Agreed, Adelia. I've poked my head round the door at Substack a few times (every time I get pissed off here!) and each time it seems to have spouted new functions and become more complex and messy. I love the clean simplicity of Medium. But by now I should be able to post a story, unboosted, and at least get 50-100 reads for my trouble, surely. That occasionally happens, but very seldom. Which means I am entirely reliant on increasingly unreliable (to put it diplomatically) curators.

I'll keep running the pub - which is practically dead now anyway, as writers have been put off by the lack of boosts, and hence readers - and post 2 Spain/language stories a month to roll the dice on those.

The annoying thing is that for Medium to be any use in other ventures, to serve as a self-publishing springboard or show a social media following to convince a publisher to take a punt on a book, you need current, active followers. Stop posting for a few days, or miss out on boosts for a month, and the figures are so embarrassingly low they may as well not exist.