Medium Vacated My Earnings from An Article Criticizing New Changes

Buster Benson , Tony Stubblebine Are we now being punished for daring to write our opinions? Ev Williams

I am beginning to feel the way the clairvoyant did upon boarding the RMS Titanic and being told her 2nd class ticket had been downgraded to steerage class: “Enjoy your trip,” snicker-snicker.

I wrote an article in the early days of the post-reforms period criticizing the new chaos at Medium. Mom and Dad, after some consultation with Sister Martina (my grammar school principal at St. Rose of Lima), decided that the peanuts I made from the article would serve a higher cause going into the champagne bucket for Medium’s celebration to commemorate the exiling of its more productive writers. My earnings were vacated, as you can see above.

Sure, many of you will say, “You’re a greedy c***, aren’t you?” I know that $.55 for an earlier article should be enough to keep me glued to spanishvillas.com but my villa will need a personalized pizza oven, right? And they aren’t free. So, here I am. A post-breakfast, pre-lunch former version of a writer who loved waking and writing for Medium but now finds himself checking vending machines for change.

Speaking of change, the ones implemented recently at Medium are a nightmare. This is a bitter pill for all of us except those who used to write one article a month and have since August 1st seen their earnings rise from $1.23 to $4.17, and the people at Medium who were tasked with cutting earnings to writers. I will sum up my feelings on these reforms in a separate article titled “Wtf, Yo?”

My Munchian scream into the black hole that has replaced America’s favorite platform for writing likely will not be heard as I have seen my “whatjamacallit”* fall off a cliff.

So to the seven people who or may not read this (more likely not), who may or may not clap for this — please, oh, please clap! I need my fix of claps!! — I have one question:

Is having earnings vacated because I am criticizing the platform’s reforms normal behavior in a post-Trump (Putin thrives) world? Well, if I put it that way, then yes. In the world of Putin, truth is more harmful than eggs. Remember when eggs were the silver bullet that, if consumed in the form of a two-over-easy, would leave us all obese and not-knowing our names? (It seems not eating them caused that.)

But just like eggs turned out to be perfectly healthy, if not a wonder food, so too the truth cannot be a bad thing regardless of how unpleasant it may be to hear.

I hope the $2.97 that was appropriated from me gets you the best champagne greed can buy.

*Whatjamacallit” is the new not-so-fragrant potpourri that Medium calls its metrics. If anyone out there, and this is an offer only to humans and the majority of us who have never successfully solved a Rubik’s Cube, can make heads or tails out of the new “whatjamacallit,” then I have a lot of old earphones and HDMI chords that need untangling.

Peace out.