I hear you. But without ads, I don’t see how pay can ever be fair.

When I paid writers on my site, I took the percentage of page views that their pages brought and gave them that percentage of the ad income the site made. That wasn’t entirely fair, but it was simple and everyone understood how it worked. It also gave them incentive to promote their own and others posts. Very socialistic :)

But here, it’s always going to be unfair. It particularly pisses me off that every Facebook group I’ve belonged to (and I’ve quit them all) has people trying to collude with others to game Medium. The same is true for Slack groups for certain publications. I quit those too in disgust.

Ads can be fair. Referral links can be fair. This never can be.