Mustachian community on Medium?

[LetsRetireYoung]

Does anybody else here write on Medium? With almost 40,000 folks on this forum, I suspect I'm not the only one. :) Would you like to form a little Mustachian community there? Personally, I use that platform to write about lean-FIRE and escaping the rat race, but I'm always down to learn about foraging, DIY projects, new lentil recipes :P , etc.

If you're a fellow Medium-ite, post your link here, follow the others, and get followers in return. Here is to building more communities on more platforms, eh. :)

Edit: for ethical reasons, I am not including the link to my own Medium. This thread is to gauge interest in a Mustachian Medium community, not to promote my work. Sound off in the comments!

[Metalcat]

What is Medium?

[Metta]

What is Medium?

It is loosely a combination of a magazine and a blog where people post articles on a variety of topics. It is free to read up to a certain number of articles or can be subscribed to for unlimited reading for $5 a month. Writers are paid by the click I believe. Overall, it's one of my very favorite platforms to read each morning. The articles are genuinely good and are on such a variety of topics and can be collected in ways that are meaningful to me.

I haven't tried writing for it, though it is something on my list of things to consider. You can find it here: https://medium.com

And here is an article on writing for it: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-to-make-money-on-medium/

[LetsRetireYoung]

Yup. :) Also, if you run out of free articles, all you need to do is just fire up Chrome in the incognito mode, and you're good to go. :)

[Spiffy]

I think this is the third post I have seen from you with a link to your blog in it. I though that was a no-no. I might be mistaken, though.

[LetsRetireYoung]

I think this is the third post I have seen from you with a link to your blog in it. I though that was a no-no. I might be mistaken, though.

Sorry - I didn't see that in the rules. :( I only linked it in other discussions where it was relevant to how I ended up in Quebec, or how I achieved my FIRE in the "2021 FIRE cohort" thread. If you look around, you'll find that in most of my posts, I engaged in no self-promotion whatsoever.

Thank you for calling that out.

[Weisass]

I think this is the third post I have seen from you with a link to your blog in it. I though that was a no-no. I might be mistaken, though.

More like 6th or so, but who is counting lol.

I get that this place needs not to become a place for folks to shill, but I’m genuinely curious about folks sharing their thoughts outside of here. What’s the line between sharing your story and hawking your blog? For example, I remember some guy was here a few months ago asking for helping improving his YouTube channel about personal finance, and i don’t recall folks telling him to stop.

[dandarc]

Just put a link in your signature - an explicitly allowed way to have a link to your blog under every single one of your posts.

ETA: and then stop posting separately about your blog - engage in conversation is fine. Your first 6 or 10 posts could be construed as spamming - whole lot of links.

[LetsRetireYoung]

For what it's worth, I've edited out the link to my Medium in the main post.

For example, I remember some guy was here a few months ago asking for helping improving his YouTube channel about personal finance, and i don’t recall folks telling him to stop.

Humans are inherently irrational monkeys. :) Even when the forum's rules don't state anything explicit about a topic, there'll be those who rise up. In some people's minds, a youtube channel must seem inherently less threatening than a blog hahaha

Just put a link in your signature - an explicitly allowed way to have a link to your blog under every single one of your posts.

Signatures are disabled in this particular forum setup - that's why nobody has them. :) I could manually paste a signature to each post I make, but that would just be a dick move.

ETA: and then stop posting separately about your blog - engage in conversation is fine. Your first 6 or 10 posts could be construed as spamming - whole lot of links.

Well, my introduction/FIRE-cohort posts were about me and my FIRE journey. Ditto for my MMM journal: I view those as virtual embassies where one is expected to write about oneself. I could, of course, copy-paste the entire 2,500-word post on my awesome FIRE journey :P but that's why Jesus invented hyperlinks hahaha

As for link-rich posts - I'm just a firm believer in sourcing my citations and claims. ;)

"Spam" is a very loaded word, and I don't believe it describes what I'm doing here - adding to various discussions all over the place.

For example, if somebody posts a question along the lines of, "I'm a complete noob and I want to learn about value investing, help!" - would it make more sense to post a link to a really long and awesome blog post I had written on that topic (which, as you can see, I am not posting now), or to write "I can tell you, but it's a big secret! PM me privately and I'll send it to you" - followed by replying to hundreds of messages from all the current and future Mustachian readers over the years?

There is spam, there is telemarketing, there is self-promotion, and there is being a subject-matter expert who wants to help others and make sharing the key information easier.

Which brings me back to my main point. ;) (Note how none of all y'all are actually posting about Medium. In that context, you are the spammers hahahaha) The point is this: would it make sense to set up a Mustachian community on Medium, to help even more motivated middle-class critters learn our ways?

