A game the whole family can play
Who Killed Medium?
Cluedo for the clueless
Ever played “Cluedo”? It is a murder mystery board game that those of us of a certain age played, and what passed for fun, in the days before the wonders of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and before we could spend our days more productively as we do now, watching brain rotting-clips on TikTok or doomscrolling on social media. Though I probably shouldn’t judge others by my own low standards!
In the game of “Cluedo”, you have to work out who has committed a murder, with which implement, and in which location. There is more on the game below.
After the earnings crash on 7th January 2025, many hoped that an apparent glitch would be resolved, but over a month on, and radio silence: this now seems like the new normal, and Medium is hoping the annoying writers will stop complaining and go away and leave it in peace.
Medium currently seems to be a zombie platform: it’s dead but doesn’t realise it, like the Wile E Coyote in “Roadrunner”, that has run over the edge of a cliff, but momentarily doesn’t realise that the laws of gravity apply:
Yes, you will have gathered my intellectual level by the way I relate to the world through children’s cartoons and board games!
The rules of the game
Anyway, I digress. Back to that board game of “Cluedo”. For the uninitiated, there are three categories which also have cards: rooms, people and murder weapons. Before the game starts, one card from each category is secretly chosen and placed in an envelope which is concealed until the end of the game.
The players are the people, represented by a counter on the board, and they visit different rooms by moving around, throwing the dice to move, and try out various theories to eliminate possibilities, until one player thinks they know the answer, at which point they call out an accusation. If they get it right they are the winner, if not they are out of the game.
The Medium version
There seem to be various theories about what has happened to Medium so this is to rehearse some possibilities. Was it Jason Provencio with some profanity in the study? Perhaps Robin Wilding with some humour in the hallway? Was it an IT engineer with a memory stick in the kitchen? Was it the CEO with a bonus in the penthouse? A hacker with a scam in the conservatory? Bin Jiang with some analysis in the billiard room? Susan Fourtané with an Oxford comma in the bedroom. A bot with some AI in the bathroom? Nancy Santos with some poetry in the pantry?
The Great Earnings Crash of January 2025
Half-serious analysis, half trying to see the funny side, this article considers the possibilities for what has gone wrong at Medium since “The Great Earnings Crash of January 2025”, though for many the decline and fall of the Medium empire probably began around the middle of 2024, when the platform strangled distribution, like some modern day Heracles seizing a snake in each hand.
Over the past year, Medium has seemed assailed by barbarians, scammers and AI bots, who crossed the Rubicon in January 2025 and are now at the city gates baying for the head of the emperor.
The suspects
“It was the scammers wot did it guvnor”– This is the official story, the one put out by , Medium’s Vice President of Content, on 9th January 2025, which now has a number of comments that we can only dream about, over 1450 last time I looked!:
Incidentally, I’ve always thought it must be great to be in charge of vice, especially as I need some new interests in retirement. Anyway, before I get distracted, the version from the horse’s mouth so to speak, is that the whole payments palaver was caused by concerted efforts to scam the MPP (Medium Peanut Payouts) over the festive season.
So while we were talking turkey, the scammers were burgling Medium HQ. One can imagine “Fingers Freddie”, or an impossibly youthful Tom Cruise, dangling from a wire hung from the ceiling of the Medium server room, about to hack the server, trying to avoid the laser beam alarms, to the “Mission Impossible” tune.
Quite why Scott Lamb’s message couldn’t have been put out by the CEO, given the impact on writers is another matter — I have always liked to ask awkward (and usually stupid) questions!
It’s good to delegate, but in a time of crisis, leaders usually lead from the front. In many organisations, a minor flunkey (it often seemed to be me) would draft a statement to be checked by the person in charge, who then puts it out in their name and takes all the credit. However that is in normal organisations, and we may have come to appreciate, Medium is not a normal organisation! This leads onto a separate theory around the mysterious absence of the CEO — more below.
The missing CEO — the virtual radio silence from Medium’s CEO is puzzling, to put it mildly. Is he in the nuclear bunker, afraid to come out until the threat from the hackers is resolved, and the all clear is sounded?
Or has he been abducted by aliens? Perhaps he is moonlighting for DOGE?
He seems curiously disengaged, given that many writers are abandoning a sinking ship for *whispers* Substack and elsewhere, or cancelling their FOM (Friend of Medium membership).
I have made my own commentary on the impact of this management style and its consequences in this article, so I won’t reinvent the wheel and warm them all up again:
Terminated by bots — this theory is that AI (artificial effing intelligence) is gradually killing Medium. Remarkably a recent study found that a staggering 47% of articles on Medium have significant AI content, and that is just the ones where it could be detected, an important proviso, given that many programmes now offer to “humanise” AI input to fool the detectors.
Yes, you read that right. Nearly half of all articles on Medium are effectively synthetic semolina slop, as covered in this article:
I did my own less scientific study, and got much the same results:
For a more erudite exposition of the threat posed to Medium, I refer you to an article by , who incidentally has himself reluctantly left the platform due to its failings:
IT issues — yes, Medium has issues, in this case of the IT variety. Assuming that they have tried turning it off and back on again, which seems to cure 99% of technical headaches, there does seem to be a wider problem with the tech.
