TRUE CRIME
️Medium Treats Writers Like 💩 and I’m Leaving
I discovered Medium in 2018, and quickly built a large following. I was more than happy with my earnings from the essays, fiction, poems and cartoons I published in those early years, a large percentage of which were curated/distributed/promoted by the platform and included in its (now-defunct) in-house publications.
That all changed in late 2019, when an “improvement” to the payment algorithm (that no one asked for) slashed my earnings by 90% in an instant. I publicly protested — and was never curated/distributed/promoted ever again.
Over the years, additional “improvements” reduced my earnings to a pittance, even while my audience grew to a peak of 21,000 readers. I cancelled my subscription to Medium. My profits on the platform, such as they were, could no longer justify the expense.
Thanks to yet another unwanted “improvement” initiated this month, those earnings have been further reduced to a microscopic sum.
I’m not alone. The victims of this latest “improvement” no doubt number in the thousands. Below is a small sample. Tragically, many are full-time Medium writers, with families, who have now lost their livelihoods. Medium doesn’t want you to know they exist. But they abound.
