Thanks for the thoughtful and insightful response. You bring up a good point — a lot of Medium’s subscribers are writers, and if writers stop feeling supported, they might have no incentive to keep subscribing (let alone contributing).

Your point about building up a following is interesting. Some people believe that Medium’s follower counts are just a vanity number. You can have 30K followers and still get 30 views on an article because (a) some of these followers never log in to Medium and (b) it takes a bit of digging to find new stories from the people you follow. Perhaps it will take much more external promotion going forward. Only time will tell.

My articles are always hit or miss. I either get 100 views or 30K+ views. Not much in the middle. When I get curated, the money I earn literally pays my bills. Almost all of my tech writing clients have found me on Medium. For me, writing here has changed my life.

I don’t count on achieving Medium “fame”, but I do worry that the one platform that once believed in the independent writer might not believe in us anymore.