Which again defeats the purpose. "Writers" seem to forget that this is a two part process. 100 followers AND $10 earned. If you have 100 followers who read none of your work then you've put in that "effort" for nothing because you still won't get paid.

Here's something new-new people may not know. Earlier this year Medium did a platform purge and deleted all spam and fake accounts. Some people lost only a few followers some lost many, many more than that. One publication lost 65% of its followers.

That's why follower counts mean nothing. It's just numbers on a screen.