A Writing Tip Behind The Truth Nobody Sees.
Why every Medium and Substack tutorial sounds different but says the same thing. A peek behind the curtain of the online content machine.
Every single day, millions of people log onto Medium, Substack, YouTube, and dozens of other platforms hunting for the secret. How to find readers. How to make money online. How to become an influencer. How to build an audience in thirty days. The answer’s always the same — trust me, I’ve been studying this phenomenon for years because I’ve been part of the game, too.
Always the same answer, just dressed up in many different ways, whose purpose is to deceive people like a mirror maze.
Why? Because all these different dressings target what makes us human beings who share the same fears, emotions, dreams, feelings, desires, and needs, many of which have been carefully fabricated.
I apologise for threatening your self-esteem, but many of your needs aren’t yours at all. But you’ve to believe they are, so that someday a product or service appears out of the blue to fulfil them, reinforcing your idea that you really needed that product or service.
This isn’t your typical article criticising platforms. Quite the opposite. But you won’t find tips on optimising your posts or hacking the algorithm. This is a peek behind the curtain at the information recycling machine that keeps the web churning.
The Grand Illusion of Originality
Here’s the real secret about how online content works: making users believe they’re accessing exclusive information they’ve never seen before, when in fact it’s always the same concepts repackaged.
Let’s take a solid example. Google “How To Get Your First 1000 Followers on Medium”: lots of tutorials were published in the last 12 months, and the AI Overview sums up the same dos and don’ts you’ll find in the subsequent blog posts listed in the SERPs.
They’ll all say: find your niche, be consistent, craft good titles, engage with other writers, join publications, optimise for SEO. Change the word order, chuck in some emojis, tell a different personal story. But the substance? One hundred per cent identical.
The same goes for “How to Make Money with Substack”. The answers are always: pick a niche, offer consistent value, build an email list, create premium content, push it on social media. Always. The same. Identical. Procedures.
When you’ve spent years selling the web dream, some of us develop a particular talent. Looking at “chunks of text”, you immediately spot the repeated pattern. You notice certain words that others don’t see, like Professor Nash in A Beautiful Mind.
The Infinite Recombination Phenomenon
In 2024, 33% of marketers admitted that producing content that genuinely resonates with audiences represents a major challenge. What happened? The market keeps getting flooded with tutorials promising supernatural outcomes.
The truth is this: all writers, creators and wannabe influencers have access to the same tools and the same information.
Now, some of you will be wondering: “So how come some people get their hands on information that’s out of reach for us mere mortals? I know experts who’ve got in-depth knowledge of writing, copywriting, web marketing, and SEO. Have they got special powers? If it’s true that all the tools and information are the same, why have they got more followers and make more money than I?”
No, dear reader, no special powers. Here’s a quick answer — necessarily incomplete for this context. They’re “just” professionals who spend an enormous amount of time and money studying. They attend specialist seminars alongside even more experienced colleagues, they’re active in super-expert forums, and they swap information with other experts and the Big Tech industry.
Let me say it again: all of this, done every single day, costs an absolute fortune in time and money. That’s why attending their courses and subscribing to their newsletters often doesn’t cost five bucks a month but thousands. And rightly so. Somehow, they need to monetise the knowledge they’ve acquired by investing so much time and so much money.
Hence, there’s no secret formula hidden away in a digital bunker. Like on a musical stave, there are only seven notes that any musician can combine as they please. The result seems to vary, and between Lady Gaga and Wagner, the difference we perceive is massive. But the notes remain the same. Always seven. Or twelve if we add the sharps and flats.
This is the reality of the web: there aren’t millions of authors creating content. There’s a mass of people believing they’re being authentic and original whilst serving up the same reheated soup with a pinch of different spices to make it seem fresh and exclusive. Marketing does the rest.
And this — I might be wrong here — seems to be the only element that sets writers apart from those before the twentieth century and us: the marketing that every writer, especially those making a living through self-publishing, must understand, even better than writing itself.
The Obsession with Authenticity
The fashion of banging on about authenticity in content reflects exactly this dynamic. Authenticity gets mistaken for originality when in reality every author believes they’ve created something that’s never existed before, whilst they’ve simply combined differently the same words we’ve all been using for the past 5,000 years. Give or take a century.
Content saturation and declining user trust and attention have made establishing credibility crucial for brands. But how do you build credibility when everyone’s flogging the same product? Through the illusion of difference. Something millions of online marketers haven’t cottoned on to yet, still peddling the same reheated soup like “Build your community…”
The Six Groups of Users and the Profit Machine
Despite everyone having access to the same knowledge and the same procedures, individuals split into homogeneous groups with predictable behaviours:
Group 1: Those who follow procedures and use tools by sticking to the instructions to the letter. This minority gets what they’ve paid for, and if they share what they’ve learned, rightly so, they ask for more money than the newbie selling infoproducts for a penny. But they remain the minority who, at least, haven’t chucked money away on courses they bin the next day.
Group 2: Those who customise procedures by 10%. These users delude themselves into thinking they’re innovative, but they’re only tweaking superficial details, whilst believing “my product is different”, so they need to adapt the strategy.
