Nicely spotted! I knew something felt a bit out of kilter about this referral fee business, but hadn't seen the pyramid selling (sorry MLM) scheme aspect.

Great shame if all the money is going to drain into the pyramid side of things. That will not improve Medium as a reading platform at all - and without readers, it's sunk.

I'm too new here to know if my finance stats are affected. My read stats look like a profile of hilly terrain and I can tell you without looking that my 'audience' stats have flatlined since the day the scheme was introduced.