Are Medium stats broken?
My read and view counts here have never been great, but now they’re weird.
I’ve mostly but not quite entirely given up on Medium as a platform. There are several reasons, but one is that Medium seems to no longer have any discovery whatsoever. The Medium team first wrecked the discovery algorithm in order to push their own in-house publications into feeds.
Several changes of leadership and business model later, they seem to have entirely killed off having effective discovery with their pivot towards trying to turn this into more of a social platform. Or maybe they just don’t have many people reading articles on the site any more.
Now, I mostly write my articles on Substack and then cross-post them here just in case Medium turns things around or in case Substack vanishes in a puff of bad finances. My read stats have looked pretty similar from month to month whether I post things or not.
And now things are really weird. I have articles with more “fans” than views or reads, according to my Medium stats. I can almost understand “reads” being lower than “fans.” Maybe some people scroll down to the bottom of the article without reading it. But more likes than views?
Also makes me think that their feed algorithm is completely borked or using different statistics that Medium collects privately without presenting to authors, because if the engagement ratio on a piece is 300%, that should put it pretty high in any algorithmic queue.