It’s simple math and basic business practices. If half of every referred new subscriber’s fee goes to the referral, then after whatever Medium keeps, there is little or nothing left for the pool of money that rewards reads. Frankly, since there’s no way of tracking it and Medium is a private company, I would not be surprised if Medium keeps it all or pays out a token amount as Medium uses an MLM playbook of unverifiable embellishments. https://medium.com/illumination/is-medium-a-malignant-narcissist-1f3d55793bf6