For the longest time, Medium has been my writing platform of choice. It’s hard not to like, honestly. As a platform, it provides everything a writer needs:
- A built-in audience
- An excellent, no-nonsense writing canvas with image and media tools built in
- Great search engine discoverability
Truly, hard not to like.
In my time there, I’ve made several thousand dollars. In fact, just this year I’ve made over $5,365.
$2067.11 in January of 2026. And $3,298.61 in February of 2026, though the month isn’t over yet.
I try to write an article every other day at least. Sometimes more. Sometimes a bit less. So I’ve never run in to a limit before.
I knew that Medium must have some sort of limit, of course. I mean surely they wouldn’t want us publishing a hundred stories in a day, after all. So some sort of limit is reasonable and expected.
The actual limit shocked me.
Trying to be consistent
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing online more than anything else, it’s that consistency matters. You may not like your writing. You may not have much of an audience yet. That’s fine. Just show up and be consistent.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Medium.
Even if I don’t have a super fascinating topic for the day, I still try to write something. And as I write, I might take the piece in a direction I hadn’t planned when I started.
I’ve also found that by just showing up, you give your readers and the algorithm more opportunities to find and share your content.
When Medium says “no”
Most days I don’t publish more than once. Maybe twice. So I’ve never had an occasion in my memory to hit this limit. Today, though, I readied my third story of the day. A story on a topic completely different from my previous two. I click publish. I filled in my tags. And Medium said sorry! You can’t do that.
The error message went on to say that I’ve already published the maximum 2 stories allowed within 24 hours.
Since when did THAT become a rule? Really? TWO?
Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that there should be some sort of limit. If I owned Medium, I wouldn’t want writers sending 15 articles a day every day. That could get crazy quickly.
But I figured that paying Medium members had a higher limit? Wasn’t it 15 at one time? Now it’s 2?
Contacting Medium support
Out of frustration, I contacted Medium support hoping that this limit was just an error. Maybe, I figured, it was a glitch in the system. Something that would be fixed in a couple of hours. I could understand that. I mean, hey. Any system can have temporary issues and lead to things like this. Maybe Medium was having some trouble on the back end.
That’s what I hoped anyway.
The truth wasn’t as joyous.
Here’s the response I received from Medium support:
Hello,
Thanks for writing in.
Authors can publish (or schedule) 2 stories and 100 responses per rolling 24 hours. If you have hit that limit, please try again after 24 hours.
Note that scheduled stories are counted on the day they are scheduled, not the future date.We are experimenting with different daily rate limits, and how many stories an author can publish or schedule in 24 hours.
We are doing this to prevent bad-actors from gaming the system by publishing an unrealistic number of low-quality stories per day. We know many of you have asked for this as readers and editors, so we hope this is a welcome improvement to Medium for you.
If this disrupts your daily publishing strategy, we apologize, and ask for your patience while we experiment with these limits to address the abuse of the platform.
Thanks,
Pat
User Services
According to Pat, this is to “address the abuse of the platform.”
To a point, I can understand that. If there were no limit or if it were insanely high, you could easily have spammers sending dozens of stories every day, flooding the site with low effort, low quality slop.
Nobody wants that.
But a limit like this? This isn’t good either for writers who aren’t bad actors who just want to get their posts published.
I’ve responded to Pat suggesting a more graduated scale that I think would be a more logical limit, while still allowing content creators who are producing good content to keep doing so without hitting such a terribly low limit.
What I proposed was a scale like this:
- Under 100 followers: 1 story a day. 2 stories per day if a paid member.
- 101-500 followers: 2 per day
- 501-2000 followers: 3 per day
- 2001-3000 followers: 4 per day
- 3001+ followers: 5 per day
This is still less than the old limit of 15, but even at a max of 5, I think that would be enough for most writers.
In my message, I pleaded with Medium to raise this incredibly low limit or at least give established writers a way to be exempted from it.
Like I said, I understand the need for a gate to keep bad actors out. But if that gate keeps out the people who are actively trying to contribute non-spammy content, is that really a net benefit or a net loss?
In my opinion, and granted it’s just that, it’s a net loss.
As it is, the limit of 2 feels like being put into a straight jacket when all I want to do is write.
Come on, Medium.