Medium was founded in 2012 by Evan Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. He has an excellent track record of getting people hooked onto social media, demonstrated through his work with Twitter, and he’s proven himself once again with Medium.

Spend enough time on this platform, and you’ll hear writers describe their relationship with Medium as addictive. It’s not surprising — it was designed to get people hooked. Here’s how.

1. Gamification

Gamification is a method of using elements of game-playing to motivate engagement from users. It’s consistently been shown to get people hooked.

It’s a method used commonly in marketing, and it’s gaining a lot of traction with incredibly impressive results in education as well.

Here are some game elements that Medium uses:

Awards

You win awards for writing on Medium. Write well enough and frequently enough in a topic and you’ll be a Top Writer! But beware, you’ll lose your Top Writer tag if you stop writing in it. So you keep writing.

Just keep publishing.

Rewards

Claps are similar to ‘likes’ on Facebook and Instagram, except you can get up to 50 per person. So you end up with hundreds or thousands of claps. They look nice, don’t they?

That 1.2K looks pretty good.

If claps aren’t enough, there’s more. Through the Medium Partner Program, you get paid for your work. Money in your bank account, instantly. It’s kind of like gambling — you keep writing because you want to keep making money.

Point-scoring

How many followers do you have? Scoring a follower is like scoring a point. Someone read your work and liked it. It’s a win, and you want more.

Competition

There’s an inherent competition in Medium. You don’t actively compete with other writers, but you see how they’re performing.

When others outperform us, they show us what’s possible, so we keep writing so we can be like them. When we outperform them, they show us how well we’re doing, so we keep writing so we can keep feeling great about ourselves.

Progressive levels

You can rise through so many levels on Medium. Being curated, being a Top Writer, being featured, gaining 1,000 followers, gaining 10,000, getting to the top 7% of writers earning $100+ in a month on Medium, and more…

Every time you succeed, there’s a higher level to work towards. So you keep writing.

My second story ever. It motivated me to keep writing.

Leader boards

You click on a Tag to read articles you’re interested in, and you have a list of Top Writers in that tag. You know if you work hard, you can get yourself onto that leader board, or even at the top of it!

2. Output oriented

Medium is output-oriented. You produce work. You see outcomes.

After an hour, or a few, of concentrating, eyes down on your laptop screen, the pretty words and images look pretty good. They’re right there for you to admire. And then you post a link to your article on Facebook, and get to tell everyone about the article you just wrote. It sounds pretty impressive, and it is.

Going from this to a full page feels great. Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash.

We get bored and frustrated when we don’t see outputs. One of the top reasons people give up on a new habit is because they’re not seeing results. But with Medium, you’re seeing the results of your hard work immediately.

3. Instant gratification

You don’t just get rewards, you get them immediately. You don’t need to wait until your book’s gone to the editors, been published, taken to the market, and sold for you to get your positive feedback.

You write the article, and you can publish it immediately. Instant gratification.

You get reads and claps as soon as you post your article, and it’s great to see that others are reading and enjoying your work. Instant gratification.

4. Variable rewards

How many people have you heard talking about the unsolvable mystery of curation? How it seems random and they just can’t figure it out?

Well, science says this alone is a big reason for you to be hooked. It’s what gets millions of people addicted to gambling. I didn’t win big this time, but next time! Next time I’ll win — I’ll just play once more!

And when they do win, it’s: Oh, I’ve totally cracked this! I know how to win. I’ll play again so I can win some more!

In 1950, Skinner published an amazing experiment on the power of variable rewards. He put lab mice in two boxes.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash.

In Box 1, every time the mice pressed a lever, they would receive a treat.

In Box 2, there was also a lever. But whether or not the mice got a treat from it was random. Sometimes they would get it, and sometimes they wouldn’t.

Amazingly, the mice in Box 1 seldom pressed the lever. They only used it every now and again when they were hungry.

But the mice in Box 2 were addicted. They compulsively pressed the lever, even when they weren’t eating the food, and had plenty of food in the box.

It seems they were driven crazy by not knowing when they’d get a treat and when they wouldn’t. This method of variable rewards is the reason gambling is thought to be so addictive.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash.

It’s the same with curation on Medium. We don’t quite know if we’ll get curated or not. How many of these thoughts sound familiar?

Oh! I just got curated! This feels so good! I’ll write another article so it’ll be curated too!

Oh! I’ve had 2 articles curated in a row! I’m on a roll — I’ll write another one!

Oh no! My article wasn’t curated. I’ll have to write another article that does get curated! I need to get back on the wagon!

Whether we’re curated or not, we’re motivated to write another article in the hope the next one will be curated.

And the seeming randomness of curation is at the heart of it all, because we never quite know for certain whether the next article will be curated or not, and the anticipation is addictive.