Wieners for Days

That headline is 100% true — according to the email Medium sends out periodically to update you on your followers, I picked up an astonishing 842 new followers last month.

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Screenshot from author's email; thanks MuddyUm!

This tracks with my experience of late, as I generally add at least a dozen new followers every single day. I do not say this as a brag, or consider it a mark of my obvious and immense talent. Most of these people have never not-once interacted with me, and never will.

Follower counts on Medium used to be a vanity metric. Now they are more like the US government's budget: fake numbers. What inflation? Just keep printing money, baby.

Most of these followers aren't even people — they're bots with a side hustle. I bet they're altruistic programs meant to inflate our self-worth, perhaps one of Ev's new ideas to improve writer morale. Certainly they aren't just scrapping our stories to throw on a crappy website where they will continue to go unread.

I have therefore devised the ultimate Captcha to weed out these fake followers. None but actual people will be able to crack The Wiener Test. For what is a wiener, truly? Is it a hot dog? A sausage? A dog dog? A penis? A sniveling jerk? Wieners come in all shapes and sizes. They are truly a marvel of nature.

Shakespeare, probably: A wiener by any other name would smell as sweet.

If you are one of my followers, I invite you to take The Wiener Challenge! Carefully study the Captcha at the top and identify all those slippery wieners!

Author's edit: it's been brought to my attention that 'wiener' is an uniquely American word. In the interest of international unity, and to ensure no actual humans are ensnared by this ingenious Captcha, I've included the definition.

If you are reading this, chances are you aren't currently following me because that's how the all-powerful algorithm likes it. Also because, as previously established, I am solely followed by a legion of bots waiting for Skynet to right some wrongs. In that event, I also invite you too to take a gander at my wieners.

But don't follow me. Unless you're a bot.

Once you've completed the test, drop into the comments and compare wieners! Did you catch them all?

The word 'wiener' really starts to look funny once you write it out two dozen times. I think there's probably a meta statement about wieners there, but frankly I'm too stiff to make it. I'm all wienered out.

Image sources, starting from top left:

Eric writes about pop culture. And sometimes wieners, apparently. More about him here.

He earns a small commission from Medium if you use this link to become a member. In exchange, you get to read everything he writes, like this:

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