[Metalcat]

To be very clear, if an established member with a history of contributing content of value to this place started a blog, they would get enormous support here. I know because several of us have been asked to do so, many, many times.

It has nothing to do with a "threat" of another blog.

The reason the YouTube guy got support was because he posted asking for advice with how to make a YouTube channel that would resonate, and we were happy to give him feedback, because we're exceptionally helpful here. That's very different from him posting his YouTube link in a bunch of threads as a newcomer. That would have gotten some comments.

I hear your reasoning, but you sound rather defensive, and as someone who has been here a long time, I recommend taking a beat and not taking the spam comments as an insult, and try to understand where people are coming from in saying that.

We don't have rules against promoting your own content here, so when a place welcomes you posting about your blog, and encourages you to put a link in your signature, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to take notice when people from this forum politely tell you that your behaviour could appear spammy.

It's not an attack, it's actually helpful advice. It's up to you how you choose to take it.

[LetsRetireYoung]

We don't have rules against promoting your own content here, so when a place welcomes you posting about your blog, and encourages you to put a link in your signature, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to take notice when people from this forum politely tell you that your behaviour could appear spammy.

It's not an attack, it's actually helpful advice. It's up to you how you choose to take it.

I understand. My confusion (bemusement?) stems from the fact that this forum's settings for signatures are explicitly disabled (I've looked: it's not anywhere in any profile settings), and I haven't seen a single user here with a manually pasted signature.

I always do my best to abide by written rules: when I joined, the forum's rules didn't say anything about occasionally referring to one's off-forum platform. (I've just double-checked - they still do not say that. :P ) My defensiveness stems from people referring to unofficial, unwritten rules that had not appeared anywhere before. Imho, if it's not written down, it didn't happen: if there are specific rules and use cases, then those rules must be amended. Otherwise, it turns into a quaint little town with its own traffic rules, which lead newcomers to get strange tickets and or into accidents that their insurance won't cover. :P

I want to be part of the collective, and the integration process is always bumpy, I get that. We'll figure it out and find the consensus, eh? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[LetsRetireYoung]

P.S.: this isn't my first profile here. :) I used to be known under a couple of other nicknames, many years ago. One of them had ~500 posts, I think. Their posting history does not represent where I am and who I am at this point in my Mustachian journey, though. I think it's silly to think that if I resurrected one of those profiles and swaggered in as a regular who awoke from a long nap, that people's reactions would somehow be drastically different.

....but if that actually worked, and if people thought "oh wow, I must have missed this guy's recent posts, but good for him for having a blog!" - then wouldn't that indicate not-so-subtle bias against ambitious newcomers in favour of good ol' boys? That way lies madness, and stagnation, and death.

[Metalcat]

P.S.: this isn't my first profile here. :) I used to be known under a couple of other nicknames, many years ago. One of them had ~500 posts, I think. Their posting history does not represent where I am and who I am at this point in my Mustachian journey, though. I think it's silly to think that if I resurrected one of those profiles and swaggered in as a regular who awoke from a long nap, that people's reactions would somehow be drastically different.

....but if that actually worked, and if people thought "oh wow, I must have missed this guy's recent posts, but good for him for having a blog!" - then wouldn't that indicate not-so-subtle bias against ambitious newcomers in favour of good ol' boys? That way lies madness, and stagnation, and death.

Okay, so defensiveness it is then.

Ambitious newcomers are more than welcome. My point about an established member having a blog was to say that an established member is already recognized as someone who isn't just trying to use this place. Also, even an established member would get called out for spamming if their behaviour looked like spamming.

We despise spammers here, and we have a long history of writers coming here, asking questions not in good faith, not actually engaging, and then fucking off with our carefully constructed answers to generate content that they can profit off of.

This place offers a very high level of help to basically anyone who arrives, for free. Those who offer that free help don't appreciate others trying to blatantly profit off of it.

So yes, an ambitious new member would be totally welcome, and if you started a post asking for advice on making a blog successful, chances are you would get TONS of helpful responses. Just like the YouTube guy did.

But if what you mean by "ambitious" is that you're trying to use this place to fish for readers through advertising your blog as often as possible, then yeah, that's the definition of spamming.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that that's not what you meant though.

[Adventine]

I understand. My confusion (bemusement?) stems from the fact that this forum's settings for signatures are explicitly disabled (I've looked: it's not anywhere in any profile settings), and I haven't seen a single user here with a manually pasted signature.

Sure you can add signatures. I've had one for years, and so have many other long-term posters. Go to Profile > Modify Profile > Forum Profile > Signature > [ url=web link] Whatever you want the link to read [ /url]. Just remove those spaces before "url" and your link should work just fine.

