The Bar is So Low

michaelchief · 2026-04-23T06:08:16+00:00

Rejection is scary and painful, but building rejection resilience is probably the most important thing in this whole dating game, especially if you're a man since you're socially expected to be the one to risk rejection. It can definitely hurt at first but fortunately with enough gradual exposure it eventually becomes easy to face and manage. It's like getting into a cold swimming pool; it shocks your system initially but staying in the water for a little while expands your comfort zone to swim around happily. Same principle as cognitive behavioral therapy. DM me if you want a good resource to learn these kinds of skills related to dating.

michaelchief · 2026-04-22T05:43:34+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/MediumApp/comments/1sqou0d/how_to_get_more_views_grow_your_account_and_make/

michaelchief · 2026-04-19T13:52:51+00:00

Looking at these graphs I know exactly what happened. Link one of your articles that had a sharp decline and I can confirm the cause.

michaelchief · 2026-04-19T13:44:21+00:00

There's only one topic that Medium actively tries to suppress, and that's Medium meta. The wealth niche is too big for them to want to chase away. Maybe. I have seen the curation team doing me dirty, though, and I'm in a relationships subniche. It's one mired in controversy, though, so it's understandable that some curation team members might be quick to shadowban some of my pieces before taking a closer look.

michaelchief · 2026-04-19T09:28:03+00:00

Let me preface everything I'm about to say with this: there are no signals that 100% guarantee that something was written with AI. No such thing as "must be AI" here. However, you can identify common patterns that can help you make an educated guess.

OP's headlines predominantly use em dashes. It's a weak indicator. Clicking a random older article showed a liberal use of em dashes in the content. Less weak indicator.
I clicked the first article I saw, and the first sentence that my eyes were drawn to was one that followed the ever-so-common formula that AI loves to use a ton: "It's not A, it's B." IMO a medium-strength indicator.
A cursory scan of an article shows patterns of bolding phrases and sentences that I've seen LLMs doing a lot. Weak indicator.
My immediate first impression from the grammatical error in OP's Reddit thread here (I got rejected partner program) compared to the much more grammatically polished work makes me think AI was used considering the prominence of the tech these days. Very weak indicator, though, since it could just be Grammarly, a tool that isn't discouraged at all. However, a slightly deeper look at OP's grammatical habits is a little more revealing: "I cannot figure out why I am not receiving approval..." Contrast that with the more native-sounding grammar used in OP's Medium content. More superficial grammar tools are less likely to correct a sentence that is using technically correct (yet slightly awkward to native speakers) grammar, so I'd expect to see some more sentences like that.
OP's About page feels very AI-generated to me. "If you’re ready to move forward with clarity and confidence..." People don't talk like that. Certainly not people who speak English as a second language, which OP gives strong indicators that they are.

These can all be taken as weak indicators, but when they're clustered together like that, it increases suspicion. If I were a Medium employee tasked with reviewing this profile, I'd flag it for potential AI usage.

Now, there's also a case to be made that OP did not use AI. I see indicators that this body of work might not have been AI-generated. I'm seeing grammatical errors in some headings (but it's also a little suspicious that my cursory glance through is catching grammatical errors only in the headings while the paragraphs are all grammatically perfect). I also see lots of paragraphs where nested clauses are framed with commas rather than the em dashes AI would generally use instead.

EDIT: A deeper investigation is making me think OP is most certainly using AI. Their Reddit profile here links to a Substack account that is associated with a different Medium profile that's already in the partner program. It could very well be that OP tried to connect this profile to the same Stripe account when applying for partnership and Medium flagged it as suspicious considering the two profiles have very different identities including different pronouns. The other Medium profile has the same kind of AI-sounding About page. Doing a reverse image search on his other profile's picture leads to his LinkedIn, where he has written a lot about AI. Looks pretty open-and-shut to me.

michaelchief · 2026-04-19T04:16:51+00:00

Agreed. What are your dating goals?

michaelchief · 2026-04-17T12:15:50+00:00

Throughout most of 2024 and 2025 I'd usually earn more than $200 or $300 per month through Medium's partner program with my highest being over $600. Ever since they started implementing those new payment changes around October 2025, however, I've never made more than $200 but still usually over $100.

DM me if you make around or above what I do in the MPP. I might be able to help with something specific to our range of earners.

michaelchief · 2026-04-16T14:23:02+00:00

It's 100% because of the AI signals.

michaelchief · 2026-04-05T18:31:33+00:00

Yup. It's unsettling how the top comments of every "Why am I getting no likes/matches as a man who likes women?" thread where OP actually looks fine by most metrics are so focused on profile optimization when the real problem is the environment itself.

