Fair points and good dialogue. I don't fault the writers for not knowing or even for falling prey to wanting likes and follows because of the spam, but I don't want that stain coming to my publications. The way that it works, in short is this, for someone who plays the game inside the spam publication:

- they amass a larger following than normal being new

- their claps and likes and shares are disproportionate because inside some of these publications there are Facebook groups or Slacks where they intentionally share and scroll and clap

- this affects the paywall because these are not real reads or scrolls so many people get paid less because of the spam

- they then create their own publications to do the same

- they tag their paywall letters (illegal if they are all links which most of them are) and then can become top writers without ever writing in that area because of the spam and overuse of daily letters

It creates and irregular imbalance in the entire pay system of Medium. It's why real writers have 200 followers and get 20 views and why spam groupies have 500 followers and get way more claps on garbage work. You can research all this as true in about five minutes in one of the rags.

I don't want someone with a fake following coming over so they outdo other writers who don't play the game as the fake views create less view for the people who care about integrity.