If only they did! Aside from the flips, flops and pivots over the years - most of which predate my awareness of the site - the whole current Boost + FoM era seems to have been built entirely on sand.

Back in May '24, Medium paid me 900 bucks for pressing a button to nominate 20 articles, plus another 1500 for writing ten more that were boosted.

That made no sense. My first thought on seeing the number was 'There's no way this can last'. At least 700-800 members' entire contribution to the earnings pot going just to me. With 500 other nommers/regularly boosted writers getting similar amounts, that would probably wipe out the entire budget. So what about the other 80,000 people posting stories? They must have been overspending by a massive amount.

Weren't they looking at the figures? Didn't they realise it wasn't sustainable, that in fact they could only afford a fraction of that, maybe a tenth?

If my earnings on Medium had slowly grown from 0 in May 23, to 250 bucks a month in May 24, I would have been impressed, surprised, and delighted. And would have seen a minor adjustment to 150 in a slack month, as perfectly reasonable.

But what you can't do is say you've brought in this great new system (presumably with some prior financial planning??) and look, here are the rewards! Then a few months later say 'Oh, we fucked up. We should have been paying cents, not dollars.'