First off, thank you so much for taking the time to personally respond. I can certainly see some logic in this meter change. But is it possible that the surge in new memberships is from Medium beginning to stretch its reach into new countries, rather than this shift?

From my own experience, it's hard to imagine that this change in itself would be spurring the increase in memberships. Initially I wasn't as cynical about this change, but when I noticed that the Gambuto article that inspired me to join the platform was now behind that paywall, it made me reconsider my thoughts a bit.

I'm incredibly thankful to be writing on Medium, and it saddens me to think that this whole venture would have probably never even begun for me if "Prepare for the ultimate gaslighting" came across my feed under this current policy. I would have opened it and been paywalled. And I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have been willing to spend money to complete just that first article.

I appreciate that free articles remain here that can still put in an argument for Medium's value. But it doesn't feel fair that if I want one of my articles to acheive anything like the reach that Gambuto did with his, I would need to turn off my ability to be paid for it. Even just one free member story read I think would be a pretty dramatic improvement over where the policy stands now. With three, I had the ability to give my extended community a few tastes per month into what Medium can offer. If a friend was touched by my article, he had the ability to share it with 1,000 more, and so on. The friend link doesn't allow masses to read my article without first paying for it.

I also feel that the shift toward this engagement-based approach, where claps, comments, and highlights determine the pay of an article, seems like it offers less meaningful insight into value than the previous system did. The member read time metric wasn't perfect, but I think it was less easy to game. I think that the most useful insight into an article's value we can glean is how wide of an external audience it can reach, and how many of those readers it persuades to sign up.

I've got some other ideas as well. By any chance is Medium looking for help in the content strategy department? I believe very deeply in this platform, and I really hope it can prevail over some of these hurdles. There's a lot about this transition that I've found encouraging, but I can't help but feel some of these other changes aren't in the interest of Medium's longterm growth.

If you'd like to reach out directly, my email is benulansey@gmail.com. Thanks again for taking the time to reply and for being a part of this wonderful platform. Hope to hear from you soon!