Hello Ev, I've given the referral program some more thought and I think a tiny tweak would make this truly awesome: After a set number of months, let me, as a reader, change who gets the 50% of my monthly fee.

Think of the 50% as a patronage or "bonus from readers".

This little change would, I think, align all incentives the right way:

- Writers are still incentivized to recruit new Medium members, which benefits everyone.

- Writers are now incentivized to keep producing great content to retain their “patrons” instead of coasting on their stable referral income.

- Readers won’t feel resentment for supporting writers they no longer care about.

- Readers get a chance to reward, through their “patronage”, writers who publish poetry, comics, and other types of stories that otherwise simply don’t earn much because they don’t have long read times or mass appeal.

- It will prevent writers from trying to game the referral system by encouraging their followers to cancel their subscriptions and sign up again through the writer’s referral link.

- Readers will hesitate less in signing up through a referral link if they know that they can later on change who gets their 50%.

- Readers who are on principle against referral programs might not be turned off if the whole thing is framed as a patronage they can opt out off.

As a reader I'd even be excited to have the option to pay more than $5 per month for a subscription just so that I have more "bonus" to hand out to my favorite writers. Medium could even take a percentage of that optional extra for themselves and I wouldn't mind.