Thank you for your question. I can answer it ahead of time (and I'll get into why that's probably a better approach).
I’m glad we published that piece because I think discussion is a good way to surface what people believe and an opportunity to hopefully improve understanding (that is our mission after all). Seeing your comments is a good thing.
My opinion is based on believing Medium is bigger when all writers see each other as being in collaboration rather than being in competition. The only reason any of us have an audience to write for here is because of the diversity of writers and writing styles of our community. Each writer we add and embrace makes us bigger and stronger.
Writers judging who is and who isn’t a real writer has the opposite effect. That makes us smaller and weaker.
Similarly, the only rules here are about extreme misinformation, hate speech, and violations of law. Beyond that, people should write what they want to write in the style they want to write it. That’s how we grow.
Yes, there are opportunities with the Boost that do have detailed guidelines, but those aren’t the rules for the site. We have the Boost for a narrow purpose which is to have confidence that we can show your story to a reader who has never heard of you and then that reader will be delighted to have paid to read it. But Medium is so much bigger than that. It’s not the job of people who are aiming for the Boost to judge the value of writers who aren’t.
I can see that some writers in the comments on the post about Remi were upset. I would encourage them to consider the value of being welcoming, that being welcoming grows the opportunity for everyone here, and that there is value in celebrating and being curious about the diversity of writers here.
To get a little bit more specific. I would never answer this question in front of a live audience because I would never target a member of our community that way. Imagine if this were you and the CEO of Medium questioned your integrity in front of thousands of people. I would really encourage everyone in this conversation to spend more time appreciating that we are all just a collection of individual human beings.
And then there are some other things that maybe I don't understand yet and you can help me with or that we will have to agree to disagree on.
RC (in your comments) tried to focus me on irregularities (his word) in Remi's follower count. But he didn't connect for me why anyone would care. So my guess is that it has to do with our standards for our Partner Program. Those standards are different and much higher than to merely be on the platform. I hope everyone can see how that would be necessary as we are stewards of our reader's money. So in the PP, writer behavior that is disconnected from quality ends up siphoning that money unfairly. We just can't have that in the Partner Program.
Outside of the Partner Program, things like buying followers or participating in engagement rings are basically meaningless wastes of time. I try to discourage them out of a sense of duty to you all. But no one at Medium thinks they need to be policed. They don't help the people who do this, don't steal traffic, or don’t steal money.
So with that, Remi is not in the Partner Program and is not siphoning up writer payments. She's been a net positive in terms of bringing traffic to Medium. Writers like her who bring in traffic and don’t get paid are actually the ones that do the most to make you money which is yet another reason to be welcoming. In total, she's a real writer by my book who grows our audience, serves that audience well, and we're happy to have her.
As for why talk about her in a blog post? She caught our eye for being different and so she seemed newsworthy. I think it's counter productive for the people that I saw in the comments to be pushing for only the most boost worthy authors to be represented on the Medium blog. If that were to happen you'd be reading a non-stop string of data scientists. That, btw, is the blind spot for every bit of feedback we get about what "everyone believes." Somehow comments like that never take into account how much bigger Medium is than whatever topics you happen to be active in.
