Why we’ve suspended Partner Program accounts this week
Addressing response spam and abuse to make the Partner Program better for writers and readers, right now.
As we’ve written here before, part of being a platform is dealing with spam and fraud. Yes, we’re building a place where anyone can share their knowledge, wisdom, and experience, and our goal is to deepen our collective understanding of the world through the power of stories. But we also know any platform is subject to a wide range of behavior.
Perhaps recently you’ve logged in to Medium only to encounter a sea of responses like these on a story:
Obviously, responses like that aren’t what we set out to make happen with Medium. It’s not why I get out of bed in the morning, or why anyone on our small but mighty team puts in the time they do. I hate seeing thoughtless comments like this on my writing here, frankly, or on your writing, or on anyone’s writing. We deserve better.
But these responses are especially damaging when they are organized in order to misuse our Partner Program and take earnings from other writers. And they’re only one form of behavior trying to extract money through deceptive content — we’ve also seen a massive recent uptick in low-quality, AI-generated posts behind the paywall, and coordinated activity like fake accounts created by a single person in order to engage with paywalled posts to generate earnings, and more.
We’ve heard your feedback and we see it ourselves, and we don’t like it. This isn’t the way to a better internet. It’s worth pointing out this isn’t limited to Medium; platforms everywhere are struggling with these challenges. So while this issue isn’t unique to Medium and we can’t control what people do, we can control how we respond and what measures we take to protect our community.
Which is why we are taking bigger, more aggressive steps to prevent this kind of abuse of the Partner Program. This week, we’ve started suspending accounts we find engaged in this kind of non-genuine activity — engagement circles, clap-for-clap rings, writers leaving hundreds of no-value responses in the hopes they’ll help boost their earnings, and more.
What is non-genuine engagement? We do not allow the following behaviors:
- Creating multiple accounts to engage with yourself, and generate earnings
- Using responses solely to drive attention to your stories with the intention of creating reciprocal earnings
- Writing responses, clapping, following, or highlighting solely to generate earnings
- Using AI-generated content to earn money for stories and responses in the Partner Program
In addition to suspending accounts we’ve found engaging in this behavior, we’ve made some tweaks to the way earnings are calculated to better reward genuine behavior and discourage gaming. We’re making these changes to protect the writers and readers of the Medium community. As always we are and will continue to tune the Partner Program earnings calculations to make sure we’re rewarding great content from genuine writers.
These are changes we can make today that we think will be effective in ensuring the most money goes to the most genuine writers. And we’ll continue to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the health of the ecosystem we are trying to build. We know spam and fraud will continue to exist, and we’ll continually come up with new and better ways to keep them out of your experience on Medium.
If your account was suspended, I hope this message will be clear to you. The Medium Partner Program is designed to support thoughtful, compelling writing by sharing earnings with authors. It is not designed to support engagement rings organizing around generating “passive income” by encouraging non-genuine engagement. That is not what we want our members’ subscriptions to support, and it is not what our members want to pay for. As a platform, we reserve the right to allocate the money towards writing that makes Medium valuable to our members.
If you’re one of the vast majority of Medium writers who are acting in good faith, you might be asking whether you need to be concerned about your own account. The clearest answer is “no” — write your best stories and engage authentically. As our Support team says, remember that Medium is “human-first,” and human behaviors are your path to success:
H — Hacks don’t work: There are no shortcuts to quality and success
U — Use your own words: Don’t use AI or plagiarism in your stories
M — Make an effort: Be thoughtful and intentional in all your writing
A — Authentic engagement only: Don’t engage just to earn or drive attention
N — No exceptions: All accounts are held to these standards
Thank you to all the writers sharing authentic stories and making Medium the great home for human stories and writing that it is today. And thanks to readers for the stories and actions you’ve flagged to our support team, and the feedback you’ve sent in. We’re trying to make Medium better for you, and hope these steps are taking us all in a better direction.
