More Stupid Medium Stats Tricks
I’ve written before about how Medium stats are just obviously broken in some way, that the stats are not useful for finding anything out…
More Stupid Medium Stats Tricks
I’ve written before about how Medium stats are just obviously broken in some way, that the stats are not useful for finding anything out about what is actually going on, which is partially a problem of however they are processing the stats but also a problem with how they present the stats.
The problems with processing the stats can be seen in the UI itself, there are stats that are processed hourly and daily, and these stats are spread across different pages so that in order to see what is going on you would need to navigate between these pages, obviously as you write more articles it becomes impossible to do this as a human being, it would need to be automated, but this is the very thing that Medium is supposed to be doing for you, and they don’t.
Frankly the stats presentation would make more sense if we thought of it as a dark UI pattern, that the UI is structured the way it is because they do not want you to be able to achieve what the UI is nominally supposed to help you do. Most dark UI patterns are for shutting down accounts, nobody wants you to shut down your account, so the UI for shutting down the account makes that intentionally difficult.
It seems the UI for Medium stats makes it intentionally difficult to understand two things
- How traffic to your writing is actually going.
- How the algorithms Medium uses for analyzing your traffic actually work.
Let’s take a look at this morning.
May 19 — morning
My complete account, Illuminati Ganga Agent 86. Normally at this time of the day it tells me I have 0 views and 0 reads, which is unlikely. So obviously something is going on that it tells me I have 53 views. But it also tells me I have 0 reads.
When I go through the same day on the Luminasticity publication I get
0 views, 0 reads.
The Hitmagist
0 views, 0 reads.
All stories published in other publications
I then went through the stories I have published to The Haven,
0 views 0 reads the past week
0 views, 0 reads the past week
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19, although views and reads over past week.
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19, although a couple views and reads over the past week.
0 views 0 reads morning May 19, 1 view last week.
1 view morning May 19!! Also several views over past week.
0 views, 0 reads over past week.
0 views, 0 reads over past week
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19, 1 view past week.
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19 — some views past week.
0 views, 0 reads past week.
0 views, 0 reads past week.
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19. 1 View past week.
0 views 0 reads morning May 19.
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19.
0 views, 0 reads morning May 19, although surprisingly reads and views past week.
Summing Up
So, summing up what I have for the morning of May 19
On Luminasticity 0 views, 0 reads,
On the Hitmagist 0 views, 0 reads
On The Haven 1 view, 0 reads
I do not have any articles published just under my profile.
So where do I get 53 views from.
Hey, forget that, where do I get
90 views!? Those 37 extra views having happened in the last half an hour since starting this writing this.
The Hitmagist currently
Luminasticity currently!
I’m obviously not going to go through the Haven stories again. Because the point is made, there is something messed up here in these stats.
At first I thought the 53 views today were left over views from yesterday that a batch job assigned to today, but that seems unlikely given the increase of 37 more views in the last half an hour.
I might also assume that it is just bot traffic, but why where is it going that doesn’t register in my publications or any article? And anyway Medium views is supposed to try to filter out bot traffic.
These views — what stories are they coming from? And why no reads at all? I have noticed a drop in reads recently, from 30–40% to 20% and lower, which makes me think either I am even more unappealing than usual, which of course may be the case, or it seems likely that the way that Medium has decided to calculate a read has changed.
But of course this morning I am getting 0% reads on views which is quite unique even for me, and even so I am not getting views on any story!
Because if I was getting views on a story they would probably be one of these stories, which are relatively new
This story had 26 views and 10 reads yesterday, back when I had 53 views it had no views, now with 90 it has one.
This was published a few days ago and had 1 view and 1 read yesterday, and 0 today.
If I go further down the list of stories I can see I have 0 reads and 0 views on most recent stories for today. I could understand if through all my stories it just happened that I had 90 views already this morning, and no reads, because obviously the universe is trying to send me a message to pack it in, I just wish Medium was better able to deliver that message clearly.
I also went through my list of highest viewed stories and none of my highest viewed stories from the top 50 list of stories have any views today. If there was a surge in views for some story I have gone down in the list far enough I would have noticed it, but there hasn’t been, obviously this 90 views and no reads could have been split up between 4 or 5 stories and they would not have moved in the rankings, but it seems unlikely and even if it weren’t unlikely, it is a damning indictment of the inability of Medium to provide a decent interface to find out what is going on with my stats that I am left to guess.
It is just absolutely impossible at this point to believe anything Medium tells me about anything because it is impossible to figure out why it is telling me these things, and by what criteria Medium is operating.
I suppose I really will have to move somewhere else, because it is clear that things can only be this bad because Medium’s management feels it is to their benefit it is this bad.
Addendum
An hour later
And an hour after that
Both of my publications still showing 0 views.
An hour later
I have to say I have experienced no reads at all by this time of the day, and I’ve never experienced a percentage of reads on any day below 8% before. 210 views, 0 reads — my stats for the Hitmagist is still 0 views 0 reads, and this publication is 0 views 0 reads.
Going to the Haven stories, my most popular story which almost always gets a view or two per day and often a read has one view
Related Articles
If you want to make me feel better and also to give me enough money so I can buy tissue to cry into, please read the following article on how you can
메타데이터
- post_id
- 41150cbbc6e0
- slug
- more-stupid-medium-stats-tricks-41150cbbc6e0
- url
- https://medium.com/luminasticity/more-stupid-medium-stats-tricks-41150cbbc6e0
- canonical_url
- https://medium.com/luminasticity/more-stupid-medium-stats-tricks-41150cbbc6e0
- author_url
- https://medium.com/@illuminati-ganga
- status
- ok
- fetched_at
- 2026-06-12 07:40:50
