You Sucked Me In and Blew Me Out in Bubbles
My First Three Months at Medium: 18 March to the middle of June
In the beginning I only wrote about sex and love and pain.
It was a huge relief to write all this stuff down, it triggered something in me when I shared it. I almost wept when readers at Medium responded and highlighted and recommended. I felt understood. I felt that people were able to meet me emotionally where I was.
I included my dating diary. To my amazement, the intimate details of my private life were not a must-read for everybody on the planet:
There are many brilliant dating articles on Medium. This is my favourite from Alana Massey:
Coat-tail Star Fucking
CTSF is defined as latching a comment on a big story to get attention.
One day when I am checking my statistics I notice that I’ve gotten over a hundred views for a “story”. In those days, a comment was treated as a story. I had written some brilliant sentence along the lines of “great story”. While I was thrilled that someone was reading my stuff, the novelty soon wore off when I realized that it was a low-effort comment I’d made to an article that had made it big. It was spillover, plain and simple.
There’s even a coat-tail star fucking tag. Follow it for the history.
My First Hit
I’d been writing about three weeks when I wrote this response to another article:
The publication, “Be Yourself” approached me for the article, as did the Huffington Post and I was their guest blogger last month.
$$$? No.
$000, 000? Yes and brag material for years to come. I know you can die of exposure but it feels so gooooood!
The idea of loving my body had been with me for decades, to be grateful for it instead of running it down which I used to do:
I began to get more and more obsessed with Medium. Instead of meditating when I wake up, I check to see what had happened during the night.
Some of the people who read my stuff are in Europe, South Africa and Australia but most are in the US, so the views start ticking in around 3pm.
I can’t be sure, but I think it’s likely that I’ve read more on Medium in the last three months than anybody else. I know most men think that about masturbation and of course everybody believes themselves to have a fantastic sense of humour when they haven’t so I could be delusional. What I mean is that I am delusional and maybe I’m delusional about that too.
I have been completely and utterly sucked into the Medium world.
Challenge of the Bots
My aim was to be number one in Denmark. I’d read an article by thomdahl about the thirty most prominent danes on Medium.
Imagine my outrage when I discovered that their prominence was derived from bots and “Tordenskjolds Soldater”. Actually, you don’t have to imagine my outrage at all. I’ve written all about it here:
Cuss Words and Stats
I smile indulgently to myself when I see people write that they never check their stats.
Guidelines to Getting More Readers
I used to follow these but I can’t schedule articles for Tuesdays and Saturdays. If an article is finished, I am impatient to test the waters.
I began including photos. Especially pet photos. I even purchased a camera to take original photos. I began photographing Copenhagen, where I live. I started with a Parisian-style boulevard in Frederiksberg:
That article had a grand total of two recommends, one of which was mine. It’s been unrecommended by the other person. Hmmmm…
The fun I had writing it and taking the photos were extremely inversely proportional to the reception it got on Medium.
I also shot off a few photo essays on bicycles. I love that about this city, the bicycles.
This cycling article:
was a classic coattail starfuck of kelly catchpole’s brilliant cycling article:
I wrote about the Stanford Rape Case, it got me all fired up. This is a round-up of the different opinions of the case with supplementary comment from me:
Then there was Brexit. Medium even made a special tag for it. It irked me to see it, I’ve been listening to the Brits whine about the EU for thirty years. “You don’t urinate in the corner and then expect to be welcome to dine”.(Insert credit here; I don’t remember who on Medium wrote that; please remind me in a comment). Then they actually said no and suddenly everything changed. I read about fifty Medium articles on Brexit. Thank you, Britain, for giving us a cast of characters beyond anything Saturday Night Live could have imagined:
Then James Allworth wrote the Brexit story to end all Brexit stories using economics game theory to answer all the whys: Brexit and Trumpism as ‘The Ultimatum Game’.
Around that time, I wrote my most recommended story ever:
I used it as a vehicle to thank the people who follow me and presumably like the articles that I recommend.
Oh Yeah, about Recommending…
Strictly speaking, the purpose of a recommend is to guide the people who follow you to the article. Strictly speaking, if you really appreciate an article, you are encouraged to write a comment. Some people have written about it.
I like recommends. I really like recommends. I know I’m not supposed to and should just focus on views and reads but I just can’t abstract myself away from recommends.
Publications
In the last few weeks I’ve started my own publications, one of which is Copenhagen Destination. I’ve approached writers who have written about the city and several of their articles have been submitted and published. Thank you.
Sometimes I can’t easily find my own stories. I’ve started creating publications to organize these stories in one place so I have a way to overview them.
BTW, thanks to Gerard Mclean for helping me to set Copenhagen Destination up nicely. He’d spent a lot of time formatting so I didn’t have to. I appreciate your help.
Ryanair
Is it possible to use social media to get a company to behave fairly?
Is it fair that my brother loses 500 euros which goes more or less directly to line the pockets of a guy who wears a real nice suit?
Back to Ryanair: I have written three articles:
I wasn’t alone in making Hitler videos about this:
I addressed Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair:
It didn’t help. Michael ignored me.
So I decided to follow the money. It lead me all the way to Los Angeles:
Don’t get me wrong, I love Los Angelites. In fact, I married one once and he gave me a son. He used to sell newspapers at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Emmet (remember Emmett Till?) luckily inherited his father’s good looks. Of course I checked first; he throws good puppies.
I have sent about 1500 tweets to different entities, linking to this article. I have sent a link to The Financial Times, The Economist and variations thereof, The New York Times and countless other financial journals and journalists.
This afternoon I found company emails on Capital Group’s website. Now Timothy is sure to read the letter.
Later that evening I experienced a security threat on my computer for the first time ever, like someone was trying to break in.
I wonder if these events are connected…
And finally, I have made a foray into food. I couldn’t resist Sarah Quigley’s call for an oatmeal duel. Since my camera is getting fixed (it’s gotten quite a beating since I bought it six weeks ago) the photos are only cellphone photos so this is only the warm-up. Beware the oatmeal battles! I plan to keep this as one article and just keep updating it. Stay tuned.
Best viewed on a smartphone screen:
This story would be incomplete without the part where a poet blocked me on Medium.
I absolutely insist that this qualifies me as a badass:
Thank you for reading all the way to the end.
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I am on Instagram and Twitter. E-mail me at augustkhalilibrahim@gmail.com.
