Hehehehe. It's just another set of shifting sands in the grand experiment that is Medium. When I zoom out across the many years I've been here, what seems to have happened is that Tony shifted the payments into a more egalitarian model. Where people used to earn $0.02 on a story over a month, they're now earning a couple of dollars. The knock on effect of this was the old-guard who were used to big payouts felt they weren't getting the recognition they deserved. So off they flounced. The same thing happened with Tom Kuegler and with Marley K. It's been happening ad infinitum since I got here.....

The problem with moving everything towards a more egalitarian model of course, is that an AI bot can make a dollar on a badly written story, particularly if its being read by an AI bot designed to read these things. That wasn't a problem in 2018 when I joined - but it's a problem now. Medium likely can't tell you about it, because telling you about it would be giving up some advantage in what has turned into a capitalism arms race.

Write less. Zoom out. Enjoy the ride.

I answered your question here for the grand sum of $14.77: https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/is-now-the-best-time-to-stop-writing-on-medium-987fc98e9fcb