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Learning First-Hand Why a Top Writer Would Quit

Why writers with tens of thousands of followers walk away

Hogan Torah
6 min readJul 9, 2024
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cheerful-ethnic-man-talking-on-smartphone-3800461/

In 2020 when I began publishing on Medium I found a list of the 50 top writers from 2017. Besides the celebrities I only knew 3 of the names.

Who were these people with hundreds of thousands of followers I’ve never heard of? I found their profiles, but they hadn’t published regularly in years.

Why did they stop? They made it to the top. They had to be making good money. Why would someone with that many followers give up? It’s a question I wondered for years.

My name is never going to be on a list of the top 50 anything for Medium, but I know what happened to them.

It’s the same thing that’s happening to me right now. Things changed and they chose to leave.

The good ol’ days

My peak was the end of 2022 and start of 2023. After 2 years of struggling I’d finally figured it out. My writing schedule looked like this:

  1. Personal essay/memoir
  2. Movie list
  3. Medium meta/self fellating writer bullshit
  4. Pure humor

If I went through a rotation once a week, it was an easy thousand a month. When…

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Hogan Torah
Hogan Torah

Written by Hogan Torah

Lovable af 🥰 Son of a Mouseketeer 🎥 25 years of online publishing 💎 Google me, I autofill

Responses (17)

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Mora, you fucker! Don't you quit on me now!!!! Hey, man, I have really enjoyed your writing lately. Coming back to medium has been a journey on itself and one of the things I learned was to connect with the writers I like through the email function…

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I do enjoy your writing Hogan, but there aren’t any takeaways. My guess is that Medium wants to boost stories that have some sort of message to make readers feel good about reading them, as opposed to straight entertainment. That’s my guess anyway. As you say, the algorithm keeps changing.

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