Loss of readership is a genuine concern. It's not just a few dropped readers. My readership is down by more than half of what it was. And, that lost readership is more than just lost revenue – it is lost connection, diminished networking. It forces you to subscribe to still find those whom you read – which creates a closed loop instead of expanding social interactivity.

I chart the most precipitous drop in readership from when the platform removed the contributer icons that used to grace the Medium main feed. This, I think, is when people started having difficulty finding the people they liked to read. Because of this, I no longer regularly peruse the feed. And, because I don't bother with the feed, it is also when I stopped stumbling across new writers. I'm not alone in this; other writers I've communicated with and those who've written on the topic find themselves in the same situation. Forcing the platform's focus this way destroys the "social" part of the social media platform.

Now, you may wonder what the problem is with forcing people to subscribe to still find those writers. Here's the problem: Your email receives a notice every time someone you subscribe to drops a new post, flooding your email, overwhelming any other email connections you maintain. I recieve more than 100 emails a day to my writer's account and my private one combined. We also feel obligated to follow those links to the posts of our subscriptions, so there's no time for any new writer discovery. With the old icons, for example, I would click on ten or so of them, read a title from the profiles which interested me, then peruse the feed for any writer's titles which interested me – I don't have time for the latter search any longer. The change is killing new-to-me writer discovery.

Finally, those writers who blog about the deleterious impacts of these changes, it's not that they want to leave. They are trying to get the attention of the Medium developers, to show them with their articles and with the responses to their articles how we paying users feel. We are, after all, paying customers; and, the platform gives us little other ways to let them know we as a body are dissatisfied. Those articles are, in effect, petitions for Medium to respond to the needs and demands of the paying users who make this platform viable.