Of course, you’re correct. The Lone Ranger mentality doesn’t work well here. You build a following through interaction. Reading, clapping, responding. When you help others, you are also helping yourself. You are building good will.

Curation provides a boost in views but it is not the holy grail some think it is. At least financially. It never translates to much more earnings for me.

Unfortunately, Medium is designed to feature the new. Old stories vanish down the prolfile hole. Unless they get outside veiws. I have one story from August of 2018 that still gets views consistently. 85% of its views are from outside Medium. It is up to 16.7k views. That is astronomically more than my other most popular stories. Yet it earns very little because those readers aren’t Medium members.

And let’s be honest. Many stories published on Medium (especially mine), would not get published in a traditional publication. And that is alright. Medium is a good place to learn and grow.

But I think expectations run high here. Many people think their stories deserve more than the traditional market would realistically pay.

But if twenty people read one of my humor stories and each gave it a dollar. That is $20 for a silly one minute story. That’s not bad.

Last point. Money ruins most things.