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I’ve read a ton of articles on how to gain a following on Medium, and I assume that the writers among you have done the same. Most of them offer the same piece of advice: write as much content as you possibly can. I assume that this is either a factor in Medium’s algorithm for promoting articles, or simply the shotgun technique. Either way, acting like a content mill only serves to make my stories shitter.
Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider some of the purposes of Medium, in their own words:
- Welcome to Medium, where words matter.
- Ideas and perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.
- Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh thinking and unique perspectives.
My conclusion is that Medium is about telling engaging, fresh stories, which people find useful. It’s all about the quality of the stories themselves.
As a regular human being with a full-time job and an average brain, I struggle to post five engaging, valuable stories a week. The more stories I write in a week, the worse they are collectively. So if Medium is all about exceptional quality, surely it’s better to write two or three great stories, instead of five mediocre ones? At least I’ll be proud of the great stories, and won’t feel like I’m being whipped by some story-pushing slave master goblin.
The desire to succeed is strong, and I feel like I’m under constant pressure to keep on contributing in order to build an audience. The result is crappy, mediocre work, which benefits few people. By following the advice of the so-called Medium successes, all I’m really doing is watering down my content and damaging the credibility of the platform as a whole.
I genuinely want people to get some value out of my stories, and it’d be nice to have a decent readership too. The question is – am I willing to sacrifice quality for quantity? Should I sell out? What’s more important to me – being a popular, mediocre writer with 10,000 followers? Or an awesome writer with only a 1,000?
Personally, I think that credibility and self-worth is more important than success. The contented feeling that washes over me after posting a satisfying story has infinitely more value than a bunch of virtual claps, and at the same time, there’s more chance of it being beneficial to the readers, even if they’re few in number. It’s foolish and unhealthy to continue stressing myself out by attempting to post five times a week, in order to gain a following.
Earlier today I learned about a tool called The Hemingway App, which reviews your work and passes judgment on what is and isn’t readable. The fact that such an app exists is a shocking example of how desperate people are for success. Whatever happened to having your own writing style, of being proud of your own uniqueness? Writing is an art-form given to us by the gods, and here we are pasting it into apps in the hope of getting a few more readers. You might be a beautiful writer with a fresh and engaging style, a style that the world would love to read. Such apps are ruining that by encouraging you to conform to hard and fast rules, recommended by writers who see nothing but dollar signs in their eyes.
It’s also tough finding the time to read and learn from other people’s content if you’re doing nothing but tapping out your own. Our curiosity is what motivates us to seek out and absorb new ideas, which after being mixed and sloshed with existing ones, can emerge as something profoundly original.
I want to be proud of the work that I produce. I want to write for the sake of writing, not for the number of claps that it receives. You can take your “five stories a week” advice and put it where the sun doesn’t shine, which is precisely where it belongs. Quality triumphs over quantity, don’t cheapen yourself or your integrity for quick-success life-hack nonsense. You’re better than that.
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