Thanks Mark for voicing our concerns. I'll add to your points though what I say will likely fall on deaf ears.

Medium used to have a curation system managed by an algorithm. It wasn't perfect but It was good. Good enough that I would venture and say medium became what it Today thanks to it.

Then it was removed altogether and all stories were curated automatically after publication. Still, the result wasn't much different from what it used to be. And Medium still retained its charm despite the change.

Both systems were working because writers knew that readers hold the power. If readers read your story from top to bottom, it means they probably found value in it. Yet it still doesn't tell you if the story lived up to its title. But that can be easily addressed with a dislike button.

Let's take Reddit as an example, it has a voting system who help the algorithm show your posts to more/less people. Why not have something like that here especially that people complained many time about the inexistence of a dislike button. You can make its count only visible on the backend so nothing is changed on the frontend and everybody's happy.

Now, all that is gone down the drain. Readers no longer hold the power, writers are no longer free to write they are passionate about.
The curators now hold all the power. Not only they control what the writers write, but also how much they earn and what the readers read. So now if that tick box is not ticked everyone is screwed (readers and writers). How is that different from submitting a story to a news broker? At least in that case you get paid on the spot and you're not bound by view. Now the curators must boost it and people must read it. Oh great!

What I don't understand is that tech readership is high on Medium. Yet, tech writers continue to get a kick in the butt. Instead of focus on limitting those get rich quick schemes types of articles, the new rules are heavily tipped against tech content which is not the easiest to write by any mean. People can knock up an emotive story in less than 1hour while for a coding tutorial you need to write the code first, test it, then documenting it on a story.

How is that fair?

I know that Tony is good at what he does and he knows the value of tech content in this platform. Otherwise, he wouldn't have started Better Programming.