Member-only story
This Is a Medium Meta-story Explaining Why I Deleted Most of My Medium Meta-articles
Besides, I never wanted to be the Medium Meta-Queen anyway.
Medium has made many magnificent changes, and it deserves every alliteration I can muster. For instance, today Medium has a million marvelous members.
What does this have to do with why I chose to delete my meta-articles? My meta-articles on how to grow on Medium are simply outdated and no longer useful.
A little backstory
I originally wrote those articles to help. I wanted to share things I learned about audience engagement and audience development to keep good writers on the platform.
Writers were dropping faster than wi-fi at a big family dinner.
Around late 2021 and the first two quarters of 2022, so many writers threatened to leave the platform. They felt all the attention had been given to a handful of writers. Little did they know, these so-called Top Writers were struggling too.
The readers just weren’t on the platform.
Therefore, what did we do? Well, a small community of writers started their own publications, we all band together and read each other's work, clapped, highlighted, and commented.
In fact, at that time, Medium was very much like a social media platform for long form writing. Don’t get me wrong, many aspects of Medium are still social, but algorithms aren’t running the show to the same degree it was in 2021–2022.
Just My Observations, No Growth Hack
From my observations, growth strategies won’t help anymore. If you thoroughly read the stats on your stories, you can see what the algorithm is quantifying.
The algorithm rewards more. The algorithm rewards engagement (claps, highlights, comments), view to read ratio, and read time.
As such, you can’t game the system as easily with:
- clickbaity titles.
- writing two to three articles a day for big publications under similar topic tags.
- negative reverse and negativity bias techniques used in titles such as 8 Reasons Why you Won’t Be Successful…
