Shelly,

I’m not sure that integrity has a lot to do with it. I’m in a position right now, for example, where it actually costs me very little to take the “principled” approach. My most profitable story made me enough to buy a coffee, and not even a fancy one; just a drip coffee with cream (which I enjoyed immensely).

For that reason I went out of my way while writing this piece to make sure I didn’t include any references to integrity or to doing things the right way. It seems condescending to many other good writers who chose the follow-for-follow. And honestly I think that you and I could make a case for doing things either way. For example, I think it may be way overboard if someone built up a pool of thousands of followers by trying the follow-for-follow approach, because it makes the follower metric less meaningful for the community as a whole, and because it probably doesn’t grow a person’s true audience by much.

But also it was really shitty of Medium to implement a 100 follower cut-off. I cannot see any earthly reason why they did that, except perhaps to make things easier on themselves from a management perspective. So it looks like what they did was cause a lot of unneccessary pain and frustration for many of their new writers — many of whom are paying them money — just to simplify things on their end. I suspect (and hope) that they will lose a lot of payments as a result of indignant people quitting the MPP program, even if that means shrinking the payment pool for existing writers. I am not a fan of corporate ennui.

So if someone who takes a quick shortcut to make the jump to 100 followers, I applaud them. My main reason for doing things this way is because I have spent a very long time trying to disentangle my psyche from its desire to do things fast, since that feeling of being perpetually rushed has hurt me a lot, and made me miserable in the long run. But not everyone does the follow-for-follow because they’re in a rush, and not everyone who is in a rush will be hurt by it. In the end, for me it was a personal decision.

But also we’re on Medium, and writing articles about personal decisions is one of the things we can do here. I’m glad to be part of this community for that reason, as well. ;-)

C