Many of the complaints about Medium remind me of the old Yahoo! Contributor Network. The comparison is not completely apples to apples, but close enough. The brutal fact of the matter is there just isn't a big audience for self-published short fiction and poetry. (Not much of one for traditionally-published short fiction and poetry, either.) And there never will be. There is no "formula" Medium could devise that would change that fact, no matter how much we might wish they would.

The old "clap" system for valuing articles was gamed beyond the point of recognition as a fair way to divvy up MPP revenue. In comparison, the system that replaced claps did negatively impact the earning potential of poetry but it's to me a fairer ordering. But it is what it is.

I think the concerns of Medium "stealing" content are overblown. (And I'm flabbergasted at the thought that an obscure Japanese website scraping content is any kind of major threat to, well, anything.)

Medium subscriptions have to deliver value or people won't buy them. No idea what their current internal analytics are showing, but I strongly suspect the data reflects an urgent need by Medium to improve quality. Any changes Medium makes I trust are targeted at trying to do just exactly that.

I mentioned the YCN at the start of my comment because it never did solve the quality problem despite several attempts to do so, and it did go away.

Just food for thought.