With all due respect, Bette, I think this may be a somewhat naive take on the CEO's words.

When political and business leaders say 'Oh, there's this problem but we're fixing it', what it invariably means is 'We think you want to hear this, so we're saying it, even though there is zero substance behind this claim at present, no action is planned, and even if it were, would be entirely inconsequential as we have no idea how to fix it, or perhaps don't even want to.'

The oil company BP (British Petroleum) launched an extensive PR campaign 20 years ago, changing their logo to a giant green sunflower and coining the slogan 'Beyond Petroleum'. Two decades later, how much do you think BP has done to change its oil-based business model?

If bot accounts are swarming the platform as paying members, and Medium is generating revenue from that, they don't care what people's read ratios are, or how the earnings pot is being divided up.

So long as the platform maintains a bare minimum of plausibility for quality content to tempt readers and writers in, that's enough.

And they do that through the manual editorial system of the Boost (in the 21st century!), and expect us to spend hours manually weeding our followers and readers, simply to make their malfunctioning platform vaguely workable.

I really don't think that 'Tony's got this' (especially after firing more senior staff members) is a plausible view.

As you say, the fix is manual, but manual isn't a viable way to achieve herd immunity here.