As others have said, people here tend to distrust new(ish) posters who just link to their own content without contributing significantly to the community. It comes across as too spammy and self-promotional.

[badger1988]

I understand. My confusion (bemusement?) stems from the fact that this forum's settings for signatures are explicitly disabled (I've looked: it's not anywhere in any profile settings), and I haven't seen a single user here with a manually pasted signature.

Sure you can add signatures. I've had one for years, and so have many other long-term posters. Go to Profile > Modify Profile > Forum Profile > Signature > [ url=web link] Whatever you want the link to read [ /url]. Just remove those spaces before "url" and your link should work just fine.

As others have said, people here tend to distrust new(ish) posters who just link to their own content without contributing significantly to the community. It comes across as too spammy and self-promotional.

I think I've seen mention before that you need 100 posts before signatures are available/visible. I can't currently see any or create one. Guess I'll be able to confirm after two more posts...

FWIW, my initial thoughts on a few of LRY's recent topics have been that they seemed intended to drive traffic to the blog links.

Edit: 100 post threshold confirmed ;)

[LetsRetireYoung]

Sure you can add signatures. I've had one for years, and so have many other long-term posters. Go to Profile > Modify Profile > Forum Profile > Signature > [ url=web link] Whatever you want the link to read [ /url]. Just remove those spaces before "url" and your link should work just fine.

As others have said, people here tend to distrust new(ish) posters who just link to their own content without contributing significantly to the community. It comes across as too spammy and self-promotional.

That's really strange... That is literally not an option on my menu. Here is a screenshot I just took: https://i.ibb.co/rmGZBxZ/profile-menu.jpg (also attached to this post, for double redundancy)

I suspect that what's happening here is yet another unwritten rule - signatures might not show up at all until some arbitrary point: 50 comments, or 1 month on the forum, etc. That once again feeds into my "all newbies are suspicious by default" hypothesis. :(

EDIT: nevermind, found it - https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/forum-information-faqs/forum-signatures/msg2436074/

Looks like the policy is "no signatures until the first 100 posts." As rules go, that one was very well hidden. :) I hope I will stop offending people if I continue to contribute to this community with my blog link in the signature, when I eventually unlock it. (Of course, being offended is one helluva drug... Which is why I'll never live anyplace that has HOA ever again LOL)

[LetsRetireYoung]

Okay, so defensiveness it is then.

I like to think of that as "eye for eye response mechanism when after contributing useful advice, established members start inventing new rules." :P A bit of a mouthful, but yeah. We are each right in our own way.

But if what you mean by "ambitious" is that you're trying to use this place to fish for readers through advertising your blog as often as possible, then yeah, that's the definition of spamming.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that that's not what you meant though.

You know, I've just looked at the rules yet again, and they do not state anywhere just how many posts, how many new topics, how much useful advice one must provide to prove that they are a human being and not a very elaborate Turing-capable spam-bot... When I posted my first few comments on this forum, there were some anti-robot questions (the 6th word of the very first blog post, etc), and I aced those. :)

I am making a deliberate effort not to sound passive aggressive - I will only state that this "you're under suspicion until and unless you pass some arbitrary line" attitude is precisely what drives out newbies and people who want to help but run into weird opposition that operates by some unwritten rules. That is not a good look - not just for MMM, but for any community.

[Weisass]

Oh man, don’t you all just *loooove* when conversations (d)evolve from an attempt to engage a new person constructively to them giving you an exhaustive education on the rules? Wheew.
Take a breath.
And then maybe try another approach, I don’t know, like: engage with folks without linking constantly (because they told you it was annoying? Not a rule, just courtesy), and let it flow from there….

[Metalcat]

Okay, so defensiveness it is then.

I like to think of that as "eye for eye response mechanism when after contributing useful advice, established members start inventing new rules." :P A bit of a mouthful, but yeah. We are each right in our own way.

But if what you mean by "ambitious" is that you're trying to use this place to fish for readers through advertising your blog as often as possible, then yeah, that's the definition of spamming.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that that's not what you meant though.

You know, I've just looked at the rules yet again, and they do not state anywhere just how many posts, how many new topics, how much useful advice one must provide to prove that they are a human being and not a very elaborate Turing-capable spam-bot... When I posted my first few comments on this forum, there were some anti-robot questions (the 6th word of the very first blog post, etc), and I aced those. :)

I am making a deliberate effort not to sound passive aggressive - I will only state that this "you're under suspicion until and unless you pass some arbitrary line" attitude is precisely what drives out newbies and people who want to help but run into weird opposition that operates by some unwritten rules. That is not a good look - not just for MMM, but for any community.

As I've said, no one here is trying to dictate rules to you, people have just been trying to let you know that a certain type of behaviour won't be recieved well here.

