Once upon a time there existed on Medium a young writer who had just graduated from college. He decided to drive across the United States on a poverty budget and share his trip with an audience. He engaged a pretty decent following of people inspired by his trip and interested to see the world through his eyes.

He got noticed, and some of his articles got picked up by The Huffington Post and other outlets like that.

His journey eventually came to an end, and so did his ideas about what to write about, apparently, even though he moved somewhere pretty interesting and romantic in my opinion.

I guess it wasn't interesting and romantic enough to engage sufficient followership, though, so he stopped writing about his life and started writing about how to make a lot of money online.

Pretty soon he was writing about almost nothing but how to make money online, and then he was selling courses about how to make money online.

You still hear from him on Medium from time to time writing about meta issues and occasionally complaining that his readership isn't what it used to be.

I don't know if he's ever stopped to think that his core audience stopped reading his writing because he's not writing what they signed up for when they followed him.

When I first started on medium, I signed up for one of his free courses. When it turned out to be a hollow pitch for a paid course (with a few fairly counterproductive methods for growing a followership), I clued to the scam immediately.