Seems pretty eloquent to me.

I don't know a lot about this most recent pay cut by Medium — there's always a new one it seems. I've been busy battling health demons.

But I can say that Medium has a large cottage industry of writing advice columns, so I guess people feel empowered to offer all kinds of advice all the time. There are couple of writers here I respect who frequently write these, but overall I believe there is only one way to write, and most advice columns are therefore a waste of breath.

That one way is, drumroll, write however you want to write. It seems to me what you do works for you. I didn't realize it was paying well for poetry. I'm very happy to see that because, as I think you know, I do love your poetry.

With that kind of success, it seems silly to submit to literary mags, with their 200 readers, 180 of whom let the thing sit somewhere to collect dust after they receive it. Same is true for me with fiction. "You should submit this story to a lit mag!" Why? Nobody reads them. And here, I sometimes make some coin. And I know I get more readers here than i will through even one of the bigger sci-fi mags.

Medium borders on being an endless lesson on how to write. This even extends to the Boost program. I don't write for the Boost program, even though there are currently about 10,000 stories telling me to, and telling me how to.

I write what I want to write. If I get Boosted, yay. I want to make money, but not at the cost of subservience.

I'll keep my FOM for now, since it helps other writers by adding a penny or two to their coffers when I read them, but I also hate that whole algorithm nonsense where writers are rewarded when someone claps, highlights, and comments, and not as much when we don't do all three. That's just silly.

Old man rant: At the end of the day, all these tech companies are run by kids. Coach Tony is a kid, in respect to my age, and it often shows. I don't expect anything more than obfuscation with their payment system from a company that has specialized in that since its founding.

I've always looked at my views and earnings thinking, "Huh. I wonder how they determined that."