Thank you for prefacing.

I feel a need to be pedantic about paying the wrong writers for the wrong content. Essentially the answer is yes with some important additions. Every writer here has fans. The question is whether they have as many fans as they need to warrant the amount of money they need to continue writing. The answer was no and that's not even a criticism of the author. That's a reflection of us. Sometimes we don't have enough of the right audience to pay a particular author a living.

The other signals are:

* Our internal understanding of sentiment is that attention is not the same as value. Stories were getting attention but readers were not thinking they got value or it was time well spent. The kiss of death for us is articles that are merely good or very good. We don't get any negative signal there other than that readers cancel their subscription.

* Whether we are perfect or not on the boost , we are at least massively directionally right. A boosted article converts a subscriber 2x as often. We think that is based on perceived substance because we also moved the paywall further down the story. (It used to be very high). The humans in the boost can judge substance in a way the algorithm can't. Because we are a subscription we aren't in the attention economy and the algorithms that TikTok and Youtube use are not even appropriate for us.

* I often share this alarming sentiment from Hacker News which is a good example of the difference between attention and value. They are responding to stories that got a lot of attention but that they hated. 92% negative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

* For 12 months we lost subscribers and the better we got at recommending stories people wanted to read the more subscribers we lost. When we took a stand internally on substance over attention, we started growing again. May-Jun was modest. July was 4x more than June. It took six days in August to pass all of July. This is record growth and it's 100% because of a better understanding of quality. Bar is high for people to pay. No surprise.

And now you you've heard my keynote and can skip my talk at Medium Day.