You have your loads and dumps backwards, and you should be using load and dump instead (the s suffix means those functions work on strings.). load from a file, dump to a file

users = {}

@client.event
async def on_message(message):
    # No need to load the dictionary, our copy is the most correct
    await update_data(users, message.author)
    await add_experience(users, message.author, 5)
    await level_up(users, message.author, message.channel)
    with open('users.json', 'w') as f:
        json.dump(users, f)

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print ("Ready when you are xd")
    print ("I am running on " + client.user.name)
    print ("With the ID: " + client.user.id)
    # Load the json just once, when the bot starts
    global users
    with open('users.json') as f:
        try:
            users = json.load(f)
        except:
            users = {}

3 ways to load a json file:

import json
import ast
with open(file_path) as file:
    data1 = json.load(file)
    data2 = json.loads(file.read())  
    data3 = ast.literal_eval(file.read())

You should use json.load whenever possible, but sometimes the JSON file is not strictly in the correct format (e.g. single quotes instead of double quotes). A solution is to use ast.literal_eval().

json.dump takes data to be written into a file first and the file second.

So the code should be:

# json.dump(data, file)
json.dump(a,e)

https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html#json.dump

If you come here because you are reading in a file from the command line using click and the file cannot be opened/read by with open(click_file_obj, "r") as f, use the name attribute of the _texIOwrapper object generated by click. That is,

with open(click_file_obj.name, "r") as f:
    file_text = f.read()

This worked for me. Source: https://python-forum.io/thread-1277.html