How I Lost 100,000 Followers in One Year, and It Made Me a Better Writer
Screw the rules.
Most of you probably know that I used to write on a platform called Medium. You know what kind of articles always performed really well there, but let's refresh our memories. Every week, some guy used to post an article about Elon Musk's formula for learning, and some of them did extremely well. One post went viral and made the author thousands of dollars. He later confessed that his article was riddled with typos. A reader even pointed out some of them, but he was worried fixing them would reset the algorithm. So he just left them in there, and the article continued soaring into the stratosphere.
That would be a certain kind of privilege.
One of the most viral pieces on there was a short little post by a guy talking about how hard it was to be incredibly smart.
Everyone, get out your fiddle.
That platform always preferred a particular kind of article, and none of them could ever offer a genuine critique or a nuanced stance on the problems we faced. A lo…