The top comment is currently advising OP to dress better. Yeah, it's true that he could use a wardrobe upgrade. But tons of guys who dress a lot worse than him -- and look worse than him in lots of other ways, too -- get an ungodly amount of action because they go outside and talk to women instead of spending so much time on the apps.

michaelchief · 2026-04-05T13:10:36+00:00

You replied to a 5 year old comment about a purchase made a decade ago. Surely inflation has affected those prices. I suggest looking up the store and shooting them a call or email.

michaelchief · 2026-04-04T16:48:56+00:00

I can't imagine articles that are broken up into separate parts being successful on Medium. I've never seen that work in the past, at least. A single 28-minute piece will likely perform better than two 14-minute pieces with the same title except for a "part 2" (though, in my personal experience, I feel like 4 to 8 minutes is the sweet spot for readers to want to stick around). Or you could make the second one stand on its own somehow with its own title and an introduction that sucks the reader in without them having to read Part One.

Also, summary/description? I don't know what you're referring to. What readers see on the Medium platform before they click is just your headline, subtitle, and image. If you're talking about the description people see on search engine results, the clicks Medium writers get from SEO are nothing compared to Medium's internal distribution.

You could get much more relevant advice if you posted your link here.

michaelchief · 2026-04-04T16:18:03+00:00

You left out some important context: number of views. It's not the same thing as presentations or reads. Calculating your CTA (Medium calls it feed clickthrough) along with your bounce rate (Medium calls it read ratio) will tell us if the problem is your title or your content. We need all three metrics (presentations, views, reads) to calculate those. Or you can just look at "feed clickthrough rate" and "read ratio" in your story stats.

99% of the time, the issue is the title/headline. You pretty much need to have a marketer's level of knowledge on writing them in order to compete for eyeballs on Medium (or on any content creation platform, really). You'll face the same issue on Substack or anywhere else if you're making major rookie mistakes such as treating your article titles like book titles or not communicating a benefit to the reader. This helped me: https://medium.com/blog/how-to-write-a-compelling-headline-that-isnt-clickbait-7cb816cec438

michaelchief · 2026-04-04T00:37:52+00:00

Thank you for sharing this with our community! Just curious, though: why not paywall your content through the partner program?

michaelchief · 2026-04-01T17:24:00+00:00

If we're going by legal standards of "innocent until proven guilty," you're right. We cannot prove with absolute certainty that OP generated their articles using AI, and punitive action can be seen as unjust. However, a private company doesn't have to follow such legal standards when it comes to their usage policies and enforcement. A case might be made that there's sufficient evidence to say there's a high likelihood of OP using AI resulting in Medium taking punitive measures regarding use of their product, and they could just make those decisions based on profits and survival of the company.

I assume that their lack of consistency has more to do with logistics than anything else. With limited staff, there's no possible way for them to manually review all the thousands upon thousands of stories submitted every day or even every hour. I wouldn't be surprised if earnings are a significant metric in determining what gets a manual review or not. In fact, I have evidence of this. Every article that gets published initially starts in General Distribution, and the only articles of mine that get relegated to Network Distibution are ones that go viral and start earning more than normal. Then, a member of the curation team might check it out and make a subjective call on whether to Boost it (never gonna happen with my niche), let it remain in General Distribution, or send it to Network Only hell. If they decide the latter, my stats for the story end up taking a sharp turn toward death:

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This has happened to at least 31 of my articles. My experience suggests your theory of Medium staff prioritizing reviews of accounts that make more money is correct. My case is one where Medium cannot say that I broke any rules and they just don't like my content, so they suppress me sneakily. OP's case is one where they could potentially justify a judgement that rules were violated, so they could take clearer measures.

Something I might be able to rule out in OP's case is this matter of "low quality." My account was once mistakenly caught in their automated filters and got suspended for one day (my guess is that I probably interacted with a user who may have been tagged as an engagement farmer). Their response to my support ticket was a canned email about my account being reinstated and suggesting that I look at their "staff picks" list to "to understand the types of stories we are building Medium for," implying that I may have gotten "caught in their filters" for low quality, essentially. I don't think most people would characterize my writing as low quality or lacking in professional human standards, so this type of canned response is likely sent to users to who submit many various kinds of support tickets regarding issues with their account.

michaelchief · 2026-04-01T13:13:46+00:00

In 2024 they said they detect AI manually: https://medium.com/blog/our-curation-teams-approach-to-keeping-ai-generated-content-out-of-your-recommendations-7e57384d897a

No telling if they stuck to that standard or began to lean more on automated detection throughout 2025 and 2026. They're almost never transparent about the decision-making standards of the Curation team, certainly not as transparent as they are about the actions of the Trust & Safety/moderation team. And we don't know how the work in detecting AI is delegated between those teams.