Group 3: Those who use tools and procedures at 50% although they cost an arm and a leg. Enough to see some laughable results, not enough to grasp the complete mechanism. Here too, the rubbish bin comes in handy.
Group 4: Those who make very limited use of the information, and for a short time. They pack it in before seeing real results. The excuses are utterly ridiculous.
Group 5: Those who quickly ditch the instructions, believing the method doesn’t work, when in reality they’ve never actually given it a proper go. The motivation behind the purchase often remains a brain-twister worthy of Mr Rubik himself.
Group 6: Those who thought they’d got the final result when they’d only received incomplete instructions on how to achieve it. The largest group and the easiest to manipulate.
Groups 2 through 6 represent the vast majority. They’re the perfect target for all producers of tutorials, courses and services because they don’t understand how the machine behind the web works: the Recyclator!
The Guru Business and Disguised Scams
According to the Federal Trade Commission, between 2021 and 2023, scams carried out on social media caused losses of 2.7 billion dollars. A substantial chunk of this money ended up in the pockets of self-proclaimed gurus flogging courses on how to become an influencer or make money online.
And we’re only talking about the American market. Europe is awash with influencers promising miracles, success and money as if it’s raining down. A few years after their rise to the throne, they all make the slip-up that reveals their true nature as snake oil salesmen. But let’s not forget there’s always someone ready to bow and pay.
The pattern’s always the same: an influencer builds credibility by showing screenshots of earnings (often fake), then sells courses promising to replicate their success. Many of these pricey courses offer generic advice you could find online for free, using psychological pressure tactics like “If you don’t invest in yourself, you don’t really want success”.
The case is emblematic: influencers who’ve never made money selling actual products or services, but who’ve got rich selling courses on “how to get rich”. Their only skill is convincing the gullible that there’s a secret shortcut.
To succeed in a market economy, you must be either a skilled producer or an effective salesman. Online, it feels like being a dodgy seller is almost a must.
The Repetitive Content Patterns
Analyse any popular tutorial on Medium or Substack and you’ll find this structure:
Introduction with a heart-wrenching personal story
Promise to reveal “what nobody tells you”
Numbered list of 5–10 tips identical to everyone else’s
Motivational conclusion urging you to take action
Link to newsletter, course or coaching service
Every element has been tested and optimised. Not for its effectiveness in solving the user’s problem, but for its ability to generate clicks, sign-ups and sales.
With over 5 million podcasts on Spotify alone, saturation has become a growing problem. The same dynamic applies to blogs, newsletters and video tutorials. Everyone’s rabbiting on about the same things using different words.
Why It Still Works
You’re probably wondering: if it’s all so obvious, why do people keep falling for the trap? The answer’s simple: because most users haven’t got the time or the skills to critically analyse the content they consume.
A person is exposed to at least 3,000 marketing messages a day. In this deluge of information, the human brain looks for shortcuts. If content seems authoritative, if it uses the right language, if it presents convincing testimonials, our brain lets its guard down.
And then there’s the hope factor. People want to believe there’s a magic formula that’ll transform their lives. They want the winning ticket. They want to believe that a tutorial, a course, or a system is different from all the others. It’s easier to cough up 997 dollars for a course promising results in 30 days than to admit that success requires years of steady commitment.
In the “quick and easy” society, nobody wants to roll up their sleeves and work for years. This mindset has developed for several reasons. First, “quick and easy” has become the collective mental pattern. Second, the internet has opened up opportunities for wealth and success that were previously unimaginable — achievable, so they say, with just a few clicks of a keyboard. Lastly, billions of individuals are drowning in debt, facing the daily fear of losing everything.
The Naked Truth
There are no secrets. There are no miraculous hacks. There are no exclusive formulas. Everything you need to succeed on Medium, Substack or any other platform is publicly available, often for free. Rarely useful. Rarely reliable. Rarely up to date.
The difference between those who succeed and those who fail doesn’t lie in access to secret information, but in the consistent and intelligent execution of principles everyone knows. Write regularly, keep improving, understand your audience, and be patient. None of this is a secret. But none works by itself or in the wrong hands.
But this truth doesn’t sell. Nobody would pay for a course titled “Work Hard for Years with No Success Guaranteed”. So the market carries on churning out illusions packaged as exclusive revelations that only Premium Users can access.
The Recycling Machine Will Keep Running
This isn’t a call to action. I won’t tell you to “wake up” or “take control of your life”. Those are motivational quotes that are part of the very pattern I’m describing.
The information recycling machine, the Recyclator, will keep running because it’s perfectly calibrated to human psychology. As long as people are looking for shortcuts, there’ll be people ready to flog them the illusion of having found them.
The difference, after reading this article, is that now you know how it works. Every time you come across a tutorial promising to reveal the secret to online success, finding fans on Medium, Substack, Patreon, Spotify and a thousand other apps, you can smile knowing it’s about to serve you the same soup you’ve already tasted a thousand times.
Only this time, perhaps, you’ll recognise it for what it is.
Signing off for now, until our next rendezvous… thank you,
© Copyright 2025 Martin Heiland-Sperling
Originally published at Medium on Nov 10, 2025
If this post is your cup of tea, why not buy me a coffee?