It's hard for us to talk about because almost everything we say gets interpreted as a value judgment for or against particular authors.

But the story is as we've been saying for a long time. The people we had been giving money and distribution to were not AS A WHOLE well received by paying subscribers. We were losing subscribers every month.

This ended last year, when we shifted the money and distribution pretty dramatically. The result is that AS A WHOLE subcribers are much happier. We went from 685k last July to 1M+ today.

It should be obvious that one of the side effects is that there are new, happy writers and older, unhappy writers. You can't claim the platform is dying just because some writers are unhappy.

Also, you have to give up the idea that size of audience is the merit that drives readership here. Go for quality, not quantity. Audience does matter some but there is so much good stuff now that even if you have an audience a lot of times they are choosing something else over what you wrote.