In the few stories that I read recently on the payout crash, I mentioned Ariel's comment and or Mike's story in comments. Hopefully word will spread but I also hope Medium posts a story with a transparent answer and steps they will take to mitigate the risk of future manipulations. I also hoe they will retroactively recalculate the artificially depressed payouts, even if they can't claw back the money from those that participated in the scheme.

On a related note, it's shocking to me that Medium doesn't employ more stringent security and verification regarding accounts. For example, the spate of spam comments to contact imposters via WhatsApp. No one should be able to use the same name and icon of another account and that's easy to prevent. If google image can scan the entire net for a picture in miliseconds, Medium can certainly scan it's own site for such duplications