Why Medium rewards low effort posts — The Pareto principle

80% of results come from 20% of the effort. And your Medium feed suffers for it.

Photo by Spencer Chow on Unsplash

Have you ever had a piece of content blow up? Maybe it was a Youtube video you made, an Instagram post, or a TikTok. By ‘blow up’ I don’t necessarily mean viral, just far more successful than your other posts of the same type.
If the answer is yes, then was it the post you were expecting? Was it the content you put the most effort and passion into? Was it the content that you meticulously researched and poured hours of your time into?

For most people, the answer to that last question is a resounding no. Predicting what content of yours blows up is (when you’re not a massively popular creator already) is, at best, a slightly informed guessing game. Sometimes the things you put a minimum amount of effort into seem to resonate with your audience the best. Why is that?

This has definitely happened to me on Medium.

$37 for 16.6k views — don’t spend it all at once!

My most ‘viral’ post was a short 3-minute article about the Javascript framework React. It’s not a particularly exciting or extensively…