Nice article, Linda. It's a necessary and productive move to get rid of the bot accounts. As far as payment goes, I believe with Medium out of seed money and never having reached a level of profitability, cutting back on writer payments is inevitable.

Tony has tried a lot of innovative things, such as the Friends of Medium program, the Boost, etc., but it's a hard row to hoe.

When I started on Medium, there was no payment. It was just an interactive blogging site for writers to write and readers to read. Medium may need to return to that model, or at least scale back pay considerably, unless something else, such as advertising on the site, is implemented to produce some income.