The Curious Case of My Viral Medium Article
How I got 47 recommends in 60 minutes.

Ever heard of growth hacking?
It’s a somewhat risque form of viral engineering where marketers exploit the inconsistencies in a social media platform to cheat its algorithms.
For instance, what if you had 100 LinkedIn accounts with 500 connections each and decided to like a random post with EVERY account?
It would send a message to LinkedIn’s platform saying THIS POST IS IMPORTANT. You would be “cheating” the algorithms into thinking that article or post is need-to-know information.
Then LinkedIn would get that post in front of more and more eyes.
I don’t know too much about growth hacking, but that’s definitely one of the ways officianados have and still do it.
Which leads me to today.
At noon I started getting a ton of recommendations on an article I wrote a month ago. It was ridiculous.

Within an hour I racked up 47 recommendations.
To put it in perspective, of the 250+ articles I’ve posted on the Post-Grad Survival Guide, only 10 have received more than 47 recommendations IN TOTAL.
So I did what any curious Medium user would do and I checked the statistics.

First, the views look pretty good, right? I have about 61–62 today.
Second, the recommends are also shooting way up. You already saw that earlier.
Now.
When I clicked on the “Reads” section, that’s when the truth came out.

You’ll see I only have three reads today. Pretty unusual if 47 people liked the story enough to recommend it, right?
That means only six percent of those who clicked the green heart actually read the entire thing.
My guess was somebody decided to recommend this article on 40+ different accounts. Was it a bot? Was it someone literally signing in and out of accounts? Why were they targeting my story?
I had so many questions. So I took a look at some of the profiles.


Here they are. For one, Phoebe and Abbey keep coming up as first names in this bunch. Many of them sound like straight up jibberish. None of them have descriptions under their profile.
Definitely weird, and proves my theory even more.
Here’s two random profiles side-by-side.


Notice anything?
They both liked all the same articles from “Atlaz,” who contributes a lot of stories to a Medium publication I won’t name here.
Here’s where it really gets interesting..
That publication has 16 followers. They posted their first story back in January of 2016, then stopped. On August 2 they started posting again, and every one of the three stories they’ve published since has exactly 50 recommends.
Interesting..
It’s almost like….nah, it can’t be, right?
I could really, really, go in deep here as there’s a lot more to cover, but something inside me is saying I really don’t need to anymore.
You can figure out the rest of the story yourself. The links are there. The profiles are there.
Somebody is trying to growth hack Medium. Clearly they want their publication to gain a ton of subscribers really quick by giving their articles tons of recommendations.
It really makes me kind of mad, though. That’s the reason I hate Twitter, because there’s just a bunch of ghost accounts tweeting 50–100 times a day.
I like Medium because it’s genuine. It always has been since I’ve been here.
My guess is they recommended my article a bunch of times to possibly throw off the people at Medium? Maybe they were trying to make their interests seem a little more diverse. I don’t know.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is, this isn’t going to work.
I love Medium. I do know they make it quite hard to sign in and out of a lot of different profiles.
I have to get an email sent to my inbox each time and everything.
Despite all this, Medium WILL reward you for posting regularly and engaging in the community. I posted five times per week consistently in my publication and Medium rewarded me by sending followers my way. I now have 3,700+ at the Post-Grad Survival Guide and 8,800 on my personal profile.
I think the only way to really thrive on Medium is to do it the right way.
I hope it stays like that.
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