Member-only story
MEDIUM
Change Is Here
Medium Changed Our Home Pages
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
I suspected change was coming. Again. Things were going well.
I joined Medium in the summer of 2018. The Medium Partner Program payment was calculated via how many claps you received for an individual story when I joined. The claps had to come from paid Medium subscription members. In my first three months of writing on Medium, I made almost nothing because I was not getting claps. I was not getting claps because no one was reading my articles since I had no idea what I was doing those first three months: my formatting, images, and plain writing sucked — they were not good.
At the same time, it was clear certain writers were receiving claps no matter if their articles were well written or not. My engineering spider-sense was up and running. There was a clap mafia at work.
Medium addressed this by changing the way writers were paid for stories. Instead of claps, read time by paid members would generate our payments. There was a big kerfuffle, and many…
