Hi Joe, thank you for the thoughtful note. You always do that.

I would say first of all, please stop telling them that we are wrong and will right ourselves. I think disappointment is a totally fine emotion right now. But I don't want people to have to go through the frustration of thinking what we are doing is senseless. That feeling is likely to prevent them from adjusting. And you are right, that one of the ways to adjust is to stop writing or stop writing here.

If you can, I would also hope to depersonalize it. I struggle to do this, so I don't know if you have any better hope of it. It's not that someone's writing is now considered bad. It's that we are now much more clear about what drives subscribers and these new incentives reflect that. The old incentives and the old recommendation systems come from a 12 month period where Medium was losing subscribers.

The money is still here, it's just going to different people. If you have time, I wonder if you could consider what information I’m not giving you that made it hard to see that this was a very well considered change?

Maybe it’s impossible to cut through disappointment. I mean, what is more encouraging than being told that you can get paid to write? And thus, what could be more discouraging than feeling that’s going away? (It’s, not, it just shifted)