Yes, there is a lot of history as Medium has evolved/changed over the years and writers gripe every time there's a change. I came in shortly after one change to the payment metrics which had writers who were making a fortunes no longer doing so and screaming like stuck pigs. I don't want to rehash all that. You can see some of it in my story I linked questioning whether Medium, still then run by Ev Williams, was acting like a pathological narcissist. Anyway, they went from claps driving MPP to reading time. Changes that made sense to me. Then last year they devalued reading time in favor of social media style engagement while limiting abuse as only one clap, one highlight, and one response per reader would count, and I benefited, but I think they went too far in devaluing reading time, when they were also making a push for quality. What does a 30-second read say about the quality of a story? Squadush, as they may say in Brooklyn. I think perhaps there should be tiers of reading time rewards. Why would they reward 30 seconds when they pushed quality? Perhaps because the overwhelming majority of paying subscribers have little attention span for more. So then they get people writing spates of drabbles (which I won't read) (100-word stories) in pubs dedicated to such and they all read each other's stories and it starts to look like inauthentic gaming, and there's probably some of both.

After all that, and I could have said more but don't feel like it, it's both simple and complicated. See the exchange between Ariel and me in the comments. Ariel works for Medium as a liaison between the pubs, which were re-emphasized through the boost program, and Medium.