You've also been given a solution where you can put your link in your signature, which many people do, and will be considered perfectly acceptable.

As I said before, you can choose to accept this help from.members trying to give you guidance on how people are likely to respond to you, or you can continue to react in a way that continually feels like I'm being told to fuck off.

So I'm out.

[LetsRetireYoung]

Oh man, don’t you all just *loooove* when conversations (d)evolve from an attempt to engage a new person constructively to them giving you an exhaustive education on the rules? Wheew.
Take a breath.
And then maybe try another approach, I don’t know, like: engage with folks without linking constantly (because they told you it was annoying? Not a rule, just courtesy), and let it flow from there….

1. Cool special effect! :)
2. Literally the only rule is "don't spam" - it has zero clarifications or follow-ups in the rule thread. Imho, what I posted were contributions to discussions, not random spam about viagra, etc.
3. The vast, vast, vast majority of my posts on this forum have zero links and attempt to help people. I don't know what kind of traumatic experience all y'all had with genuine spammers years ago, but it seems to have left you so traumatized that you freak out when someone new links to a loooong blog entry about their FIRE journey instead of pasting 2,500 words into a forum post. It really does sound like traumatic response. O_o
4. I define spam as either posting random links that have zero to do with discussion (viagra, porn, etc), or posting irrelevant text - like copy-pasting a wiki article about hedgehogs in a thread about hedge funds. :P AFAIK, I indulged in neither. Ironically, almost every post in this thread (except the first 3) meets the second definition, as everybody here seems to gang up on the newbie instead of posting about, you know, Medium.
5. If you show me which specific post of mine broke the very concise rule ("no spamming"), I will sincerely apologize. Until and unless you do that, you're just being a very strange breed of cyber-bullies.
6. This "discussion" is pointless - y'all appear to be coming from the place of fear. (Seriously, how many legions of scammers were there? lol this is the only board I've had to join by downloading an app for verification first.) This is going nowhere, so I will not dignify any future strange emo harassment (fueled by invisible unwritten rules) with my response. Leaving this thread for good now. (To any future Mustachians who opened this to learn about Medium - sorry, eh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[dandarc]

Since you're too damn lazy to read the rules post in its entirety, here's the clarification you didn't take the time to read:

5/21/14 Edit:
"Spam" in rule number 5 ("No spam.") includes linking to your own blog.  You may add a link to your blog in your signature, and it will show up under every post you make.  Please do not start a new thread just to link to a post you wrote.  If the content is good enough, others will do that for you.  If your blog post is relevant to another thread that is ongoing, feel free to add the link, but do not abuse this - if too many of your posts are direct links to your own content, that is spammy.  Enforcement will be at the moderators' sole discretion.  If you are not sure, please contact a moderator before posting.

You were rocking a 30% "link to your own content" average after 20+ posts when you got called out by another poster - would a mod call your posting history "spammy" if you kept that rate up? Hard to say - I'm not a mod - but it was happening frequently enough for other users to notice what you were doing, and not just one post either - you had a sample set to draw from.

We've had CPAs that have posted here for years express concern they are spamming when posting a link to expert-level content on all these rapid  tax law changes we've seen due to the pandemic. So users with one or two posts to their own blogs per thousand posts (or more) after literal years of contributing real and very valuable expertise on this forum are more concerned with community standards than you as a newcomer, even after relatively gently having it pointing it out.

Now you're acting like the forum is actively rooting against you. To be clear, I certainly am by now, but I doubt the forum as a whole is.

Also @PDXTabs - might want to read the bolded part yourself. Had a snarky response half written for you in the Top is In thread, but figured it was better to post here than there, and no point in continued snark, particularly there.

[PDXTabs]

Also @PDXTabs - might want to read the bolded part yourself. Had a snarky response half written for you in the Top is In thread, but figured it was better to post here than there, and no point in continued snark, particularly there.

I never wrote that LRY wasn't spamy and/or wasn't breaking any forum rules. In fact I would agree that at least one post he made seems to run afoul of the forum rules. I only wrote that this post which you complained about seemed in bounds to me. Which to me, personally, doesn't help the LRY spam problem.

[dandarc]

Have fun selling your "I'm a genius financial analyst that after 12 years at Amazon and a meteoric career path needed to triple my money in 1 year to get to a few hundred thousand dollars" story. And recognizing someone's username who became so famous in just a few days isn't exactly stalking.

@PDX - the problem wasn't a single post. If it was just one post, then obviously fine. People were actually trying to do LRY a favor by calling attention to how the posting history potentially looks - how long can 1 out of every 3 posts linking to your own content stand here? The obvious spam bots get shut down quickly. If you're a human being you get more leeway, but c'mon you're telling me 1/3 of posts linking to my own blog is OK?