I'm happy to hear Medium is working to keep the spammers and frauds out. Thank you for that!

However, like many others, I'm struggling to see the financial benefits you mention. Earnings have been plummeting for a while, and especially lately.

And the Boost program?? It's become something of a joke. I know nominators who were getting rejections 15 minutes after submitting - and then even 2 minutes later. How could the story have even been read in that time?

I used to craft stories carefully with the boost in mind and most of them were accepted - plus a few I didn't anticipate.

Now? Rejection after rejection after rejection. I'm not going to spend two full days working on creating a quality story anymore when I'll be lucky if it earns pennies a day.

in December, I published a piece that has had 69 reads and earned $13.50. Yesterday I published a piece that has had 38 reads and has earned 13 cents. Both were 9-minute reads. How can twice the reads earn 100 times as much just 2 weeks ago??!

Something is definitely rotten.

It’s so disheartening to spend 8–10 HOURS a day here, reading, supporting, engaging with our community — as I did yesterday for a whopping $1.50 — pouring our hearts and souls into our stories, and providing content to build this platform so M’s employees can earn huge incomes (I’ve seen the job postings). I wonder how the Higher-ups at Medium would feel in our shoes.

Thank you for your post, and for the good that Medium is doing. Now if it could also work on fixing the issue of paying its writers something far more reasonable for their efforts, that would be golden. As it is, earning $10-ish a day for several hours’ work is ridiculous. But at least it beats a few pennies.