Hmmmmm. I'm dubious about kicking back at employees of Medium - and I'm also dubious at kicking at salaries. The proof is in the pudding, if you get someone in that role who can turn that earning figure from $1.01 to $3 for every article written, then everyone benefits. If you engage in nepotism and bring in a fuckwit then you'll piss off all your writers and they'll leave and the quality will go down. Sometimes it pays to bring in talent, provided you're actually getting the talent.

I was writing here when new stories earned $0.02 maximum. If I write something now, it's almost always guaranteed to go above $1.00. That's no small change in how the place operates and it's far more welcoming to new writers than it was. How did they do it? I think they probably stopped paying the top writers a fortune for doom-porn, stoic-guru nonsense, and race-bait. That's why they left. Nobody is going to be 100% happy 100% of the time, but take the long view and give them the benefit of the doubt. I write more when the going is good, and I write less when there's a financial winter. That's always been key to Medium survival. The last extinction event took out the twin doom-pillars of Wildfire and Haque and that's not done Medium any harm overall.

Without getting my legal defence hat on, it's also worth noting that the entire digital sphere is coping with the introduction of AI and what that means for everything. We had that entire debacle with Medium promoting someone who brought 300,000 views from TikTok but whose content was AI generated puff-nonsense. I'd much rather take the long view, give Medium the space and time it needs to properly sort a problem. We have AI writers being given money by AI clappers. This is better than truculently insisting we keep everyone earning at a high level and see infrastructure investment finances siphoned away into cryptocurrency suitcases. Sure... it's a bit more extreme this time round, but I'm a bird. I'm the last of the dinosaurs standing, hunker down, trust the project, have faith in the outcome and don't bust a gut trying to do literary star jumps in a flatlined economic space.