The first thing you need to know is that nothing on this platform makes any sense, so it's a big waste of time to try to understand it. Just have fun and keep writing.

The second thing is that follow-for-follow will lead to a lot of crap in your feed.

Of course, Medium being what it is, there will ALWAYS be a lot of crap in your feed.

But the more you follow writers whose work you don't actually want to read, just because they've followed you, the worst it will be.

I focus on reads, not follows.

I try to check out the work of everyone who reads me, and follow them if I enjoy reading them. I've been here since early 2019 and I'm at 8K followers so that seems to be working well enough.

This was probably a longer answer than you wanted or needed, but I'm procrastinating because I'm supposed to clean the bathroom and writing this was a lot more fun.