Medium’s Rebalancing Act for Quality Writing

How the changes to the partner program might finally weed out those who game the system

Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash

I, for one, am in heaven with the arrival of “that” email from Medium.

The reason being?

I’ve had enough of the gamers. Those who take it upon themselves to churn out article after article, sometimes as many as three a day. They were gaming the system to gather claps and increase earnings.

The approach by some of these writers has been based on a false reality.

One of if you couldn’t increase the number of clicks per article, you could just increase the number of articles. More articles, even with a low number of claps, would increase the total claps, in turn increasing a writer’s overall income.

This capacity to game the system, combined with an easy path to get started—after all, anyone can write—has led to a flood of new writers.

With it, an even greater flood of articles, resulting in an almost bottomless pit of dross. But now, well, that’s all about to change …