It is really so sad... When I first signed on to Medium, I was a really broke, single mom with a toddler living in a rural area, and Medium actually supplemented my income really well... Then people figured out how to hack the system with a bunch of crap, and they changed the way the payment system worked. I went from making $600/month to about $15/month. That was 2017 or so, and a lot of really quality people just bailed and it doesn't appear to ever have changed or recovered.

I do have to ask, however - what exactly makes it a Ponzi scheme? Serious question, I'm super, super curious.