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Severity
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MODERATEpeak 44ranked #34 of 42people’s rank #31 · preview
Case 034 · Publishing · Admitted 2017
The Enshittification of Medium
The Enshittification of MediumMedium, founded by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams in 2012, has cycled through multiple business models, moving from advertising to a $5-per-month metered paywall in 2017 and repeatedly restructuring how writers are paid. The company laid off a third of its staff in 2017, bought out its entire in-house editorial team in 2021, and replaced Williams as CEO in 2022. Partner Program compensation formulas changed several times, shifting from claps to reading time and adding eligibility requirements. In 2024, an analysis commissioned by Wired estimated that nearly half of recent posts on the platform were likely AI-generated.
First symptom
Jan 2017
Symptoms on file
8
Categories
3
Prognosis
Moderate
4 quality · 3 pricing · 1 features
Alternatives
The Paper Trail
| Date | Category | Symptom · rating · source |
|---|---|---|
| 2017-01 | quality | Medium lays off a third of staff and abandons ad modelCEO Ev Williams announced Medium was laying off 50 employees, about a third of its staff, and closing its New York and Washington DC offices while abandoning its ad-driven business model. Williams said the company had been scaling teams to sell products that were only incremental improvements on ad-driven publishing.↳ CNN |
| 2017-03 | pricing | Medium launches $5-per-month paid membershipMedium debuted a $5-per-month membership program offering access to exclusive content from a select group of writers and publications behind a paywall, marking the company's pivot to subscription revenue. The launch followed the January layoffs and the abandonment of the advertising model.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2017-10 | features | Paywall opens to all writers via Partner ProgramMedium expanded its Partner Program from invitation-only to any author or publisher, allowing anyone to place stories behind the $5-per-month metered paywall in exchange for a share of subscription revenue. Payouts were calculated by an evolving formula based on member reading time and claps.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2019-10 | pricing | Writer pay formula switches from claps to reading timeMedium announced that Partner Program writers would be compensated primarily based on the time members spent reading their stories rather than claps, the applause mechanic it had previously used to allocate payouts. It was another revision in a series of changes to how writer earnings were calculated.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2021-03 | quality | Medium offers buyouts to its entire editorial staffAfter building roughly 80-person editorial operations across publications such as OneZero, Forge, Marker, and Elemental, Medium offered voluntary buyouts to everyone in editorial, with Williams saying the publications' hit rate had been too low to make the economics work. The company shifted strategy again, toward supporting independent voices rather than in-house journalism.↳ Axios |
| 2021-08 | pricing | Partner Program adds eligibility requirementsMedium revamped its Partner Program, introducing new eligibility requirements, including a 100-follower minimum and recent publishing activity, that writers had to meet to earn money from their stories. The company simultaneously launched referral bonuses tied to new member signups.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2022-07 | quality | Ev Williams steps down as CEO amid another resetFounder Ev Williams stepped down as Medium's CEO after more than 11 years, handing the company to Coach.me CEO Tony Stubblebine following years of strategy pivots, layoffs, and product resets. Williams remained chairman of the board.↳ TechCrunch |
| 2024-10 | quality | Analysis estimates 47 percent of recent posts likely AI-generatedAI detection startup Pangram Labs, commissioned by Wired, analyzed 274,466 recent Medium posts over six weeks and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated, a rate its CEO called orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the internet. Medium said AI-generated stories are suppressed by its algorithms and barred from the paywall, relying on human curation to filter them.↳ Wired |
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<a href="https://enshittification.xyz/medium"><img src="https://enshittification.xyz/badge/medium.svg" alt="Medium on the Enshittification Index"></a>The Enshittification Index · 42 case files · no source, no entry · updated Jun 2026
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