The lack of transparency has always bothered me, but never enough to leave. I will call them out from time to time but always with the caveat that I'm not here to make money but yes the payments are appreciated even when they are paltry and the issue with the email excuse is that my recent poem is performing equally as poorly and the ones from end of September while the ones in August and early september saw great percentage increases.

The articles that really got my goat, and yours is of course not one, were from the writers who were making a lot of money before August and complained about the drop and wrote that everyone should abandon Medium. Entitled brats. I never heard of 99% of those writers. I only saw the articles because friends sent them to me.