Medium has gone though more changes of direction than the Jets have had lousy coaching changes. It seems to me EvW has his sights on building a publisher that can take on Amazon--which if that is the case the algorithm should be designed to reward good feature length writing and not 3 minute reads written at middle school level, as he should want a stable of loyal writers who will choose to publish with him and not Bezos, and that the reason the paywall calculation is so secretive may be he doesn't want it known that he's using the fees as acquisition capital because he doesn't have the likes of Amazon's currency--a stupidly high stock price.