MEDIUM | UNPOPULAR IDEAS

How to make yourself unpopular with your peers and stay afloat nevertheless

(an alternative celebration of the first two years of my writing on Medium)

There, I have been on Medium for two years. Time for a party!

It started slow, with the first surprises of how life could be so different under lockdown. Before Covid happened to us, I had been looking at an agenda full of activities planned out for me — with workshops, travels, a book launch tour in India, speaking assignments, the London Scrum Exchange, a convention of systemic facilitation in the Netherlands, a poetry reading.

Then all of a sudden there was naught and it was truly liberating. I know that many people suffered — but I’ll admit it, certainly at first, I sort of liked the disruption and the emptiness that followed.

In this emptiness, I started exploring Medium, the platform for independent writers that you are currently reading a page from. Which was a bit tough for me. I mean finding my way through the app as a content creator was not exactly a joy ride. So it started slow and building an audience was a bit of a sore. Also, it didn’t help when Medium announced early this year that writers with too low a followership would get kicked…