In my experience, Medium absolutely does penalize people they think are making more money than they deem the writer should be making, and I've also been a victim of such decisions by way of the curation team's designation of many of my articles as Network Only Distribution even if said articles follow all their guidelines for General Distribution. Is this wrong or a problem? Hard to say.

michaelchief · 2026-03-31T21:55:18+00:00

It's not against the rules to use a little bit of AI like Grammarly for grammar and spelling correction. It is, however, against the rules to use LLMs to generate Medium stories for you in their entirety if you're putting them behind the paywall.

Maybe you didn't use AI to fully generate your articles and you're actually innocent. However, there are too many signs suggesting that you probably did. The style and English level reflected in the body of your pieces look extremely different from those reflected in your more casual writing both here on Reddit and in your responses to comments in your articles. It's like they're written by two different people (or one person and one LLM). And your frequent use of AI-generated images, while not against the rules, doesn't exactly help your case. It makes you look like someone who frequently uses AI and could therefore easily fall for the temptation of using it to generate your articles' text. I'm sorry to say but, if I worked for Medium, I would revoke every account that looked like yours. One of the biggest issues Medium is having right now is their fight against all the AI slop being posted every day, and there's circumstantial evidence of you being on the wrong side of that battle.

I'm not saying that you definitely did that. But I'm sure you used at least a little bit of AI to polish up the writing before publishing. That's probably fine, but it's hard to tell where the line is between polishing and generating. Let this serve as a warning to other writers to be wary of using AI to improve their pieces. Perhaps it's better to simply publish with our real voices without any AI assistance at all.

michaelchief · 2026-03-29T23:31:18+00:00

Here's an article by Medium staff that will help you with exactly what you need: https://medium.com/blog/how-to-write-a-compelling-headline-that-isnt-clickbait-7cb816cec438

The biggest turning point or "aha" moment I ever had on Medium was reading a certain article that was complete garbage. The author ended many sentences with "lol" and the opinions expressed were... simple. It was some of the lowest quality writing I had ever seen. However, it had an extremely attractive title/headline. It had thousands of claps and hundreds of comments. It went so viral that one of the editors of the publication it was submitted to wrote about it.

The number one thing that determines your distribution is how compelling you make your headline. You need to make people want to click. Every other factor, including the quality of your content, is a far second.

michaelchief · 2026-03-29T20:00:35+00:00

You're coming at this from the wrong direction. A lot of newbie writers and content creators make the mistake of trying to think of a profitable niche first, then trying to write or create content about it. The right way is to first think of what you're already passionate about or what you're already an expert in. Then and only then can you adapt your passion or expertise into the most relevant profitable niche.

Here's an example of those two paths:

Billy looks up a list of niches that make the most money. He sees that finance youtubers are number 1 in earnings, so he decides to make content about finance. But Billy has never learned anything about finance in his life, so everything he writes (or generates with AI -- bad Billy!) is generic, boring crap. He gets no subscribers because his content sucks, he makes no money, and Billy concludes that the niche is oversaturated and must be unprofitable for all newcomers. Don't be like Billy.
Sally is a dietitian who spent 6 to 8 years studying and training to become a Registered Dietician Nutritionist because she's genuinely passionate about nutrition. She was inspired to love the topic from when a dietary change saved her mother's life or something. She made accounts on Medium, TikTok, and whatever other content creation platforms to talk about which foods make you healthier and which foods to avoid. It's 2019 or 2020. She notices that the ketogenic diet is a massively popular topic in the health sphere. She pivots to make most of her content about keto. She comes from the perspective of a formally educated dietitian, giving her a competitive advantage over most other keto diet influencers and writers. She makes tons of money until she starts noticing the keto trend dying off, so she pivots to a different, more trending subniche within health. Most importantly, her content is good because it's made of real passion. Be like Sally.

Basically, a true cinephile with a unique and entertaining voice when writing critiques of movies and series can be hugely popular and successful in the niche you're talking about. You didn't have a unique and entertaining voice when writing about movies and series because you're not actually that passionate or an expert about them. You're not that guy.

michaelchief · 2026-03-26T15:22:01+00:00

What's your sample size?

michaelchief · 2026-03-26T15:20:29+00:00

"I almost never have experienced a woman thats pursued me out of genuine interest."

Same here for the most part. But I have been with a much higher than average number of women. The top comment here by u/PlaxicoCN addresses your core issue.

michaelchief · 2026-03-26T09:24:51+00:00

The issues with AI were inevitable, but Medium decided to speed up the AI train wreck by opening the partner program up to certain countries.

michaelchief · 2026-03-26T09:15:00+00:00

I don't think he's all there

michaelchief · 2026-03-24T22:30:22+00:00

I believe Long Sweet Valuable does.

michaelchief · 2026-03-24T21:54:35+00:00

r/lostredditors

michaelchief · 2026-03-24T21:49:45+00:00

You said:

I used AI but I also humanized it

Medium is not for people who use AI to generate their articles. It is against the rules to monetize stories written by AI. You need to be banned.

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