may eventually lead to the readership my desperate need for attention seeks. But then, admittedly and paradoxically, I fear feeding the beast within, that beast that I think may have grown from the inner child that never got the validation he needed.
I digress and ramble.
My point: the Medium reading and writing community, at least as measured by Top Stories and Reads, seems to increasingly be a sort of rat race, and I think it’s best to ignore it, else I may never finish a post, click Publish, or stop looking at those damn Stats that apparently pester — even haunt — many a writer on Medium.
There are indeed many excellent, genuine writers on Medium who have gained popularity, and many who have not, but are deserving of it. They share original stories and ideas, from an informed perspective, from their truth to mine, in a way that many seem to connect to.
But still, it increasingly feels like a rat race to be “read” on Medium, and so, I believe I will join Lisa at her lawn party and then invite her to my next barbecue. Who knows, maybe we (she, you, I, and others) will start our own little block party and see who shows up.
