To be bluntly honest, the following concept is problematic. On the one hand I know that every time I pick up a follower it means that something I wrote, whether in a published piece or just a comment, resonated with someone and possibly helped them and that means the world to me. I also know that picking up followers does not lead to more reads. Then the other side of it, following people, I want people to feel what I feel when I pick up a follower but I find that following people hurts me in terms of what the algorithm feeds me to read, especially now that on my landing page and I've heard from others on theirs too, the icons of people we follow and read most often no longer appear and thus I am in the process of unfollowing all publications and topics and reducing the number of people I follow so that I will get fed the stories of people that over the two years I have been here that I know I generally want to read. I know that subscrbing does that and I do subscribe to many but I don't want an email every damn time people publish because I don't want to read everything they write.

Anyway, how are you Julius? I hope you are well. I stayed away from Medium for a while and am easing myself back in now.