Good to hear from the CEO. Some things I'd hope y'all consider:

1. For people who don't mind seeing ads, could you allow free membership with ads? As long as the ads are static and relevant, it shouldn't be a problem.

2. It helps if you are transparent about Medium's revenue and how it got distributed to writers. I'm having views and new followers, but no claps. So claps aren't really rewarding writers correctly, even if people are finding the content useful. More payment modes could be added too.

3. Medium really would benefit from a dark theme. Even Wikipedia now has a dark theme. The bright white is difficult on the eyes.

4. Asking writers to pay to become a member before being able to receive payments, is like asking an intern to pay to do an internship and yet be guaranteed no salary. Even the requirement of having written something in the last 6 months to become a Medium partner is not conducive to having writers who write because they have something meaningful to contribute.

5. There are bugs that need fixing. The manner in which Medium’s comment section has been programmed, makes it very annoying to use. On Firefox, the scrollbar of the comment section is inaccessible since it gets hidden behind the scrollbar of the main page. To read nested comments, I’m taken to a different section, instead of the comments just loading in the same section. When editing a story I’m writing, the hyperlinks in the text I’m writing, don’t show up. I’ve written to your team about all these, and yet nobody fixed it.

It'd be helpful if you could review the existing rules and consider more flexible ways of getting more members onboard. For struggling freelancers outside USA, the dollar conversion rate makes even the $5 fee somewhat expensive. Medium is already a great platform with good SEO. It'd become even better when the use-cases of people of various countries are considered.