How to be Popular and Fake on Medium

Some timely advice

Image by Andrea Piacquadio, from Pexels

Do you want to be a very popular writer on Medium? If so, the best way is to be fake AF.

Here, I’ll take you through it:

Be the World’s Biggest Know-It-All

Pretend you have the keys to success and that you know everything worth knowing (while ignoring all the fundamental, philosophical problems).

Write listicles that cater to unrealistic expectations. Spoon-feed the young, lazy, or busy readers who just want easy answers fast, as though life had a Coles Notes cheat sheet.

Flood Medium with trash to help lower the audience’s expectations. That way you’ll have no trouble meeting them and you can write fifty listicles a day.

Your readers like to think they’re too busy to read something deep and substantive or to learn anything difficult, especially if doing so would threaten their self-esteem and social standing by making them less happy.

So all you have to do is flatter them by making your articles as disposable as possible, while simultaneously pretending that any problem can be solved in the blink of an eye with zero effort.

And write as if writing weren’t foolish and anachronistic in the internet age of Trumpian fake news. Pretend it’s still possible to be a hip writer, as though radio, television, and social media haven’t made successive mockeries of literary values.

Help Infantilize the Audience

Dumb-down everything. Write only infotainment.

Avoid using big words. Write in itsy-bitsy baby sentences. Keep all your paragraphs super-short so the writer won’t be put off by the appearance that you’ve engaged in substantial thought on the matter.

And needless to say, write only very short articles. Keep them so short they’ll float away in the ether like bubbles or like the forgettable, trite puff pieces you want them to be.

Presume the audience has a minuscule attention span and exploit that weakness. But be light and airy so the readers won’t realize you’re implicitly insulting them at every turn.