My Most Successful Medium Story is about Anger
I guess I should just get mad at stuff all the time? That's what people want?
In about a week of life, my story about the new Medium logo being stupid has garnered almost 500 reads and a 90 percent retention ratio. That's not a ton of people at all compared to some of my bigger headphone and tech articles, but the graph of its success has one of the most pronounced upward slopes of anything I've written.
Also, the piece has more "fans" than almost any other piece I've ever written on Medium, or anywhere else. 49 different people have clicked the Clap button, which used to be the Recommend button. Again, not a lot in the grand scheme of Medium. Most writers consider 100 fans to be the minimum bar for a successful piece. But it got to that number faster than anything else I've ever written. It's in second place overall, just under a popular headphone article, and it might pass that one in another few weeks.
LESSONS TO LEARN FROM THIS
The piece is short. Really short, compared to most of my stuff.
It's a punchy little piece of snark that people can quickly digest before moving on with their lives.
Most of my other articles are vomits full of detail. "Let me tell you about these headphones or this game in impossibly stupid detail! Let me write this blog that's too long!"
That's my thing.
So, writing more shorter pieces would probably be a good thing.
The anger... I'm less sure about.
I don't usually like to write mean things. It's why you'll almost never see me do a negative review, unless I'm really disappointed in something and need to warn people away from it. Since I'm not a real critic, I get to pick and choose what I cover, and I heavily guide my writing with my personal tastes. I want it to mostly reflect what I'm enthused about, not what I'm upset at.
Sometimes I'm gonna get mad enough at a thing to write about it. Even that Medium logo piece and the longer piece I did here were because I like Medium so much, and not because I just wanted to fling anger around.
Some might say "Ignore your audience and write what you want."
I always write what I want.
I don't have a panel of judges or a focus group voting on the articles I produce. But ignoring the audience is not something I want to do. I want to write pieces that people actually read, for the most part. One or two are just for me...but the rest are meant for an audience.
So when I have so much data about them, it seems silly that I wouldn't take that into consideration a little bit.
