Medium’s Third and Most Dangerous Move: Denial and the Blame Game
In January 2025 — the worst month in Medium’s history — countless writers faced devastating losses. Today, the CEO publicly dismissed their concerns. There are better alternatives to regain the broken
I published this Quick Update for the Writing Community on Medium, so please share your views there if you are a writer or reader on that platform.
Dear friends, I trust this post finds you well.
This is a quick update, as many writers keep asking whether there has been any news since my farewell story. Many have expressed frustration over the silence, and I have noticed a few writers sharing their thoughts in various publications now. The silence is suddenly broken on Medium with harsh words from the CEO.
As of now, there is still no formal update, apart from Brittany’s latest message in my farewell story, where she encouraged patience, graciously accepted the situation, and showed willingness to investigate it. Before that, Scott acknowledged the concerns as an update in his viral blog, stating, “We hear you, we are working on it, and we will keep you updated. Thank you for your patience.” Ironically, a stupid AI detector, as mentioned by Dr Broadly, thought these wonderful words were likely written by AI.
However, today, in a well-written piece by an experienced writer whom I will cite below, the CEO stated that there was no payment issue — only a handful of people making noise among themselves. He also mentioned that there was communication including an email to affected people.
Since Scott’s viral story, there has been no official announcement, at least as far as I know. None of my close circles, including around 500 of my protégés, received an email from Medium. CEO said an email was sent. I am not claiming that Medium did not send one, as email systems can fail. I personally lost a significant portion of my income, yet I did not receive any communication. If you have received an email, please leave a comment on this story.
This message is not about criticizing the CEO. I have no conflict of interest with him. Some people support him; others do not. Personally, I support him and have always appreciated his writing, even before he became CEO. I also recognize the weight of his role — what we see as users and what he sees as a leader can be entirely different.
As I mentioned in a previous comment, Medium is a black box. No one truly knows how it operates, how the algorithm works, who runs the company, or who the curators are. I have observed its patterns for six years, analyzing significant public data, and even when I was a boost nominator, I could not fully decipher its workings. It is also possible that the CEO does not have complete freedom to set the strategy. The reality is — we are all speculating.
That said, the data from January 2025 is clear.
Thousands of authentic writers — many of whom are connected with me — have reported a significant drop in income. Some have earned mere cents or nothing at all, despite their stories being read by at least 50 people, including Friends of Medium (FoMs).
Denying this reality is a perilous move. It risks deepening the already broken trust. Reading the CEO’s comments on John’s story deeply concerned me, especially after both Scott and Brittany acknowledged the issue.
Even more troubling was the tone of the CEO’s response — framing those who critique Medium’s current situation as adversaries of the platform. Yet, the majority of writers raising concerns in January are the very people who loved Medium the most. They are not against the platform — they desperately want it to recover and thrive once again.
I was inspired to write my post after reading a story by John Pearce 🌻who posed the metaphorical question, ‘Who killed Medium?’ The story is written in an excellent style and is boostworthy. I curated it on Illumination to create a healthy debate and possibly brainstorm to make this platform better and the community vibrant again.
My response to John’s intriguing game is that while the answer is complex and there are multiple hypotheses, the final blow came from Scott’s desperate message — written just half an hour after I published a community bulletin in response to over 4,000 inquiries.
Scott’s reply to my story was kind and friendly, as was mine which he seems to hide from others to see it. But his viral bulletin on the Medium blog felt unreviewed by anyone who understands audience psychology. Though subtly worded, it blatantly labeled authentic writers as spammers, justifying the drastic earnings cut. Therefore the story got so many negative comments.
He later admitted they had slightly ‘tweaked’ the algo to address the fraudulent activity, which was good, but the change was glaring — writer earnings were slashed by about 90%. Blaming authentic writers as spammers was shocking to the community. He fortunately made a good update to his story.
Medium improved the payment situation slightly, but according to data shared with me by those smarter than I am, the payouts are still much lower than before. We don’t know the exact reasons. Some speculate Medium needs to save money because they will be hiring new product managers replacing Ariel and Buster, and new backend engineers advertised on LinkedIn to solve technical issues.
The unexpected earnings of writers were my reason to post my farewell story, clearly pointing out that until Medium addresses this unfair situation, I will not contribute to the platform meaningfully, meaning that I will not post my premium content once loved by thousands of paying members. Many established writers I know have this approach now. It does not mean we don’t like Medium or want it to fail. It means we care about it and want it to be a great platform again.
My title refers to the third critical misstep.
To summarize:
The first misstep was a stealth algorithm change that was never communicated to the community. Writers only discovered it through the shock of earnings plummeting by an order of magnitude.
The second misstep was Scott’s poorly framed blog post, which attributed the income drop to an increase in spam and scam-like stories, effectively shifting the blame onto writers.
And now, the third misstep — perhaps the most damaging — is the outright denial of these income losses, along with blaming and alienating the very writers who deeply care about Medium while dismissing their pain.
My decades of leadership experience tell me that these three actions are serious red flags for a company in sharp decline — one that seems unwilling to recover, as if burying its head in the sand.
A far better approach would be to:
Acknowledge the problem instead of dismissing concerns.
Offer a genuine apology for missteps.
Communicate a clear plan for addressing the issue.
Keep the community informed with regular updates.
Fix the problem incrementally to rebuild trust.
Ignoring reality and playing the blame game only accelerates the fall.
Now, we have a serious publication issue. Possibly another big bug.
Many stories submitted to our pubs are automatically rejected, sending false messages to writers even before our editors see them. Many writers keep asking me why their high quality stories meeting guidelines are rejected. This looks like a bug to me. If a story is returned without a private message, please contact me via my Slack or my website contact form, and I will get it published. I will raise a ticket about this, although I did several months ago, and it was ignored.
I recently built a health and wellness network for the ILLUMINATION community. All authentic writers and readers are welcome to join. I wrote a post about it on Medium, but unfortunately, only a few direct links had a chance to see it. Recently, I checked stats and noticed that only one story out of 300 is distributed. I will write a detailed post about it soon.
Thank you for reading my bulletin. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
You put a mirror inside of Medium and show us true picture. I lost trust like many. Medium blacklists writers it does not like and those who criticize them. I am one of them. Despite my significant contribution to the platform I was put into distribution jail. Now my stories get zero views once they used to get many. I believe it is in a coma as you identified. No one wants it to die but this arrogance is unbelievable and expedite its demise.
“This message is not about criticizing the CEO.”— It should be. 🤣
His arrogance and dismissive attitude towards writers is inexcusable.
I’m not sure what email he’s referring to, but the only one I can think of is from Medium Writers Support on 1/15/25. There was a small ‘partner program abuse update’ near the end, but it was essentially a condensed version of Scott Lamb’s post.