Congrats on the milestone... one thing not mentioned that, from what I gather, has the BIGGEST impact of # of followers is when you started contributing to Medium. If you started this year or even last year and got to 20k followers that would be absolutely insane. and incredibly impressive... but I'd guess you were here in the early days and those follower numbers grew over time with every post and every year. That's a big part of the story that's missing here... most people with 5-10k followers or more have been contributing for 5+ years and thats the common denominator more than "good content" when it comes to impressive follower stats.