Six years. Two hundred articles. Technical writing about software architecture, data pipelines, and the tools I work with every day. Not a single dollar earned from the Medium Partner Program — because I wasn't there to sell subscriptions. I was there to write.
Then one day, without any prior warning, my account was suspended.
What Happened
Medium's automated systems scanned my content and concluded it was probably AI-generated. Account suspended. No explanation. No opportunity to appeal before the fact.
After contacting support, I received an email reinstating my account — accompanied by this warning:
If you are using AI writing to generate your stories, you have a much higher likelihood of triggering the filter.
The problem: I hadn't used AI to generate the content.
The Technical Reality: Why Human Writing Gets Flagged Too
Automated AI-detection systems rely primarily on two metrics: perplexity (how statistically predictable a text is) and burstiness (the variation in sentence length and structure).
Technical writing — especially when covering software architecture or data pipelines — is naturally structured, uses repeated domain terminology, and follows consistent patterns. These are precisely the characteristics that detection algorithms interpret as "synthetic."
OpenAI itself retired its AI Classifier in 2023 due to unacceptably high error rates. Research shows these tools falsely flag up to 50% of human-written content, disproportionately penalizing non-native English speakers and technical writers whose prose is formal by necessity.
I fall into both categories.
The Core Contradiction
Medium charges its readers a subscription fee to access content written by people like me. My articles were published across six publications. ClickHouse.com referenced one of them. Real audiences were reading.
Yet Medium's algorithm — with no human review at the first stage — decided this content didn't belong on the platform.
At the same time, Medium's content policy states that "human authenticity" is the most important criterion for quality. But the tool they use to measure it cannot reliably make that distinction.
This is a structural contradiction, not a one-off mistake.
What Medium's Recovery Email Actually Said
In the reinstatement email, Medium pointed me toward their Staff Picks list and held up essays like Nikolaus Correll's work as the standard to aspire to — writing that integrates "lived experience," "authentic perspective," and "human storytelling."
Six years of writing about the tools I use in production every day. Real problems I debugged at 2 am. Architectural decisions I had to justify to stakeholders. If that doesn't qualify as lived experience, the problem isn't with my writing.
The algorithm simply cannot tell the difference. And Medium is comfortable with that.
Why a Personal Site Is the Right Move
After this experience, I realized that publishing on someone else's platform means accepting terms like these:
- Your content can be removed without warning
- Algorithms you don't understand make decisions about your work
- Your audience has to pay a subscription fee to read what you wrote for free
- You have no control over distribution, structure, or format
A personal site means:
- Open access — anyone can read, no subscription required
- Full independence — no algorithm standing between your writing and your reader
- Real ownership — your work belongs to you, not the platform