I like, or find reasonable, everything else about the new partner program, like the minimum $5 amount to be earned, or else they roll it over to the next month.

The minimum follower count is cruel to new authors or authors who dropped off to rejoin. Worse, nobody has heard of Medium this side of the Subarnarekha river. Taking away the $0.01c one might make merely by publishing, and linking it to a 100 followers is crazy. Now it is tougher to convince anybody to join Medium casually. Making the first cent on Medium has gone from the difficulty level of walking to the difficulty level of parkour.

People will not write their stories here because it is now like YouTube which needs a minimum hours of views to join the partner program.

It also reduces the number of people who might join through our referral links, which will “roll up with a dinghy load of money each month, crossing our palms with silver”, as Antony Lawrence says.

Keep everything else, the heck with 100 followers. Hell yeah.