I am not surprised by this statement. While I have read probably 20+ of your stories, most of which would have been under the new read time payment method. However, I would estimate you would have gained 4–5 minutes read time from me.

I don’t say this to be rude or cruel, but in hopes to give you something to improve on. The reason I keep clicking on your stories is that the title is interesting. However, I end up clicking away when early on your make a huge generalization’s that either have no supporting evidence or are factually wrong.

You follow the above highlighted quote posing why Medium would intervene in the system that was working and spoken highly of. There is an obvious reason why they would intervene because the system was not working and it was being gamed. They had the insight from their back end to see that people were clapping for stories without reading them. Now I am not saying that many writers were intentionally gaming the system. Many of them would have been highly expecting people to read their work. But at the same time if they are getting paid nicely for the claps, they are not going to argue with the system and will praise how good it is.

Now, if Medium is not profitable, there are two potential problems. They are not attracting enough paying readers or they are giving out to much of the pie. I can understand a start up like Medium wants to make it attractive to people to write for their platform so they try and give as much back as they can. But this leads back to the change in system. They could give out less of the revenue they get under the new system while increasing payouts for writers that are well read and decreasing payouts for writers that could have been getting inflated results due to clap for clap type of outcomes.