Shayne, I am not a bot, but I have plenty following me. I have written on Medium for 4 years, and used to follow thousands of people. Everyone stopped reading me, so I stopped too. I deleted over 400 stories out of frustration.

I used to spend 4+ hours a day engaging with people here, but if we do that now, our account will get suspended, even though engagement is how we get paid. This place is addictive, so I pulled back to reclaim my life. I was putting in all this effort for less than $100 a month. It was madness!

I used to have 6.5K followers, but I removed a ton of inactive accounts and bots to try to help my engagement, but it didn't. So, you see why I am frustrated.

Also, yeah, the search feature is awful. We don't even see the people we follow anymore, which is a big source of anger and frustration for long time writers here.