Medium EXCEEDED my expectations when I first joined in 2018. The home page was full of well-written articles culled from Medium's in-house publications. More importantly, though I had few followers at that time, my stories were widely read and earned respectably. When Medium unexpectedly "improved" the payment algorithm in late 2019 from clap-based earnings (a measure of how much people liked a story) to read time- based earnings (a measure of how long it took people to read a piece whether they liked it or not, favoring clickbaity, wordy, overlong, padded, repetitive articles, which have since proliferated), I, like thousands of authors, saw my earnings drop 90% overnight. Further "improvements" have reduced those earnings even further, despite having 100x more followers now than when I joined. I’ve long since cancelled my membership and rarely post anymore, as it isn't worth the effort. In the new, "more relational" Medium (!), no one can see or find my stories anywhere, not even followers. Publications are dead. Curation is dead. Medium is dead.