Is Medium A Sinking Ship?

Alarming email

Photo by Jason Mavrommatis on Unsplash

Every email from my Illumination substack is more alarming than the one before. According to the latest:

• Good writers earn just pennies for most stories.
• Supposedly yesterday, some writers saw their earnings disappear. I talked before about glitches. Claps disappear, comments suddenly can’t be found. Is Medium trying to annoy us, or is their tech just not up to snuff???
• Good writers are marked as “spammers” and have their payments withheld.
• Medium actually blames the recent cuts in payment on spammers. I can’t believe that there are so many spam accounts, and Medium certainly doesn’t really know how to identify those correctly.
• Droves of editors and people who spent years on Medium are leaving.
• To my dismay I just found out that Dr. Mehmet Yildiz is also leaving Medium until things improve. He wrote his farewell story a few days ago.

Another surprising piece of information: Non members can write for Medium and can even have up to three stories published a day. Apparently 35000 people write for the Illumination publications, but 9000 of them are not even members.

At one time, I submitted two stories a day to Illumination and was told that was too many — but non members can…