Cue ominous music. The last “improvement” — to the payment algorithm — all but wiped out the incomes of thousands of poets, cartoonists, photographers, humorists and fiction writers. My once-healthy earnings plummeted by 90% overnight — and remain dismal. It’s like having one’s pocket picked every day by a billionaire.

Dissent and dissatisfaction on the platform are widespread, and there’s no shortage of heartbreaking stories:

Claps were at least an accurate measure of how much people liked a story. Read time — a measure of how long it takes people to read a story — is at best pointless.

What Medium fails to realize is that its paying members are truly its shareholders, and shareholders deserve better treatment than this.

To prevent future income theft and abuse, Medium writers need to unionize — asap.