What I Learned From the Article That Is Paying My Rent For Nearly A Year
By: Dimitris Poulopoulos
Tags: Monetization, Writing, Médium, Inspiration, Remote Working

During my MSc studies, one of my professors said something that completely changed my view on the way I’m expressing my thoughts: “You have to differentiate yourself from the crowd; you have to be a heretic.”

Take, for example, how the research norm changed in the field of Artificial Intelligence during the last decade: for years, artificial neural networks were considered a lost cause, a dead-end. Articles dealing with Neural Networks (NN) were viewed with skepticism, and their authors were trying to conceal the fact that their submissions examine NN-related properties.

Then, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio brought us the Deep Learning, a revolution that now dominates the field, secured them the Turing award in 2018 and opened up new possibilities for application developers and users. Deep Learning is the result of persistent work against the research paradigm in Artificial Intelligence for decades.

“The future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious of everything I have said.” — Geoffrey Hinton.

So, I decided to follow that advice and touch on an almost taboo subject in my field. I had my opinion and I needed to let it out. The article's subject doesn’t really matter, and it’s not the point of this article. This is not an article on how to write stories that go viral on Medium. I don’t have that recipe. But, if you’re curious, it was about the “raging war” between Microsoft and Linux, the corporate and the open-source world, and how you can unify everything under one system to get your job done.

When I completed the article and submitted it to a Medium publication, nothing could have foretold what would follow. The article went live in the morning, and until late in the afternoon, it did not seem to be anything special. It had a couple of hundred views, and I had not posted a link on any social media or relevant forums; no self-promotion.

Then, something happened, and every time I was refreshing the Medium stats page, the article was gaining hundreds of views. To this day, I’m not sure who gave it a push, but it closed the day with a bit more than seven thousand views. The next day got another 160 thousand, and the day after that added another 100K.

I continued discovering the article posted in every forum or Facebook group you can imagine. In the beginning, I had to run the comments through google translate to get a gist of the discussion around it if the debate was not in English. In the end, this was not maintainable or efficient, so I let it be.

Eventually, the article got more than half a million views, 7.5K claps, more than 1000 hours of member reading time, and more than 60 comments, most of them accusing me of bribery; I told you this subject is almost a taboo in my field, so there is a price to pay if you’re voicing a non-popular opinion. However, I think that the 7.5K claps more than compensate for the unfounded comments. Also, this was my first article that has been translated into more than one language.

The aftermath

Almost one year has passed since, and I’m still receiving comments, claps, mentions, and followers from this seven-minute-long article. But I got more than just a good Medium paycheck; a lot more:

I landed the job I have today

Interest from book agents

Followers on this and other platforms that continue to support my work

A growing list of subscribers to my newsletter

Influential followers on Twitter who appreciate strong opinions

I had written one or two articles that went viral before, and I wrote a few after, but none at that scale. In short, this article alone has been paying a great part of my expenses for the last year. But that’s not what you should keep from this story.

If you have an opinion, it needs to be voiced

Before I started writing on Medium, I had no experience in blogging. I published my first article last February. It was a tutorial article showcasing a programming library that I had developed.

From that day, I decided to publish my notes on things I read. I study something new, take notes, transform them into an article, and publish them on Medium.

The article that went viral was exactly that. My notes on how to unify Windows and Ubuntu. It was a solution to an actual problem I was having. But there was something more to it: it was also an opinionated article.

I didn’t try to sell anything. I did not promise to change anyone’s life, I did not lie, and certainly, Microsoft was not sponsoring me. I expressed my opinion, backed with evidence, that happened to be an unpopular one. I was a heretic. I fell asleep, woke up, and thousands of people were arguing about it. That was the x-factor; this article made people react, support my opinion, push back, and even leave hateful comments.

This article’s goal is not to provide you with a checklist for writing articles that go viral, neither to tell you how to get rich on Medium. However, you never know who is going to read the things you jot down. You never know who you will influence and who will reference your work. In this connected world, it only takes one person.

So, if you have an opinion, differentiate yourself from the crowd. People don’t need another article that carries forward an already popular opinion. You don’t need to be liked by everyone, and you certainly don’t need to agree with everyone. If you have an opinion, voice it, be bold about it, present the evidence, and be a heretic.

Learning Rate is a newsletter for those who are curious about the world of AI and MLOps. You’ll hear from me every Friday with updates and thoughts on the latest AI news and articles. Subscribe here!

About the Author

My name is Dimitris Poulopoulos, and I’m a machine learning engineer working for Arrikto. I have designed and implemented AI and software solutions for major clients such as the European Commission, Eurostat, IMF, the European Central Bank, OECD, and IKEA. You can follow me on Medium, LinkedIn, or @james2pl on Twitter.