My goal on Medium was never about money — I just wanted somewhere to write something longer than a tweet. I spent a lot more time reading than writing.

But I finally got to a point where the algorithms stopped working. All I was getting was stories by people teaching us the secrets of making $20K a month on Medium, the same political analysis by the same people and, oddly, lots of sex-positive stories. I don’t care about the first group, the second group got boring after the same author wrote the same thing for the 10th straight day, and while I’m happy to read sex-positive stories, I don’t only want to read them.

I’ve also lost all faith in Medium’s numbers. The distribution system is a disaster, curated posts are useless, and I had a story do 1.3K views in a day with zero seconds of read time.

I’m not incapable of writing interesting content. I’ve been a freelance writer for 31 years and I was a Top Writer on Quora. Sadly, like that site, this one seems to have lost its way.