To be fair the whole set-up must be incredibly complex, so it is not surprising that problems have emerged. At times the earnings formula and distribution algorithm seem so complex, that the staff themselves don’t seem to understand what is going on. This may explain, for example, a statement from the CEO that writers are being paid at the same rate, when it is as clear as day to a blind bat in an institution for blind bats, that this is not the case.
One can imagine staff pulling levers and pressing buttons, as the Medium version of Chernobyl goes into meltdown. It seems as though they have lost the instruction manual, or it is written in Swahili, or printed by IKEA, and they have the manual for the chest of drawers when they bought the hydraulic bed.
(Going ever so slightly off subject, don’t ever buy a hydraulic bed from IKEA. It took three relatively competent adults several hours to assemble one.)
Evidence of the IT issues comes from Tony Stubblebine himself, in the following post from “LinkedIn”:
Incidentally I would happily sign up for some “unlimited runway”, or whatever Tony is smoking. Most of us have been on a crash trajectory with impact imminent for most of the past year.
has commented well on the IT disaster theory, which Tony euphemistically and optimistically calls “technical debt”, which could be jargon for “we’ve screwed up the computer”. I once worked for an organisation where a cleaner unplugged the main server to plug in their hoover, and crashed the whole network for several days, and I suspect something similar may have happened!
In Medium’s case, it seems that some senior IT engineers left, and there was no-one who had the capacity to fix the issues:
The 77 countries theory— I have seen this theory bandied around, that it was the expansion of the MPP to new nations that triggered the crisis. Some of the commentary verged on the rather un-Medium like suggestion that certain of these nations were more prone to issues with fraud, which bordered on being rather offensive, especially given that existing partner nations seemed to be doing quite a good job of wrecking Medium already, I won’t say more as the DEI debate is quite heated enough already.
Corporate greed — this is perhaps an unkind theory, but one I have seen. Writers who have somehow breached Medium’s Iron Dome defences, and had somehow had contact with individual staff, report having found them friendly, helpful and committed.
However, the frustration of seeing earnings cut by 90% or more, means that many of us may have sounded off along these lines, given that writer earnings have at times been cut to a handful of cents per article.
This sentiment around corporate greed may have been encouraged, when recently discovered a job advertised at Medium for over two hundred thousand dollars a year, with the sort of additional employment benefits many of us can only dream about after over-doing the caffeine and Red Bull –
Poor communication — Medium has a communication problem. A huge one. Which is again bizarre for a company based around the art of telling a story.
After Scott Lamb’s article on 9th January 2025, there has been minimal communication with writers, resulting in a deluge of articles criticising the platform, people cancelling their FOM membership, and many leading writers leaving for Substack or greatly reducing their presence on Medium.
This has given rise to the accusation of “gaslighting”: that in some ways it feels as though writers are being deceived or ignored.
This is a huge shame, as the community on Medium has been rather special, and the current crisis, if it has been caused by attempted fraud, could have been tackled so much better. There could have been a partnership with genuine writers, who would have been so much more on board and sympathetic, if any normal communication had been maintained.
I won’t mention my idea of a Writer’s Panel yet again (for writers’ representatives to meet virtually with senior Medium staff regularly), since that suggestion has been done to death, but it might have avoided the current disaster.
A merger or takeover — this seems improbable, but given that it has taken Medium a staggering twelve years just to break even, this could be a possibility. (This timescale is partly why I have suggested that Medium is being run rather as a hobby, which may explain some of the communication gaps and seeming disengagement that many feel. My impression is that the founder, Evan Williams, has rather lost interest in his creation and moved on, and is perhaps a bit disinterested in bailing it out yet again).
It is my understanding that Medium and Substack have their HQ on the same street in San Francisco, and there are clearly potential synergies and overlaps, so I am sure the possibility has crossed the minds of owners even if it is not a serious proposition.
Pending bankruptcy — this theory is again perhaps implausible, but I have seen similar signs with other businesses about to go under during my working career. Rumours swirl around, suppliers don’t get paid properly or on time, if at all (and in Medium’s case writers are one of the suppliers), key staff leave (as some have at Medium), and the next thing you know suspicions are confirmed.
The coup — there is even a theory doing the rounds that Medium’s seemingly imminent demise is part of a coup, to shut down any dissent. If you like a good conspiracy theory, you may love this one by :
The grand reveal
So we open the envelope at the end of the game of Cluedo for the grand reveal. Who killed Medium? Take your pick from the above theories. It could be one of these, perhaps a combination of two or more of them, or even something completely different.
This has in many ways been a good platform — certainly in terms of the writing community who have been great. However, unless the current issues are addressed urgently it risks moving from zombie status to being more deceased than a Norwegian Blue parrot (the clip below explains this obscure reference, for those not familiar with some comedy gold from “Monty Python”):
where writers can support each other and share articles.
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Discord — link to an unofficial chat group for Medium members —
