Medium Followers: I Can’t See My Followers on Medium & A Work-around on How to See Them
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Why can’t I see my Followers Names on Medium anymore?
In October 2020 Medium changed all Medium members over to the new Medium Profile Page layouts. But you can’t see who your Followers are, unless you use a work-around.
On your main Profile Page there’s the approximate number of Followers of your profile page, then if you click on “About” it will take you to another page.
This page shows how many people are following you, i.e. your Followers, and how many people you are following, i.e. Following. If you are an Editor for a Medium Publication, it will also show you the names of the Publications, and they will be hypertext links. So clicking on a name will take a person to the Publication.
You will see that the web-address or URL (uniform resource locator) is made up of the platform name (Medium), a User Name (@CelineL in my case), and a page name, in the example above, being “About.”
For now you can see the names of your Followers by manually changing the web-address in your browser’s address field.
https://medium.com/@yourusername <- Your home page
Add forward slash and the word followers to the end of your homepage URL, after your User name. So, position your cursor at the end of your homepage web address and type /followers .
Press Return and you will be taken to the old list of your Followers names.
Of course new members to Medium won’t know this. I wrote to Medium Support asking them if they will allow a Medium Member to at least see her or his own Followers!
Previously a member or anyone else could click on the word “Followers” or on the word “Following” at the top of someone’s Medium Profile to go to the list of their Followers or to the list of who is Following them.
Perhaps the clickable links have been removed, due to privacy concerns, such as someone saying to Medium that they didn’t want others to see who was following them, or who their followers are. Who knows?
Anyhow I wrote to Medium saying that I need to see who my Followers are, so that I can manage them. By this, I mean that, as all social media platforms should allow, we would like to know who is following us (similar to knowing who Likes our Facebook posts).
You may not want a certain someone to follow you, or a spammer may be following you. It’s your right to block a follower, and even to report a spammer who follows you.
Here is what Medium replied:
Hi there,
Thanks for writing in.
At this moment, there is no way to access the list of your followers in the new interface on the web. Our product team is aware of this, and is looking into ways to re-implement it in the future.
We are sorry for the frustration around this. If you need help with anything else, please let me know.
So there you have it. Hopefully a function will soon be added back to our individual Settings so that we can, at least, see a list of names of our own Followers!
UPDATE: November 2020
Hooray, Medium has now made a person’s Followers link clickable. This means that anyone can now click on the word “Followers” on her/his “About” page to see who is following her/him.
You can click on “Following” as well, but only for yourself.
Medium has decided (for now) that someone can go to another person’s Medium Profile page and click on “Followers” on that person’s “About” page, and see his/her followers.
However, you can’t see who someone else is following.
Go figure, why these are the changes Medium has graced us with!
UPDATE: April 2021 — — and so the changes continue !
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Medium has enabled a Blogroll function, which means that the names of a few publications and of a few people you follow, appear in a list on the left of your Profile page, IF YOU ENABLE YOUR “BLOG-ROLL”.
Back in the days, many, many years ago, when I started blogging with Blogger and MySpace, and creating blogs using Ning, Yuku, etc. a blogroll was a list of completely customised links…..customised by me…being Links to blogs that I liked AND links to other external sites that I liked.
I hope that Medium will tweak the current “Blogroll” function so one can choose to only show individual writers’ names (to promote them) and so one can add other links too.
Anyhow, the point is that at April 2021, the blogroll is just the list of one’s Following (who one is Following).
You can now click on “Following” on somebody’s “About Page” to see who they are following.
I tested out using an URL to look at someone else’s “Following” without having to look at the person’s blogroll (if she has one), and instead of clicking on “Following” on their “About” page.
All you have to do is to type in /following….. after the person’s Medium URL for their Username.
Example:
Above is the URL (webaddress) for my Profile page. Go to my profile page, and after CelineL type in forward slash and following:
/following
It should take you to the list of those who I am following.
It looks like, Medium had the “blogroll” in mind when the link to “Following” was taken off the “About” pages back in the day…..and have now reinstated links to people’s “Following” lists!
Maybe some day, it will be optional to have “Following” and “Followers” shown publicly, for those who are “private” and don’t want one of these lists, or both, to be shown. 😛
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The following (long) article that I wrote looks at Privacy on Medium!
Yet another UPDATE, this time added in February 2022 !!
If you can’t see someone’s “About” link / page, the article below explains why.
