I have been on this platform since a few months after it started. I didn't write an article until about 2016, and then I paid for the first time in about 2019 (I think). I stopped paying for a year as we could still earn (although my earnings dropped substantially), and then I started paying again.

Evan Williams originally started Medium in order to see if there was a way that a magazine or a platform could be run profitably without advertising. He saw how advertising manipulated policy, and he wasn't happy with that.

Then, he decided to pay writers, and initially writers were paid for claps, made a lot of money as they gamed the system. Over a period of time, Medium writers have been paid less and less. This is normal for all writing sites on the web. I've been writing on the web since somewhere around 1999/2000, and have written for many sites during that time. I was generally always in the top 1% to to 5%. In 2021, on Medium, I was in the top 1000 writers for all four months.

Tony has brought Medium into profit for the first time since its inception (that is my understanding). Up until his take-over, Medium was running at a loss.

Over the past three years, Medium payments to writers have become less and less.

If you've been aware, for the past three or four months, monthly payments have been later than normal.

My conclusions are as follows:

1. Medium is either having a cash flow problem, or its paying its shareholders something, and as such they have to get the money from elsewhere, and they're taking it from writers, and they are going to keep the current rate. They expect writers to get used to it. They also accept that some writers will leave, but it's not a great loss because there are always more writers joining.

2. There is a genuine mistake. As an ex programmer, I am well aware how code works, and something might just have gone wrong in the works.

That's my two pennies.

On the positive side, this is a nice site to write on in terms of formatting and ease of putting an article together.

In addition, if you're a reader as I am, there is always something to read, and as I read for something like 5 hours day (sometimes more than that), I always need something to read. The one thing Tony has been really good at is getting that balance right - for me, anyway.

That's my two-bits.