It's the platoform. I joined Medium in 2016 and monetized my account a year later. My articles from back then made WAY MORE yet my quality of writing was not as good.

It's true I don't write consistently enough compared to my early days on this platform, but even when I did take a hiatus from publishing, I still did better than now.

I think switched happened post-pandemic. That's when most people started looking more into making money online. That's when I started to notice my numbers dropping off by a lot.

Also when the Partner Program originally started, the number of claps contributed to your earnings. One person can give a writer 50 claps at most. All 50 of those claps from that person boosted your earnings. Nowadays, that is not the case. So that is one "cheat code" that can no longer save you.