My Medium Story Went Super-Viral. Here’s My Detective Work on Why

…and the weird shit that went down.

In a matter of a few days, the story went from zero to over 300 reads per day. Image is Medium screenshot by author.

In late April I flew to New Orleans to check out the music festival. My plan was to unplug from Medium and everything else. It didn’t work. When I woke up on my first day in New Orleans, I decided to take a peek at Medium. I had 73 notifications. What? 73? A story I had written two months before was skyrocketing in views and reads.

The story is “In One Hour My Match Date Said Five of the Dumbest Things I’ve Ever Heard.” It’s pretty good, but IMHO other stuff I’ve written is better. In fact, I’ve had two stories recently boosted. They’re doing very well, but still not anywhere near the success of “In One Hour…” which, at this writing, has over 12,800 views and 10,300 reads. Here it is.

In One Hour My Match Date Said Five of the Dumbest Things I’ve Ever Heard

I did minimal promotion on social media. I’m not that guy. I thought after the story got to a couple hundred reads per day, the reads would peak and sink down again. They didn’t. They went up again to almost 1,000 per day.