Like Many Publications, ILLUMINATION Also Lost Many Followers Overnight (This Is What You Can Learn From It)

Follower count is not the end of the world.

Screenshot taken by the author on June 22, 2021

Just before the massive follower drop, I saw the follower count of ILLUMINATION on June 15, 2021, as I published an article that day with them. I was very excited to see that ILLUMINATION, the same publication that first welcomed me as a newbie writer on this platform, was only 2K shy of hitting the 100K follower milestone. That’s why, yesterday, when I noticed that the follower count went down from 98K to only 35K, I was shocked to the core.

63K followers just vanished overnight! Is that a joke? What’s happening on this platform! Messy stats, weird homepage, low views, and now, followers decline — what’s coming next!

I remember the article published on December 5, 2020, where the ILLUMINATION Founder & Editor, Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, shared his excitement while celebrating the 50,000 followers on Medium. He wrote, “I was confused yet grateful and thanked our opponents. The stats are transparent, on July 15, we had 20K, on October 23–40K, now on December 50K followers.”

Then on March 19, 2021, Dew Langrial, another ILLUMINATION Editor, said in a post titled Illumination vs. the Ascent: Can This New Pub Really Defeat a Colossus, “Even now, when Illumination is a prominent publication with 88,052 followers, its culture is original, vulnerable, and responsive. It is not rigid.” She also made a comparison between The Ascent and ILLUMINATION, exhibiting the pub’s swift success along the way.

So, I can assume how hard it is for them to digest this overnight 63k follower drop. I mean, they were just taking pride in thousands of fake followers. Unknowingly, of course.

But now, it certainly hurts.

Why ILLUMINATION Lost Such a Huge Number of Followers

The answer is very simple. In a post published in 3 Min Read, Medium’s official publication, they clearly stated that they are removing spam accounts from your follower and following counts. Why? Because they want this platform to be authentic. So they will do this cleaning task on a regular basis from now on.