I looked into it four ways, but I'm still a bit suspicious that I missed something given that you do say a specific amount that was attached to this story and that it's your two most recent stories about Medium that aren't behind the paywall. Had you seen that that story had been credited with earnings prior to today?

We (not just me) looked into the backend history on this article and can't find any day where it had been credited with earnings. I'd thought maybe we had a bug that was not displaying earnings if a story moved out of the paywall.

Your story is not just criticism, it's also about Medium itself. That's the part that does get flagged. A long time ago, well before the time that I joined, we decided that we didn't want to be a platform of navel gazers and so we made articles about Medium ineligible for algorithmic distribution beyond your direct followers. We call these "Meta" articles internally. The process for flagging articles is a combo of algorithm to identify candidates and then human review. This is normal and your meta articles have been flagged as ineligible for wider distribution. But that isn't the same as ineligible for earnings. We don't have a feature like that.

Then to triple check we looked at other similar critical articles that had been flagged as ineligible for distribution and confirmed that, yes, they do continue to earn.

And then last I tested out a new article and also couldn't reproduce this.

So right now, without additional info, we are leaning toward the explanation being that neither of your two articles were ever behind the paywall and thus weren't earning money.